January 4, 1821

On this day in 1821 Elizabeth Ann Seton passed from her earthly existence.

A side altar from the basilica in Emmitsburg.

Along US 15 in Maryland just shy of the Pennsylvania border is a rather Catholic area, complete with a seminary, university, shrine, and pilgrimage grotto.  A tall gilded statue of Mary rises from the edge of the Appalachians and looks over the northern Maryland piedmont.

The scale is less than impressive, but it was a hard shot to take without 

A shrine, indeed a full blown basilica, is one of the central features of the small town of Emmitsburg, Maryland.  The grounds and edifices, of course, are dedicated to the honor and memory of Elizabeth Ann Seton, who in 1975 was made the first United States-born saint.  Emmitsburg became a place of rest for Elizabeth only after years of difficulties both financially and physically.  She was actually a New Yorker, and an Episcopalian by birth; her beginnings can be experienced in another shrine near the battery park at the southern tip of Manhattan.

Things might have remained quiet and simple for her in New York, but Elizabeth fell in love with William Seton.  William was a businessman with a small fleet of ships at his disposal, but found himself at the unfortunate end of both a failing business (due to naval problems during the Napoleonic wars) and a rather weak constitution.  His doctors recommended he spend time in the warmer climate of Italy, and took up an invitation to stay with a business partner in Livorno.  Elizabeth came along, of course, and while there encountered Roman Catholicism in living color.  She fell in love.  When she returned to the United States in 1805, she was received into the Church.

To make ends meet for her family, she opened a school for girls.  In keeping with a history of difficulty, many parents refused to send their children to a school run by a Catholic, and Elizabeth might well have disappeared into obscurity had it not been for a chance meeting with a Sulpician abbot.  Eventually, the Sulpicians invited Elizabeth to Emmitsburg to run a Catholic school.  At the time, this was something of a radical concept; the United States was largely Protestant, and in the Catholic areas of the world a Catholic school was pretty much a given, or just considered a school.  Elizabeth did not know it, but she was being a pioneer in what has since become a grand American tradition of specifically Catholic schools.  As her husband had passed away and her children were growing up and leaving for their own lives, Elizabeth took her mission of education a step further by founding a religious community dedicated to the education and care of the children of the poor.  In doing so, she founded the first congregation of religious sisters formed in the United States.

The area which became her resting place is among the oldest cores of Catholic culture within the United States and is rather notable in being a historical center focused on works of peace rather than war.  Just to the north is Gettysburg, while nearby to the southwest are Antietam and Monocacy National Battlefields.  These anniversaries have largely overshadowed the 200 year remembrance of the passing of the saint, but it is hard for most travelers passing between the battlefields not to notice a very different legacy that exists in this place.  Near Mount Saint Mary's University, along with the giant statue, is a place of repose with lovely gardens and trails built into the verdant edge of the Appalachians.

The heat and a lack of time meant that I did not stop and take pictures of this place, but you have my assurances that it is worth going to even for non-Catholics.  I do confess to a certain bias here.  Mom and I would stop there every time we drove down 15 en route to I-95 and southern Florida each year, and aside from experiencing the shrine of the North American martyrs in Midland, Ontario, the holy sites around Emmitsburg and the story of Elizabeth were among the sacred geography responsible for lighting the flame of a vocation to the priesthood in your author.

The main portion of the basilica.  The thing is actually pretty huge.

As far as the area goes, aside from being riddled with tons of historical sites, things are rural and half-wild.  This is the highly developed eastern coast of the United States, but it is also where the coast gives way to the great wall of the Appalachians, and many places feature undeveloped patches, especially along the ridge lines.  For an urban sophisticate like Elizabeth, moving out here must have been quite the transformation of lifestyle (not that she was worried about it).

Looking west from US 15 northbound, just a few miles south of Emmitsburg.  Those mountains a few miles over are the foothills of the Appalachians and part of Catoctin Mountain Park, something of a federal version of a metropark for the DC area.

Old California: The Missions

California.  The word conjures up images of a vast urban landscape, mountains with towering trees in them, a pleasant climate, dramatic looking beaches, orchards and vineyards that seem to go on forever, and depending on one's political views, either a paradise or a cesspool.  Both in state and abroad, the left focuses on what they deem to be progress, while the right focuses on what a mess progress has made of things.  The past gets ignored quite well here, dismissed either as backwards or a pointless exercise in nostalgia.  Here and there, historical memory can be a bit hard to ignore.  Many of the names of the cities of California bear witness to both a colonial Spanish and Mexican past, and many recall the peoples who once dwelled for thousands of years here.  In some places, the names remain unchanged or slightly altered from older designations that identified them as missions.

First, a little history.  In the push northwards into the deserts and mountains, colonial Mexico stopped sending forth armies to subdue the frontier, and instead encouraged missionaries to introduce Christianity to the various peoples there.  The Franciscans and the Dominicans were usually the first to heed the call, but they were not extremely successful in adapting to very foreign cultures.  Though they would not give up, these orders knew that they were not making steady progress in evangelization.  They were proud of their histories, and proud of the work they were doing in the name of their faith.  Needless to say, when an upstart, young, and fancy religious order came along that seemed to improve on their work everywhere they went, well, rivalries developed into heated debates.  This new group, of course, was called the Society of Jesus, known commonly as the Jesuits.

The Jesuits started off a little differently from the older religious orders.  They did not have a cloistered division, they were not founded for any particular reason to reform or combat the enemies of Roman Catholic Church, and they centered themselves on a theme of "contemplation in action", meaning they existed to bring otherwise secular experiences and disciplines into a religious and theological context and understanding.  Needless to say, they drew in many different kinds of men, but most if not all of them shared a common intellectual fire.  As such, when missionary opportunities presented themselves, the Jesuits leaped at the chance.  Evangelization, you see, was not only a chance to spread the faith, but to explore the world, and even more exciting, to explore cultures outside of the European theater.  This got them into trouble in China, when the Dominicans insisted that religious conversion had to go hand in hand with cultural assault.  The Pope sided with the Dominicans, and, well, China did not see significant missionary activity again until the 19th century.

On the other side of the world, as the doors to China were closing, the gates in New France were thrown open by the Franciscans who were daunted by the wilderness and seemingly savage native cultures before them.  They invited the Jesuits to join them, who proved to have far more vigor in engaging the mysterious forests of Quebec and Ontario than they could have imagined.  In 1629, both orders were thrown out of New France by the English, who briefly held Quebec.  When the dust settled in 1632, the Franciscans did not return.  The Jesuits, on the other hand, threw themselves into their efforts.  In 1639, they founded Sainte Marie on the southern shores of Georgian Bay, the eastern enclosure of Lake Huron.  By 1642, they had founded a mission at Windsor, which would later become Assumption Parish.  This work among the Hurons (Wyandottes), Algonquins, Muskegon, Ottawa, Montagnais, and Iroquois was extremely difficult.  Flexibility aside, the two worlds were very different from one another, with entirely different outlooks on civilization.  The Iroquois openly attacked the Jesuits and French, the Muskegon, Ottawa, and Montagnais tolerated but largely ignored their efforts, and the Algonquins and Hurons suffered greatly for supporting them.  In 1649, the Society of Jesus learned a very painful lesson in adaptation: their first major loss.  Saint Marie was burned to the ground.  Today a church stands over the long lost ruins, which, in the opinion of your author, is one of the holiest places on this planet.

The Jesuits would later return, and push further inland.  Far to the south, they opened up a second front in the Chihuahuan and Sonoran deserts.  Running the length of Baja California, as well as along the western slope of the Sierra Madre Occidental and north into Arizona, there are a series of missions founded by the Jesuits, many of which remain intact and in use as parishes.  One of the most famous remains as Tumacacori, south of Tucson.  The Jesuits had a significant impact on the local culture, offering the "northern" peoples a different look at Spanish and Mexican civilization than they had otherwise become forcibly accustomed to.  Unfortunately, again, this would not last.  On the 21st of July, 1773, after decades of struggle with European monarchs regarding human rights, the Society of Jesus was suppressed.  Overnight, the black robes in the missions were replaced with grey and brown robes of the Franciscans.  Fortunately, much had changed in the relations between the two orders by that point, and the Franciscans, while not abandoning their methods, knew that the walk in this frontier world did indeed require adaptability.  Perhaps more strikingly, they also continued the Jesuit tradition of evangelization through art, and embraced the exquisitely ornate Baroque and Rococo styling of the Jesuit missions.  They built their missions in this style as they moved up the coast of California under the leadership of Junipero Serra.  Here is the most famous of their missions, San Juan Capistrano, built in 1782.

As you can see, Alta California never really disappeared, even under the smog and glitz.  Sorry if the image was a bit blurred, I had issues keeping the camera steady because I was in a state of awe, and this is after having been throughout some pretty amazing churches in Europe.  The smell of cedar wood and countless flowers outside, in gardens planted by the friars (who are better horticulturalists than Jesuits... well... maybe), combined with the wooden beams of the ceiling and hanging chandeliers absolutely shout "Alta California".  I half expected Zorro to jump out at me!  San Juan Capistrano lies mostly in ruins, having been damaged by an earthquake in 1812.  The above "side chapel" is intact, while the main sanctuary forms some of the most impressive ruins in the United States.

This is far from the end of the story, however.  The rest of the mission is largely intact.  In 1833, the mission was secularized, but a parish was formed later, and President Lincoln returned the property to the Church in 1865.  The parish here lives on, having been rebuilt in present form in the 1980's.  Come by tomorrow to see it, and be prepared to be shocked in a good way.

Neo-Gothic Churches in North America: A Little Bit of the Old Country in a New Home.

In the middle and late 19th century, the United States, and to a lesser extent, Canada, saw an increase in immigration among German and other northern European peoples.  Such peoples made their way inland and to this day their descendants continue to populate the areas shown on the U.S. Census map below.

A great deal of these immigrants were Roman Catholics, and quite proud of their heritage.  The villages and cities that they left behind often had grand monastic or cathedral parishes, and they wanted to re-create something of that world of majesty in the new lands that they would settle.  Coinciding with this desire to establish a little bit of Europe in North America was a Victorian penchant for romanticizing the medieval past, while also elaborating on it with gilded ribbed vaulting and dark, rich wooden interiors.  The new styles caught on amongst the immigrant populations, perhaps in part because some types of wood were still relatively inexpensive and readily obtainable.  The result was a vigorous building of grand parish churches that beautified a somewhat bleak industrial era urban landscape.  On the Plains, in some of the smaller towns, these churches tend to really stand out.

Kansas, somewhere off of I-70

Then, in the cities, we have places like St. Patrick's Cathedral, which, while dwarfed to some degree by modern structures, adds a presence of soul and lasting culture to an otherwise heavily commercialized street like Fifth avenue.  St. Patrick's was a bit of a different story from many of the other Neo-Gothic churches built further inland, however.  For the most part, it was a project endorsed by the ruling ecclesiastical authorities (Archbishop Hughes came up with the concept in the first place), and it had ample funding from rich donors and poor parishioners alike.  Non-Irish communities were usually not as fortunate, and sometimes German, Polish, and other ethnic communities had to fight with the predominately Irish bishops just to get the rights to form a parish in the first place.  That, however, is a story for another post.  Let's take a look at one of the German parishes.

This is St. Joseph's, built between 1870 and 1896.  She is still an operating parish, and one that offers everything from your typical Sunday Mass to traditional Latin Masses and the odd Mass now and then in German.  Like many parishes in urban cores throughout the United States, its membership has dwindled somewhat in recent decades because of demographic shifts, but it still serves the neighborhood, and its setting and architecture draw visitors from far and wide.  Want to take a look inside?

While it is something of a misnomer to label her a "typical" American immigrant Neo-Gothic parish church, what you see above is generally what one will see in such churches.  Overall, St. Joseph's has a majestic simplicity to it.  Not every edge is painted, not every window is as grand and detailed as the next (funding situations often resulted in windows being installed in stages, and thus not all turned out the same, or were even completed as desired), but the place is clearly beautiful.  All three nave stretches are equal in height, which was apparently inspired by southern German "hall church" styles.  Much of the structure was raised by parishioners, and many of the windows and other decorations were locally produced in Detroit.  When the community had to stretch the budget, they did, but in general, they wanted to leave a lasting monument to their perseverance and faith, and thus spared no expense.  Instead of using plaster, carvings in the church were made from wood.  The window below, imported from Innsbruck, Austria, is more evidence enough of a desire to build a truly majestic monument and temple.

The scene depicted is the death of St. Joseph.  Now, this is one of those photographs that does not do the window justice.  The colors are absolutely brilliant, and I could only image what the Church would look like if the rest of the windows were produced by the same people from Austria.  Of course, the other windows are just as lovely, and by no means should my admiration for this piece be a sign that the Detroit artists were inferior.  Costs aside, the parishioners could have probably imported more art from the old country, but they chose not to.  This was Detroit, this was their new home.  The local artists poured their hearts and souls into a true labor of love, unashamed to be compared and seen next to foreign talent.  In fact, some of the earliest use of American architect firms in producing stained-glass design is found in the other windows, which can all be seen on the parish website, linked above.

St. Joseph's is one of the many churches in Detroit that is worth a visit.  The history of a hard-working and determined immigrant community can be seen quite visibly here.