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  • "Without Guide, Church, or Pastor"The Early Catholics of Cincinnati, Ohio
  • David J. Endres (bio)

On November 23, 1818, a small group of Cincinnati Catholics sent a letter of appeal to John Carrere (1759–1841), a successful Baltimore merchant. The letter gave voice to their needs, likening them to "the lost sheep of the house of Israel, forlorn and forsaken, destitute of the means of exercising the duties of our holy religion, without guide, church, or pastor." Cincinnati, though a sizeable frontier town of nine thousand residents on the Ohio River, had as yet no Catholic church structure or resident priest. The few Catholics—fewer than a hundred men, women, and children—were without the means of fully practicing their faith. They had assembled weekly for prayer, but gathering for Mass and participating in the sacramental life of the Church had been limited to periodic visits from circuit-riding missionaries, mostly Dominican priests headquartered in central Kentucky. Due to a lack of numbers and resources, they were compelled to appeal to Catholics elsewhere for assistance in building a church.1

This study argues that before the 1820s Cincinnati's Catholics had yet to form a separate, recognizable ethnoreligious subculture. Instead, they mixed easily with their non-Catholic neighbors, representing a form of frontier or republican Catholicism marked by egalitarianism, flexibility, activism, irenicism, and optimism. As a mixture of immigrants, including Irish, German, and French, and a few native-born, they maintained social, political, and ethnic ties with non-Catholics. Religiously, they exercised a certain fluidity, if not indifference, especially before an organized Catholic presence developed in the city. Some gathered for worship and fellowship in the absence of any clergy; others showed a willingness to attend non-Catholic churches and in some cases, leave behind the practice of Catholicism. Still, despite the difficulties of being Catholic on the frontier, lay leaders emerged to provide the possibility of practicing the faith. Downplaying their ethnic differences in favor of a republican ideal, pioneer Catholic laity successfully organized the city's first Catholic congregation.2

While their organizing efforts to found Christ Church—the first Catholic church in the city—have been documented, there has of yet been little attempt to study the city's lay pioneers who brought Catholicism to the western frontier. Utilizing as a starting point the names of twenty early Cincinnati Catholics that historian V. F. O'Daniel recorded in 1920, this research explores the lives and religious experiences of Catholics who arrived prior to the establishment of Christ Church in 1819.3 [End Page 3]


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Christ Church. Catholic Churches of Cincinnati and Hamilton County (United States Church Album Publishing Company, 1895).

CINCINNATI MUSEUM CENTER

Before the turn of the nineteenth century, Catholics were rare on the western frontier, save for settlements near Gallipolis, Ohio; Vincennes, Indiana; and Bardstown, Kentucky. In the first decades of the 1800s, a meager wave of Catholic migration west of the Appalachian Mountains came from established Catholic communities in Maryland and Pennsylvania. At first, isolated on the frontier and deprived of association with their coreligionists, they prayed and worshipped privately or not at all. When they reached a critical mass, lay Catholic leaders worked to provide a foundation for the faith, attempting to organize their own congregations and eventually schools and charitable organizations.

The frontier shaped these Catholics as much as they shaped the frontier. Historians have noted the characteristics of frontier Catholicism: "intensely patriotic, self-assured, simple, flexible, active, optimistic, at ease with fellow Americans of whatever religious persuasion, and moderately prosperous." Catholics on the frontier had imbibed a form of republicanism that championed religious liberty, supported the separation of spiritual and temporal power, and elevated the role of lay trustees vis-à-vis clerical control of congregations. Such emphases could be found among Catholics elsewhere but held a certain saliency in frontier locales like Cincinnati, where the church was just beginning to be organized. The frontier provided a unique locus for the development of lay-led ecclesial structures in particular. Catholic laity, and not clergy, as witnessed in Cincinnati, provided the impetus for the founding of churches and schools. As Thomas Spalding argued, "it was the...

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