r The Catholic Democracy of America,64 - Digital Repository Services

The Catholic Democracy of America, 60
explorers first set up on American soil the emblem of the
Church's faith, might have obtained this honor, since it was by
the hands of the Spanish envoy that the decisive petition to
the Holy See was conveyed. France, whose missionaries had
planted the Catholic religion throughout the continent, from
the St. Lawrence to the Mississippi, had, as we had seen, aided
the recognition of the Church by the newly born nation, but
in the year of grace 1790 France was amply occupied with
her domestic concerns. Just at the moment when thq designate
father of the American episcopate was being welcomed
beneath the hospitable Dorsetshire roof-tree, Lafayette, who
had no little share in the events of which this was the consummation,
was likewise engaged in ecclesiastical ceremonial.
Over in Paris an altar had been reared in the Champ de Mars
on the anniversary of the capture of the Bastille, and there the
hero of Yorktown waved hjs sword while Louis Seize swore
fealty to the revolutionary constitution, after mass said, for the
last time in his chequered career, by Charles Maurice de Talleyrand,
Bishop of Autun. It was better that the ordering of
America's first prelate should be in the quiet retreat of an
English manor, though it is strange that the democratic Catholicism
of the United States should have received its episcopal
seal in a home of that English Catholic gentry which was even
then willing to suffer and to sacrifice for a lost cause of absolutism.
We have described with some detail the circumstances of
the foundation of the hierarchy because it was the turning
point of the destiny of Roman Catholicism in the United
States. Had the Church in America not been established upon
a local basis, had it remained as a missionary organization
administered by a camarilla of foreigners in Italy, not only
would it never have approached its present position of power,
but it would have always been regarded as an alien institution,
and the millions of Catholic immigrants who have peopled
and fertilized the continent could never have been assimilated
with the nation. From the consecration of the first bishop