First Contemplatives of the Least-Churched State

On the Pacific coast of North America, California and Alaska were evangelized by the established churches of their respective colonizing powers, Catholic Spain (1769) and Orthodox Russia (1794), but the evangelization of the region in between, known as the enjoyed no such high patronage and no such uniformity. In fact, what brought the gospel to the Oregon Country was a series of local grassroots pleas made to struggling bishops beyond the Rocky Mountains. These pleas recall a dream of St Paul himself, narrated in Acts 16:9, in which a appears and begs him to cross the strait and help us. The Macedonian Cries Black The first such from the Oregon Country was prompted by a devout Iroquois named Old Ignace, who had come west with French-Canadian trappers and had settled among the Flatheads of Idaho-Montana. By 1831 he had persuaded his hosts to send a delegation to St. Louis to ask for Black Robe missionaries. A further decade was to pass before the Catholics of St. Louis managed to respond, sending the great Jesuit, Peter de Smet. Meanwhile, the Macedonian cry had been publicized throughout the Atlantic states, where the Catholic phrase Black Robes was replaced with the Protestant term Book of Heaven. Thus, in sharp contrast with California and Alaska, the Oregon County soon began to receive quite a far-from-uniform range of privately-funded Protestant missionaries well before the first Catholic priests arrived. In 1834, when the first Protestant missionary, Jason Lee, was crossing the Rockies, a second series of grassroots pleas was sent east. These came from some retired French-Canadian trappers who were farming in the heartland of what is today the state of Oregon. It was addressed not to St. Louis but to a missionary bishop based near what is today Winnipeg, Manitoba. Thanks to backing by John McLoughlin, powerful head of the Hudson Bay Company for the whole Oregon Country, these pleas eventually procured two French-Canadian priests, both of them secular (1838). Soon Fr. De Smet joined forces with them and recruited reinforcements for them from Europe, so much so that in 1846 Rome boldly elevated the fledgling Oregon City to become the Ecclesiastical Metropolis of the West, an archbishopric second only to Baltimore! That same year, however, the United States won California from Mexico, and a year or two later, gold was discovered there, resulting in a gold rush that drew away from Oregon many of its Catholic laity, priests and sisters. This exposed the diminished flock to xenophobic bigotry on the part of settlers trekking in from the States. Meanwhile, the Church of French Canada was enjoying a golden age, and by the later 185Os the famous Bishop Bourget of Montreal was able to send batches of sisters to serve Oregon's needs. By the end of the Civil War, there was a steady influx of laity, priests and sisters from a variety of national backgrounds. Those arriving directly from continental Europe took delight in America's freedom from the high-level anti-clericalism they had known back home, but they were shocked to find minor officials showing them private xenophobia and bigotry. Immigrants from French Canada, on the other hand, took religious liberty for granted and were shocked rather by Oregon's indifference in religious matters, which so sharply contrasted with the solidly Catholic fervor they were used to back home. When Oregon became a state (1859), it was probably already the least-churched of them all. What gives Oregon this characteristic is the way it was settled. Other frontier areas had been typically populated by families migrating together from areas of the Atlantic states that were religiously and culturally homogeneous. Later, immigrants were able to come directly from Europe to the Midwest and, thanks to friendly organizations, they could cluster together with families of the same language and background and so preserve much of their old lifestyle. …

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