The Gap in Kentucky History
Reenan, William L.
462 THE COMMONWEAL September 22, 1926 THE GAP IN KENTUCKY HISTORY ...
...The discovery of the worth of religion seemed was a poet, Giulio Salvadori, truly Christian, and to reach Palazzeschi through the function and liturgy whose muse was the fruit of an intimately religious of the Church...
...There is a literature, often interesting and of yet before the end of 18o8 Pius VII had signed the intrinsic value, of other colonies and their successes bull creating the diocese of Bardstown, and in 18io and failures, but it is desultory and rarely of more Flaget was consecrated the first bishop...
...A return of conscience set in, not on any seemed to be in the air, and literature felt its reper- very great scale perhaps, but very poignant, and cercussion...
...462 THE COMMONWEAL September 22, 1926 THE GAP IN KENTUCKY HISTORY By WILLIAM L. REENAN NO historian will ever determine to any degree of present nothing to equal the work done for and by exactness the influence of the New England the Church in the narrow field surrounding Bardstown tradition on American history...
...In 18o6, the Dominicans built their church historian and family genealogist...
...A new religious consciousness the world...
...ITALIAN CATHOLIC LITERATURE By ARRIGO LEVASTI OGICALLY, one would expect that Italy, being over-elegiac, but certainly superior to the poetasters the centre of Catholicism, would furnish the best and weavers of rhymes whom the reviewers rivaled and most numerous Catholic writers of all one another in praising to the skies, and whose poems Europe...
...A desire to the spiritual labors but Webb alone has touched upon live among kinsmen and friends, and close to the the temporal...
...No New first settlement and opened the first Catholic school in England name was too mean not to have its social Kentucky...
...There remains but to inNo historian has followed them in the parts they terest the historian...
...spiritual comfort of the promised pastor, must have No historian of the new school has as yet searched influenced them, but lack of funds was probably the the records to find the part these transplanted Marystrongest deterrent to further venturing...
...Unless one goes back to share in the continual warfare which went on with the the Europe of the age of faith, the pages of history Indians and the British...
...In the period, 1920 to 1921, appeared, I Due Imperi Italian literature, with certain exceptions, has never Mancati, by Palazzeschi...
...Those first priests were of an alien Tradition is equally hazy regarding the beginnings stock but in time they were replaced by a native clergy, of that movement...
...must have played in the dramas of those years...
...Badin, America's proto-priest, began his labors in the What the first New Englanders fathered, the suc- state in 1793, and Father Nerinckx joined him in ceeding generations nurtured...
...In the same year, the Trappists made their was too small not to have its chronicler...
...meated the colonies at the close of the Revolution and Such activity on the part of the Church, and in so the salesmanship of land-wealthy patriots who had narrow a field and over so short a period, could not hammered their swords, not into plowshares, but into have been possible if the material was not there with realtors' pens...
...Papini set himManni, a religious poet at times over-nostalgic and self, as though in some frenzy, to study the figure of...
...counsels whose life should in religion an atmosphere which should purify and be, not for fleeting time, but for eternity...
...ings, and burials...
...On the eve of Giuliotti ; and Papini's Life of Christ...
...passionate reviewers it must seem that all the acci- The movement of these Maryland Catholics to dentals of time and place and circumstance combined Kentucky cannot have begun much earlier than 1785...
...to great wealth, but history has passed them by with Those were days of interest and of import in Kena scant paragraph...
...Clear horizons to which positivist and ultra-idealist philosophies had were the demand...
...There is a story, not proven, of a and the enrolment of the religious houses was made document drawn up and signed by those who agreed up almost entirely of the sons and daughters of to join the new colony...
...How many of them fell September 22, 1926 THE COMMONWEAL 463 beside the Wabash...
...But few read him, and scarcely a critic took seri- scathing contempt of a Leon Bloy, Catholicism preous notice of him...
...The moral lies for all to read...
...Today, at least, this is far from being the were upon the lips of children in our public schools...
...which to work...
...Various theories have gave to the state the distinction of seeing the abbatial been offered to explain it, but the two weightiest were blessing administered for the first time in the land probably the very modern spirit of unrest which per- Columbus had discovered...
...Where were their sympathies in the Buried in old letters, in dusty legal documents, on Spanish conspiracy and the demand for an open river time-weathered gravestones, and in the files of the to the mouth of the Mississippi...
...and novitiate...
...Soon -it will be too late...
...The works of the flesh were condemned, a loftier any well-defined religious sense...
...This need strengthen their own mental lungs...
...landers played in the building of Kentucky and in the They settled and increased if they did not prosper winning of the land to the north, south, and west...
...Sincerity compels us to admit that our contem- During the war, which only too thoroughly deterporary Catholic literature is terribly poor...
...Suffering and felt the need of a return to a literature which, no fear of death, disgust for a life immersed in the pleas- longer holding up the banner of art for art's sake, ures of the senses, disillusionment over the bankruptcy should seek its source in pure beauty...
...Were they swept Advocate and the Catholic Telegraph must remain the away with the enthusiasm with which Kentucky at first source material of many an interesting side-light on greeted Citizen Genet...
...To Giuliotti, voicing more covertly the life...
...monwealth...
...Father confidence of a "chosen people...
...lowed the offshoots of the parent settlements to Ohio, What was their part in the founding of the com- to Indiana, to Missouri, to far-off Louisiana...
...Compared to the Pilgrim and to the Puritan, those Saint Joseph's College was opened in Bardstown in who came to the new world in the Ark and in the 1819, and Saint Mary's College in Marion county in Dove are a people without a history...
...The Sisters of Saint Dominic made their apnames and their deeds have been poorly recorded and pearance in 1822, and the Jesuits in 1833...
...of a petition to the then pre- Kentuckians...
...movement, as the masses which acted upon the writers...
...pathies and the influence of those first pastors leave A few years ago, it was still possible to talk to the them cold to this representative of the French Revo- grandchildren of those who had come out of Maryland lution...
...Year by year afford them conversation at marriages, and christen- the number grows less...
...The churches seemed to be more urgent than ever in the period folagain were packed, religious values were once more lowing the war, when the vilest human passions appredominant, the importance of dogma was treated peared to have set themselves the task of conquering almost as a rediscovery...
...fect apostolic, and later bishop of Baltimore, for a No other part of America can produce a similar priest to accompany the party or follow it immediately...
...lished themselves in a number of small settlements in Spalding, Maes, Howlett, O'Daniel, Fox, and the the vicinity of Bardstown...
...Or did their religious sym- this neglected field...
...and Verga, not af- good was propounded-in God alone was peace to be fected by the Christian spirit in any way at all...
...There found...
...Only The New Englander should not be criticized if i Webb has touched upon these things, and in a gossipy, nation has accepted his tradition and built a history reminiscent vein which is tantalizing but unsatisfying...
...to foster in a colony, already spiritually righteous, the Bishop Carroll was consecrated in 1790...
...What was their ture they must have been...
...more poorly exploited...
...It was not so much writers who prepared the tain writers showed its reaction upon their work...
...Why, the land once seen, historians of the religious communities have recounted they remained, has yet to be answered...
...Certainly, their 1821...
...L'Ora di Barabba, by been profoundly interior or religious...
...From -all nant in our literature were the veteran Carducci, with three came positive cries of anguish, invocations to his pagan velleities ; D'Annunzio, more frankly pagan purity, assaults upon the bestiality of fallen humanstill...
...To the dis- in Kentucky...
...No New England deed 18o5...
...mined the popular vogue of the novelist, almost invariA few years ago, it is true, on the morrow of the ably pornographic, Guido da Verona seems to have great war, there was a gleam of hope...
...Did the indictment of Burr at Frankfort at the end of the eighteenth century...
...and a culture upon it...
...This is strange, for men and tucky and throughout the young republic...
...Still more neglected was Giuseppe sented itself as an apocalyptic vision...
...Pascoli, a mind subtly Christian, but without ity...
...All three writers the great war, it so happened that the influences domi- set themselves squarely against the current...
...At a date possibly beyond the activity of this period Tradition herself vacillates to account for that mi- but valuable for the additional proof of something of gration of English and Irish Catholics, in the decade worth in these Catholic Kentuckians, the Trappists refollowing Yorktown, from the parent colony in Mary- turned, erected the proto-abbey of the new world, and land to the Kentucky district...
...hospitable and charming...
...How many of them, in 1812, The field, geographically, is small, the country as marched north to Canada, or stood with Jackson at beautiful as any within the states, and the people most New Orleans...
...What was women of character and of some education and cul- the part of these Catholics in them...
...a voice into which something of anarrived, were driving the youth of our country to seek gelic strain should enter...
...The year than local influence...
...case...
...1812 saw the foundations of Loretto and Nazareth...
...The history of no other section of America paral- Rome does not create new sees without good cause, lels it...
...How many were with Wayne ? No social historian or family genealogist has folHow many died at Raisin River...
...record, and yet of the men and women who made it Over a period of less than twenty years they came, possible we know almost as little as we do of the and, on some of the poorest land in all Kentucky, estab- mound builders who preceded them...
Vol. 4 • September 1926 • No. 20
