EARLY NORTH AMERICAN CONNECTIONS
OF THE ENGLISH BENEDICTINE CONGREGATION
Dom Aidan Bellenger
The English Benedictine Congregation's associations with the New World pre-date the present century. John Bede Tatham, alias Gray, born in Yorkshire about 1640 and professed at St Gregory's in 1657, left the order and emigrated, as a married man of means and as a personal friend of William Penn, to the New World in 1685. He pursued a successful career as a man of affairs and built himself a palatial house (no longer standing) at Burlington, West New Jersey. He served as a justice and as a councillor and may even have been considered as governor of New Jersey in 1690. On his death in 1700 his property included a library of some 500 books (with many Benedictine items), religious relics and a collection of mathematical instruments [1].
[1] Henry H. Bisbee, 'John Tatham, alias Gray', The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography (1959), pp. 253-64. His putative governship is discussed by John D. McCormick, 'John Tatham, New Jersey's First Catholic Governor', American Catholic Historical Society Researches (1888), pp. 79-82.
Richard Paul Chandler, a native of Maryland and a member of one of its best know Catholic families, was educated at St Gregory's, Douai, and later entered the community being professed on 28 December 1705. Ordained in 1710 he died young at Douai on 12 April 1712 [2]. With the dearth of records from the pre-revolutionary School it is impossible to say whether Chandler was the only American alumnus of Old St Gregory's. He was almost certainly the first American Benedictine monk.
[2] H.N. Birt, Obit Book of the English Benedictines from 1600 to 1912, Edinburgh, 1913, p. 73.
Elizabeth Rozer, daughter of Henry Rozer of Holty Hall, Maryland, was received into the novitiate at Brussels on 29 January 1767 taking the name Scholastica in religion. She was professed on 8 December 1769 (Chronicle of the First Monastery founded at Brussels for English Benedictine Nuns A.D, 1597, East Bergholt, 1898, p. 200). Several students of the name Rozer or Rozier (from America) appear in the records of the English Jesuit Continental Colleges. (T.G. Holt, St Omers and Bruges Colleges 1593-1773, CRS 69, London, 1979, pp. 226-7).
Additional names include Dame Mary Xaveria Boone, who died at Preston, was professed at the Benedictine Abbey of Ghent, later settled at Oulton. She was the daughter of Francis Boone of Maryland, and died in her 55th year of 5th January 1798. 'She was a very exact and good religious woman and performed the office of Mistress of Novices, Chantress, Infirmarian & Celerier (sic), in which last she died.' Catholic Record Society, XIX, London 1917, p89)
Dame Louisa Hagan (1740-1811), nun of Cambrai, born at Bryantown in Maryland, and professed in 1763. She returned to England with her community in the 1790s, and died at their temporary base at Abbots Salford (CRS, xiii, London 1913, 15)
The central part played by the English Benedictines in the life of the North American Church was the consecration on 15 August 1790 of John Carroll (1735-1815) by the Benedictine Bishop Charles Walmesley at Lulworth Castle Chapel in Dorset [3]. Walmesley, (1722-97), Gregorian by education, Edmundian by profession, was Vicar Apostolic of the Western District in which Lulworth was situated. Carroll who was to become first archbishop of Baltimore and father of the American hierarchy thus had an English Benedictine as consecrator, a fact commemorated in Walmesley's handsome tomb at Downside which was paid for by the American bishops [4]. This connection is well known.
[3] Guilday, The Life and times of John Carroll. New York, 1922, pp. 369-391.
[4] D.A. Bellenger, 'An Anglo-American Memorial: Bishop Walmesley's tomb at Downside,' South Western Catholic History 8 (1990),pp. 40-46.
Much less known is the fact that in the unsettled period during the French Revolution when the monks were without a permanent home they were offered an extensive American property by John Carroll. The evidence for this is in a letter of 19 September 1794 [5] from Carroll to the Gregorian Michael Benedict Pembridge (1725-1806), Cathedral Prior and Definitor of the Regimen, then stationed at Dorking in Surrey [6]. Carroll begins the letter by commending Pembridge's book The Whole Duty of a Christian, and a Guide to Perfection (Hereford, 1775). He then turns to the matter of an American settlement for the English Benedictines which Pembridge had proposed:
I said that your letter was a precious favour, because nothing can be more pleasing to me, than the prospect of having in my diocese a settlement of English Benedictines. I will not enter now into the reasons of my attachment and veneration for them; suffice it to say, that I trust in God, they will honour and extend religion, and that I never can forget, that they were the Apostles of England, Germany and many other countries. If therefore your Venerable Chapter has encouraged your idea, I promise as long as God grants life, to give to the undertaking every encouragement in my power.
I will now give the best answer in my power, to the questions, you propose.
1. All things considered, such as healthiness of situation; cheapness of land, favourable disposition of the laws; the extensive prospect of supplying the immense western territory of the United States with well-trained virtuous Apostles and pastors, I am decidedly of opinion that the neighbourhood of the town, called Pittsburgh, in Pennsylvania, about 300 miles from this, would be the properest place for a settlement and school. The situation is far remote from and as secure, as London, from the Indians: there is a continual communication of trade and regular posts from that settlement to Baltimore, Philadelphia and all the trading towns on the Atlantic. I cannot now detail many other reasons for this preference.
2. I am convinced, that with one thousand or twelve hundred pounds sterling three or four hundred acres of good land might be obtained there, and a neat, comfortable and sufficiently large wooden house might be built to accommodate twelve Religious, including at least four good laborious lay Brothers, who would be exceedingly useful, as your great distress there would be for hirelings, and the laws of Pennsylvania admit not slaves.
3. Besides this sum for the first year a good deal more will be wanted for subsistence; and may it not, on this account, be advisable, to send first two or three judicious persons to examine and prepare for the rest?
4. There appears to me no need of application to Rome.
I have now only to pray earnestly and sincerely to God, that he may not suffer this prospect to be delusive, but that it may be realised to the great advantage of my diocese.
[5] Downside Abbey Archives, Birt Papers B66. I am grateful to Dom Rene Kollar for drawing my attention to the printed correspondence of John Carroll in which extracts from the Downside letter are quoted.
[6] Birt, Obit Book, pp. 125-6.
Carroll's enthusiastic response was, as far as the English Benedictines were concerned, not to bear fruit. The Benedictines were not to be the apostles of America as they had been of England and were to be to Australia.
But there is a postscript. Carroll had great difficulty in securing a successful Pennsylvanian mission but in 1846 Benedictine missionaries did arrive, from Metten in Germany, and under Abbot Boniface Wimmer established what is now the abbey of St Vincent, Latrobe [7]. It could so easily have been St Gregory's, Latrobe.
[7] It appears that the land which might have provided a home for St. Gregory's was the same property acquired by the German monks in 1846 (J. Oetgen, An American Abbot, Latrobe, 1976, p. 69). The first Benedictine monk in good standing to arrive in the United States (assuming Chandler did not visit Maryland as a monk) was probably Dom Pierre Didier, a French monk of the Congregation of St Maur, who came in 1790 to Gallipolis, Ohio, and died in 1799 as, remarkably considering later developments, a parish priest in St. Louis, Missouri, (Oetgen, pp. 68-9).