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News & Features

Colonial Catholics
archived from: 2004-01-02
by: Patricia Bartos

First in a six-part series

It was 250 years ago this spring that the first Mass of official record was offered in Pittsburgh, a milestone the diocese will celebrate in April.

Father Denys Baron celebrated that Mass immediately after French forces took over the fort at the confluence of the city’s three rivers in 1754, naming the site Fort Assumption, but soon changing it to Fort Duquesne.

In reality, Catholicism first arrived in western Pennsylvania in the early 17th century, as sporadically and tentatively as the new society itself.

Explorers and traders, many from French Canada, were the first to venture into the wilderness, often including Catholic chaplains in their company. Settlers, many of them Irish and German immigrants, began pushing west beyond the Allegheny Mountains.

Few early visitors left records, and it was equally obscure and transient priests who introduced Catholicism and cared for the spiritual needs of the few followers of the faith they encountered. They also worked among Indian populations. Records offer mostly glancing mentions of priests, and historians are certain they said Masses locally.

Robert Cavelier de La Salle is thought to be the first explorer to reach the city of Pittsburgh, arriving in 1669-70 from Canada on an exploratory mission down the Allegheny and Ohio rivers. Sulpician priests generally accompanied his voyages.

In 1749, Jesuit Father Joseph Bonnecamp accompanied a French Canadian expedition led by Capt. Louis de Celeron de Bienville, which camped in several areas locally, including McKees Rocks and Logstown in Beaver County.

Though not specifically recorded, “We can safely affirm that Mass was celebrated,” Benedictine Father Felix Fellner wrote in his history of early Catholicism in Pittsburgh. French influence here eased the work of priests, but efforts to live the Catholic faith in colonial America were hampered by widespread contempt against “papists” and by English proscription laws forbidding public expression of Roman Catholic worship. Catholics made up less than 1 percent of the population.

Pennsylvania, because of William Penn and the Quakers, was the most open to religious expression of any colony, even permitting building “Mass-houses,” or structures with a room for services in Philadelphia.

“Penn’s Colony was the only haven in English America for those oppressed for their faith,” Sister Martina Hammill wrote in her “Expansion of the Catholic Church in Pennsylvania.”

With Independence came the overthrow of such punitive laws.

“The days of ‘Mass-houses’ was over, and the building of churches began,” wrote Msgr. Andrew Lambing, the prolific historian of Catholic Pittsburgh.

After the French abandoned Fort Duquesne in 1758, Catholic presence in the city for some 40 years amounted to a random passing-through of priests. These included Father Benedict Flaget, later bishop of Bardstown, Ky., who was stopped here in 1792 awaiting a rise in the river.

Father Michael Fournier, here for three months in 1796-97, offered Mass each Sunday, drawing, at most, six people. Many visiting priests, however, were French and didn’t speak English.

Though few in number, Catholics in the city had begun petitioning for a resident priest.

The appeals went to Baltimore, which had been created as the country’s first diocese in 1789, headed by Bishop John Carroll.

When Bishop Carroll was named prefect apostolic in 1784, in charge of all priests in the new country, few Catholics and no priests lived west of the Allegheny Mountains. But, by 1808, four new dioceses were created: New York, Philadelphia, Boston and Bardstown, Ky.

That same year, Father William F.X. O’Brien, newly ordained in Baltimore, arrived to become the first resident priest in Pittsburgh and pastor of St. Patrick, the city’s first Catholic church.

When Bishop de Andreis visited soon after, he wrote that “among a population of 10,000, Catholics number scarcely 300” in Allegheny County.

Catholic settlements were going up in other areas of western Pennsylvania — in the Butler region, at Sportsman’s Hall Parish in Latrobe (now St. Vincent) and in the Monongahela Valley.

Two missionaries dominated in that early work. Fathers Demetrius Gallitzin and Capuchin Peter Helbron both arrived in late 1799, full of energy and spirit. Father Gallitzin dedicated a log chapel on Christmas night, launching Loretto as a center of Catholic life. “The apostle of the Alleghenies” began a school the following year.

In 1827, Philadelphia’s Bishop Conwell named Father Gallitzin first vicar general of western Pennsylvania. Father Gallitzin was offered promotions several times, but wouldn’t leave his people. In the end, he served them for 41 years.

Father Helbron, a former Philadelphia pastor, arrived at Sportsman’s Hall and soon revived the parish.

Over the next 16 years, he traveled through Washington, Waynesburg and Brownsville, coming to Pittsburgh several times. On one extended trip, “the apostle of western Pennsylvania” baptized 90 children.

These two pioneers in the diocese were joined in 1807 by Father Lawrence Phelan, first resident priest in the Butler colonies, and in 1808 by Father O’Brien in Pittsburgh.

The young Father O’Brien was dismayed by the conditions he found.

“I have seen the church. It is not finished, only covered in, neither the floor, windows nor anything else is done,” he wrote on his arrival.

The church trustees were in debt, the square St. Patrick Church was “much too low,” measuring 50 by 30 feet. “I am necessitated to say Mass on Sundays where I can,” he wrote.

One visitor reported that “the pastor of Pittsburgh has under his jurisdiction a parish nearly equal to 10 dioceses, and is constantly engaged in visiting his parishioners.”

Philadelphia Bishop Michael Egan arrived in 1811 to bless St. Patrick and to officiate at confirmation. At that time, Philadelphia had just 13 priests — three of them stationed in western Pennsylvania.

Father O’Brien remained until 1820 when, his health broken, he returned to Baltimore, succeeded as pastor by “Priest Maguire,” Franciscan Father Charles Bonaventure Maguire.

“He made the church in Pittsburgh what it is,” a priest wrote of the newcomer, who later became the second vicar general of western Pennsylvania.

He gave a face to the faith in the wider community. “A scholar, orator, linguist and missionary,” Aux. Bishop John McDowell wrote in his biography of the pastor.

The church continued to expand. By 1830, 1,214 baptisms had been recorded within 10 years, 4,000 Catholics were living in the city and 70 convents had been added.

Talk grew of the need to establish a Pittsburgh diocese.

Coming Jan. 30: A diocese is formed.

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