A representative study of Southern Catholic Bishops’ domestic ministry and views on allegiance during the American Civil War 1
1. Elder’s Domestic Ministry
Elder’s domestic ministry took on many forms and can be grouped in-to the following categories: theological instruction (the standard duties of celebrat-ing Mass and preachcelebrat-ing to men and women at home), local education, interactions with Protestant Christians, ministry to African-Americans (some slaves and some freemen), hospital ministry for wounded soldiers, and the collection of funds and material goods for his and his brother bishops’ congregations. As is natural,
2 J. M. Woods, A History of the Catholic Church in the American South, 1513-1900 (Gainesville:
University of Florida Press, 2011), p. 279.
3 W. E. Wright, ed. “Bishop Elder and the Civil War”. The Catholic Historical Review, Vol. 44 (1958-1959), p. 290.
4 Ch. E. Nolan, The Catholic Church in Mississippi, 1865-1911 (Lafayette, LA: University of Louisi-ana at Lafayette and the Catholic Diocese of Jackson, MS, 2002), p.11.
with the war touching all parts of the South and southern society, domestic ministry often butted up against, and spilled over into, the war zones.
Elder’s Civil War years were full. He faced a host of quotidian duties on the home front. This included making sure that the Catholic educational system was running smoothly. Elder reported having to exam a large school in Catechetics, Grammar, Spelling, History, Reading, Geography, and Latin.5 Of this examination he reported that every subject was improved upon by the students with the excep-tion of geography,
“which failed entirely.”6
When a Protestant student at the Catholic school, a boy named Preston Thomas, fell out of a tree and was injured, it was Elder’s duty to send someone to check on him.7 When soldiers were passing through the area, Elder, in addition to giving them a blessing, treated them to a bottle of wine.8 He was constantly play-ing many roles in addition to bishop: schoolmaster, welcomplay-ing committee, and amateur sommelier.
Elder’s lasting impact on the home front was his deep commitment to evangelization. His primary concern, whether strengthening the faith of his own congregants, or bringing converts into the Church, Protestant or otherwise, slave or free, was the human soul. Such is the case related to the death of a Mrs. Kenny, a lapsed Catholic with a Protestant husband and Protestant daughters, all away from home at the time of the woman’s fatal illness.9
Elder recorded her story as
“a remarkable one.”10 “Very bitter against the Church,”
Mrs. Kenny was being cared for by one of her nieces, “a practical Catho-lic,” who had sent for Elder to come and see her aunt in her final hours.11 Elder asked Mrs. Kenny, in the presence of her doctor and the doctor’s sister, if she wished to receive Catholic Sacraments (most likely Confession and Anointing of the Sick).12 Mrs. Kenny said she did wish to receive them.
5 Bishop William Henry Elder Civil War Diary (1862-1865), ed. by The Most Reverend Richard Gerow, Bishop of Natchez-Jackson (Natchez: Most Reverend Richard Gerow, 1960), November 7, 1862, p. 3. [Thereafter quoted as: Elder Diary.]
6 Elder Diary, November 7, 1862, op. cit., p. 3.
7 Elder Diary, November 12, 1862, op. cit., p. 4.
8 Elder Diary, February 23, 1863, op. cit., p. 18.
9 Elder Diary, December 10, 1862, op. cit., 8.
10 Ibidem.
11 Ibidem.
12 Ibidem.
“It must have been [the] especial prayers of her Mother13 in heaven,”
Elder recorded in his journal,
“that obtained for her to receive the Sacrts, just when she did. –What a happy thing is a good religious education. It kept the faith alive under all those cold embers of 25 years... Blessed are the mysterious ways of God!”14.
Mrs. Kenny died that day. Three days later her husband came home and was furious with Elder when learning of his wife’s reconciliation to the Catho-lic Church.15
For some unknown reason, Elder doesn’t specify why, Mr. Kenny had a change of heart and came to see the Bishop the next day. He was no longer upset and actually wanted his wife to be given a Catholic funeral.16 Some theological questions ensued, Elder explaining
“why people wish to die in the Cath. Church.”17 “Because only there have the helps & con-solations wh. God has appointed [subside],”
Elder noted,
“& taught in His Holy Scrp. The Sacrts- Penance-Eucharist-Extreme Unction-Communion of Saints.”18.
All Southern Catholic clergy, bishops like Elder as well as battlefield chap-lains and Sister-nurses, were eager to gain converts to the faith and employed di-verse means to achieve this end.
Elder’s hospital ministry centered around sickbeds and deathbeds.
The Bishop was indefatigable in his service to the sick and wounded. Following a battle Elder would go to the hospitals. In May of 1863, the Bishop reported visiting
“all the hospitals”
13 It is unclear by “Mother” if Elder means Mrs. Kenny’s biological mother or the Blessed Virgin Mary.
14 Elder Diary, December 10, 1862, op. cit., p. 8.
15 Elder Diary, December 13, 1862, op. cit., p. 8.
16 Elder Diary, December 14, 1862, op. cit., p. 8.
17 Ibidem.
18 Ibidem.
in the Natchez area, with many lodged in private houses he visited
“all I c[oul]d. find.”19.
Following the fighting at Vicksburg Elder was in the hospitals once more.
There he anointed a man shot through the head, one of the many examples of the last minute administration of the Sacraments following a soldier suffering a horrific mortal wound that was for Elder, and all Catholic clergy, a grisly daily reality.20
Elder, in his hospital ministry, was doing similar work to chaplains’
on the battlefield but with less sustained interaction with soldiers as he was con-stantly on the move. Chaplains had plenty of free time to develop personal relation-ships with soldiers and mutually support one another in upholding Confederate values. Bishops didn’t have much time for this. Bishops, because they were spread so thin, literally one man in charge of an entire state, and this daunting task exacer-bated by the reality of nineteenth century travel, moved quickly from one post to another with the majority of their time spent dispensing spiritual duties.
Elder’s ministry to African-Americans was extensive. Elder described them, both slave and free, as his spiritual brothers and sisters,
“every one of them immortal, made to the image & likeness of God, redeemed by the Pre-cious Blood of the Son of God,”
as he wrote in an 1858 letter to the Propaganda Fide.21 He backed up this sentiment in his domestic ministry to African-Americans, visiting them at home and in hospital, sending them religious items on request, and performing baptisms, all for the goal of giving them what was, in his estimation, the most pre-cious of gifts: the Catholic faith.
On September 4th, 1863 he visited African-Americans in hospital, baptized a young man into the faith and gave him absolution, and later baptized seven more African-Americans (three infants, four adults).22 An older man, ninety-two years old, called for Elder and asked that he pray with him; Elder did and shortly after-wards the man entered the Church and received the scapular.23
19 Elder Diary, May 14, 1863, op. cit., p. 30.
20 Elder Diary, July 18, 1863, op. cit., p. 46.
21 Bishop William Henry Elder, “Apostolate to the Negro Slaves in Mississippi”, to the Society for the Propagation of the Faith, 1858, [in:] Fr. John Tracy Ellis, Documents of American Catholic History (Milwaukee: Bruce, 1962), p. 325-329.
22 Elder Diary, September 4, 1863, op. cit. p. 63.
23 The scapular is a devotional garment that originated from the habits of monastic orders, in its most common form it is like a small necklace consisting of two wool squares of cloth connected by string—
The next day, September 5th, Elder baptized fourteen infants and two youths at the
“colored camp.”24
On September 8th, the Feast of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, El-der baptized ten more African-American children.25 On September 12th Elder
“prepared five for death”
and returned again to the scene six days later. For four consecutive days at the end of the month he went to the African-American camp every day.26 Elder visited African-American soldiers throughout the war, dispensing the Sacraments, especially baptism, and simply his time.27 Elder went to see his African-American congregants even when they were interred at the small pox hospital.28
Elder held paternalistic views towards African-Americans but he was not a hypocrite when it came to living his own evangelical prescriptions to
“put the sickle into the abundant field”
of souls giving African-Americans access to the fullness of truth — the faith, Sacraments, all the gifts of the Church.29 Elder did this not just in hospitals and field camps but by other means, too.
When an African-American man named Alonzo asked Elder for religious items the Bishop sent him a rosary.30 Elder made pastoral visits to his black con-gregants, visiting a woman named Eliza three times in five days in March 1863.31 When Alonzo was afflicted with an unspecified hemorrhage, Elder went to see him immediately following Mass.32 Following Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament, Elder sometimes held educational sessions for African Americans, teaching them, many of whom might have been recent converts to the faith, Catholic doctrine.33
one square is worn over the chest and the other over the back. They are usually worn under one’s shirt and are associated with popular Catholic piety; Elder diary, September 4, 1863, op. cit., p. 63.
24 Elder Diary, September 5, 1863, op. cit., p. 63.
25 Elder Diary, September 8 1863, op. cit., p. 63.
26 Elder Diary, September 12, 18, 21-24, 1863, op. cit., p. 64.
27 Elder Diary, October 10, 19, 1863, op. cit., pp. 67, 69.
28 Elder Diary, January 1, 1864, op. cit., p. 72.
29 Elder, “Apostolate to the Negro Slaves...,” op. cit., p. 325-329.
30 Elder Diary, December 14, 1862, op. cit., p. 9.
31 Elder Diary, March 16, 19-20 1863, op. cit., p. 22-23.
32 Elder Diary, April 14, 1863, op. cit., p. 28.
33 Elder Diary, July 26, 1863, op. cit., p. 51.
There is no obvious reason to doubt Elder’s sincerity in his work with Afri-can-Americans. It appears that he genuinely believed they held spiritual equality before God, and that he wanted to give them the rudiments of the faith, and bring more African-Americans into the Church, because he was first and foremost a bishop. The tragedy of all this is the tragedy of the Southern bishops writ large in regards to slavery. Although all of them did some good things for slaves, and later for freedmen, and although the almost exclusive number of bishops viewed blacks and whites as equals before God, they nonetheless endorsed the slavery system. Southern Catholics’ endorsement of slavery, either openly or by omission, left those men and woman whom the bishops claimed were spiritu-al equspiritu-als societspiritu-al inferiors — inferiors to the point of chattel slavery, an unspeaka-ble degradation and a blight on the bishops’ record. While the bishops remained above the sectional fray in spiritual matters they wholly identified with southern social mores and, as historian Michael Pasquier has shown, slavery was the prime example.34
Benedictine priest and scholar Cyprian Davis35 says this, in summation, about Elder:
“For a truly pastoral bishop like Elder, the needs of the slaves were evident. Still, even he saw them as basically inferior to whites in regard to character and intellect, although, as he clearly pointed out, grace could make up for these deficiencies and make them saints.”36
Davis writes that Elder’s concern for African Americans was
“from all indications genuine”
and that the Bishop of Natchez viewed former slaves as
“refugees in a land that had been a prison more than a home.”37.
34 Michael Pasquier, Fathers on the Frontier: French Missionaries and the Roman Catholic Priest-hood in the United States, 1789-1870 (Religion in America Series. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 187.
35 Fr. Cyprian Davis OSB (1930-2015). Davis, an African American born in Washington DC, was ordained a priest in 1956. He received a licentiate in sacred theology from the Catholic University of America in 1957 and a license and doctorate in historical sciences from the Catholic University of Louvain (1963, 1977). A professor of Church history at Saint Meinrad Seminary and School of heology, he received the John Gilmary Shea Award and the Brother Joseph Davis award for The History of Black Catholics in the nited States. http://www.saintmeinrad.edu/news/?story=11660 [Access: 1.-5.2016].
36 Fr. Cyprian Davis, O.S.B., The History of Black Catholics in the United States (New York: Cross-road, 1990), 45.
37 Ibidem, p. 46.
Elder was solicitous for souls of all races and backgrounds. The more men and women who entered the Catholic Church the better, and no amount of converts could meet a quota. Helping non-Catholics become Catholics and Catholics be-come fervent in their faith was the goal of Elder’s ministry. Elder rarely missed an opportunity to bring up the faith when possible. Elder, at a farm house turned into a hospital, and in a typical scene of his wartime experience, gave an impromptu sermon to two Protestants inquiring about the faith:
“I exhorted them to at least make an offering to God to that they wd. search for the truth
& embrace it-& also to make an act of Contrition.”38
In August of 1863 Elder went to see Union General Ulysses S. Grant re-garding plans to build a convent. 39 Grant was not in but his son was there and he had
“very sore eyes.”40
Elder told him to wash them in holy water and to say the Litany of Jesus every day.41
Elder, in regards to helping Catholics become better Catholics, constantly exhorted his people on the home front to make spiritual advancements. The first entry in his Civil War Diary, November 1st, 1862 (All Saints Day), notes a sermon he preached at Mass on the divine origins of the Church42, the communion of the Saints, Apostolic succession, the martyrs, and the popes and doctors of the Church.43 All this for the purpose, as Elder put it, of showing that “She is still the same Church-wishing to make Saints now-‘tis her whole business-and we are
38 Elder Diary, May 15, 1863, op. cit., p. 34.
39 Elder Diary, August 3, 1863, op. cit., p. 55.
40 Ibidem.
41 Ibidem.
42 Catholics believe the Church has been personally, and therefore divinely, instituted by Jesus Christ:
Simon Peter replied, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.” And Jesus answered him,
“Blessed are you, Simon Bar-Jonah! For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father who is in heaven. And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock. I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.”
(Matthew 16:16-19). See e.g.: Holy Bible: Douay-Rheims Version. Charlotte, NC: Saint Benedict Press, 2009, pp. 1086, 306. See also: Bible Hub, online URL: http://biblehub.com/context/matthew/16-16.htm [Access: 01.06.2016]; see also website: Douay-Rheims Bible + Challoner Notes, drbo.org, URL: http://www.drbo.org/ [Access: 30.06.2016].
43 Elder Diary, November 1, 1862, op. cit., p. 2.
material-just like the other Saints- to be perfected by the same means if we will use them.”44
Elder often preached on the theme of redemptive suffering, one that cer-tainly must have resonated in war-ravaged and Union occupied Mississippi.
The Virgin Mary’s sufferings during the Passion of Christ were a good example of how Mississippi Catholics should bear their own, personal crosses, Elder com-mented.45 No better example of heroic suffering was available than Christ Himself, and, as Elder noted, it was
“man’s vocation to follow in the footsteps of Christ,”
to unite the struggles of the war to Calvary.46 The Bishop, on Easter Sun-day, connected his previous sermons on suffering to the Resurrection, arguing that the latter was unattainable without the former.47
Elder, as he demonstrated during the secession crisis, had no problem entering the political arena when needed. For the Bishop of Natchez his deep Cath-olic faith and his strong Confederate partisanship were not in tension. He was both devout Catholic and devoted Confederate, but when forced to choose between these two allegiances, as he was during the Union prayer request of 1864, Elder put his religion first.