The Holy See and the Nascent Church in the Middle Western United States, 1826-1850To an American studying Church history in Rome the archives of the Sacred Congregation de Propaganda Fide stand open like a vast quarry that contains the precious materials necessary for reconstructing the Catholic past of his native land. The edifice of that history will remain incomplete until this quarry is exhausted, because many indispensable stones can be found nowhere else. Even though it is not permitted to extract blocks from the zones that are less than a hundred years old, the earlier sections, hitherto only scratched on the surface, still offer rich deposits of information to the beginnings of the Church between the Allegheny and the Rocky Mountains, for up to the present time these archives have never been systematically exploited for this region. For this reason alone, I could have considered the choice of a subject for this doctoral dissertation to be obvious, but with the added motive of having been born in Chicago I felt almost pbliged to avail myself of the opportunity for more detailed research within the limits imposed by all these circumstances. |
