American Catholic History

The earliest Catholic settlement in what is now the state of Arkansas was Arkansas Post, established in 1686 by Henri de Tonti, a lieutenant of the great French explorer Robert Sieur de la Salle. Never a bustling settlement, the Catholics who lived there struggled to maintain their faith, while mission priests came and went. But they built a church. Originally built on a barge in the Arkansas River in 1782, it was moved to land in 1832, when the first resident pastor came to minister to this neglected, but persistent, flock. Forced to contend with a flood of protestant settlers and anti-Catholic preachers in the wake of the Louisiana Purchase, St. Mary continued to be an important center of Catholic life in the region until it was supplanted in 1903 by St. Joseph Parish in the growing community of Pine Bluff. St. Mary fell into ruin until a daughter of one of the old Catholic families took on care of it, restored the old church, and pledged her estate to maintain it in perpetuity. Among those buried in the graveyard is Mother Agnes Hart, a member of the Sisters of Loretto of Kentucky. Mother Hart was the superior of the Sisters who came out in 1838 to establish schools for the girls of the region. Mother Hart died of malaria in 1839, but she was held in such high regard that those who buried her placed a bed of roses in her grave on which to lay her body. Then, twelve years later, when they had to move the graveyard, her body was found to be “petrified.” And after a miraculous cure attributed to her intercession in 2007, many regard her as a saint worthy of canonization.

Maronite Catholics maintain one of the most ancient traditions within the Catholic Church. They are originally from the southern edge of Asia Minor, and lived in relative peace for many centuries in the mountains of Lebanon. But civil wars forced many to flee. During this time of upheaval, the devotion to Our Lady of Lebanon resulted in a massive and important shrine being built in Harissa, Lebanon, just northeast of the Lebanese capital, Beirut. Maronites first came to America beginning in the late 1800s, settling wherever they could find jobs. During those years that often meant the steel cities of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Birmingham, Alabama, and Youngstown, Ohio. In the 1960s, a replica of the original shrine of Our Lady of Lebanon was built in rural northeast Ohio, just outside of Youngstown. That shrine, and its associated basilica, are a major site of pilgrimage every year for Maronites from across the U.S.

Catholics have had a tremendous impact on American food from the beginning. The Franciscan friars in the California missions brought wine making. Those same friars also invented a delicious cheese that we now know as Monterey Jack. In Louisiana the French, African, and Acadian peoples who settled the land developed cajun and creole food. In Cincinnati, Ohio a Catholic businessman convinced Ray Kroc to make the Filet-o-Fish a staple of the McDonald’s menu. In West Virginia the pepperoni roll became a hugely popular quick and easy meal for miners. And in Michigan, locals received permission to eat muskrat as a source of protein on Fridays.

In 1620, the year the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock, a Spanish nun began to appear to the Jumano people of west central Texas. The Spanish nun, Sister Maria de Jesus de Agreda, was a mystic who never left her monastery in Spain, but through the spiritual gift of bi-location visited the Jumano people more than 500 times between 1620 and 1631. After she’d evangelized the Jumano for eleven years she sent them to the Franciscan missionaries who had come to New Mexico. When the Franciscans came to the Jumano village near present-day San Angelo, Texas, they examined and baptized 2,000 Jumanos whom they found to be very knowledgeable in the faith.

Margaret Haughery came to America as a child in 1818 and promptly lost her entire family to disease and desertion. She married and had a child, but before her 24th birthday she lost her husband and daughter to disease. Through the help of her parish priest she turned this tragedy and pain into energy to work hard and help others. For the next 40-plus years she became one of the most prominent philanthropists in New Orleans, turning a dairy business, and then a bread empire, into orphanages, homes for indigent mothers and elderly, and schools. She became known as "The Bread Woman of New Orleans." Her death in 1882 was a public calamity. The archbishop, many priests, many politicians, and even the Pope honored her at her funeral. Two years later a public monument to her was erected, the first statue honoring a woman erected on public land in the United States.

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