Lamy of Santa Fe. Paul Horgan

Mexico. The act was the first in a sequence which, though without meaning for Lamy until three more years had passed, was to determine his work for the rest of his life.

      Meanwhile, what was nearest seemed larger. Father Pendeprat, who was intended for Sandusky to help Machebeuf, would soon be reassigned to Louisville by Purcell—hardly a matter for rejoicing in the north. In April Lamy suggested to Purcell that he station a permanent pastor at Newark, and announced that his presbytery at Danville was completed and that Mrs Brent and one of her daughters were established as his housekeepers. “The old lady does great deal for me and yet she will be no burden to me she finds her own provisions and says she is quite happy to do it for she is now near the church and can go to mass often. I am really edified by this regularity and piety. I have also an orphan Irish boy about 14 years old. I can buy in general but the Catholics of this congregation have furnished me with provisions such as they have.” Lamy later converted Mrs Brent’s young son, took him to Rome to be educated for holy orders, and years afterward Father Brent, in turn, became pastor of St Luke’s.

      Northern Ohio was growing faster than the central counties of the state. Machebeuf—with an air of complaint—reported to Sister Philomène at Riom that Purcell had, since his return from France, assigned to him all the duties of Norwalk in addition to those he already struggled to meet. He would have to take charge of everything—assembling materials of all kinds, keeping all accounts, spending almost a month at Norwalk making a general canvass for funds to protect the church from being sold on demand by “a protestant fanatic who had furnished various materials” and who obviously had not yet been paid.

      A momentous response to the leaping growth of the lake cities and inland towns of northern Ohio came in the summer of 1846. The American bishops petitioned Rome to separate the area into a new diocese, to be taken from Purcell’s great domain of Cincinnati, and proposed Father Rappe of Toledo as the new bishop-designate—the first of the original party from Auvergne to be raised to the mitre. The decision would throw both Danville and Sandusky, among other settlements, under a new bishop so soon as he should be consecrated—presumably in the autumn. In his own group of parishes, Machebeuf was desperate for more help. Lamy was named by Purcell to go to him if only for a month, and wrote Purcell in late August that he was daily awaiting his own replacement at Danville. “Everybody,” he said, “except in my own congregation knows that I am going to Sandusky City … one thing only I regret it is to be cut off from the diocese of Cincinnati, but whether I stay at Danville or be removed to Sandusky City I will belong to the new diocese of Cleveland, but if I must be out of your jurisdiction … I shall never forget the kind attention, the paternal affection which you have always showed to me.”

      Sandusky was in need of every sort of governance. “Dreadful scenes” went on in public, drunkenness, street fights, sometimes reaching even to the church door. One of the rowdies was so out of control that he bit off the nose of his father-in-law, an old man almost seventy. Machebeuf, small as he was, often had to separate such fighters. Lamy would be a great reinforcement, with his powerful, quiet presence. Not only would the public peace be resumed, and the missions attended, but the two great friends would be united, as they had always hoped to be on leaving home together.

      But this was not to be. In September Lamy wrote to Machebeuf to report that Purcell had felt obliged to rescind his decision. Lamy was not to go to Sandusky. Machebeuf was downcast, wrote Purcell that he accepted the will of Providence, and did not know how he could now carry on against civil disgraces and religious neglects all of which brought ill repute upon the Catholic name. Purcell wrote to Machebeuf twice—once evidently to explain the change of plan, to which there was no answer from Sandusky; and again to hope that Machebeuf was not angry at him for what had been done. The answer to both letters was late in going off to Purcell, but its manner was somewhat stiff—sorry if Purcell had been made to “think that I was displeased with you.” Protesting his devotion, Machebeuf went on to add, “To say that I did not feal [sic] disappointed in hearing that I was to [be] deprived of my very dear friend Rev. Mr. Lamy would not exactly be true, but I did my best to resign myself.” He could not forbear mentioning one other matter of grievance—it seemed to him that he might have had the “consolation of assisting at the forthcoming consecration” of his “worthy and beloved neighbour”—Bishop-designate Rappe—but he had not been invited. Ah, well. Machebeuf’s spirited nature could be testy as well as merry. Also, on occasion, discreet. He was baptized Joseph Projectus Machebeuf. The Latin middle name was translated into French as “Priest” (with no connotation of prêtre). In all his early life he used the French middle name, but during his Ohio years he dropped it, since in an anti-Catholic atmosphere it seemed open to invidious use, and for it he substituted his baptismal middle name of Projectus. (To avoid confusion, his original style of Joseph Priest Machebeuf is here used throughout.)

      For Lamy, it was a sorrowful year. He received word from Lempdes in the course of the autumn that his father had died there on 7 September 1846. Writing this news to Purcell, he said that his father’s family “urge me very much to go to France, but I have no desire of going,” and ended by asking his friend the bishop to “be so good as to pray for the repose of his soul.”

      x.

       To Covington

      “THE WEATHER,” wrote Lamy to his bishop on New Year’s Day of 1847, “was very bad this last Christmas and the mud very deep.” Even so, the little Danville church was as crowded as ever—people came from many miles through the abominable roads, many of them in the dark, for again he said his first Mass at five o’clock. The church was “as well decorated as we were able. For the illumination we had 150 candles burning almost all sperm [whale oil] or wax candles.” (From San-dusky City, a more exuberant account of the Christmas feast there went to France—Machebeuf told Sister Philomène in all the detail dear to a nun that never had Christmas been celebrated at Sandusky with such “pomp and solemnity.” The church was solidly lined with greens, there were three hundred lights, and the sanctuary vault—all Gothic—was sparkling with innumerable stars cut out of gold paper. And the music! The choir had been practicing for two months under an excellent director, accompanied with an old piano as there was no organ.)

      It was the wettest winter and spring in years—travel was worse than ever, when all the rivers and creeks flooded the countryside. Bridges went out, canals were ruined, animals were borne away and those that lived ended by pasturing far from their home farms, and the wheat crop was given up. Barter took the place of currency paid, and parishioners brought produce and goods to their churches instead of money. Machebeuf remarked with irony that it was obvious that it was a land of milk and honey—and added, apropos honey, that Lamy paid him a visit in January and brought him a gift of “an enormous pot” of it. Lamy was adding a small belfry to his Danville church, where it was now clear he would remain, and himself pledged a bell of 400 pounds to hang in it. He was well, so was Father Pendeprat, and Machebeuf himself said his only illness was an “excess of health.”

      What never ended was the growth of the state. Lamy gave Purcell a three-year summary of his records of baptisms, Easter communions, marriages, and deaths, and in each category, the figures of the first year were about doubled for the third year. Machebeuf’s parish grew even faster, for northern Ohio had the lake, and shipping, the immigrant workmen kept arriving, and more than ever, more than even Lamy himself, he needed a new assistant. None was at hand. When in February Lamy and some other priests went to Niagara Falls to see the great cataract, their route by-passed Sandusky, which came as a “shock of electric current” to Machebeuf, who would have gone along but for two reasons—he could not afford it, and he had too much to do at home.

      But a larger concern brought a shock which needed no exaggeration when the Ohio priests heard that despite the petition of the American bishops and Purcell’s own urgent description of the need, Cleveland was not in all probability to be separated after all from Cincinnati by Vatican decree. It was an embarrassment for Father Rappe, who had been nominated for the mitre, and it showed a typical bureaucratic lack of imagination (such as often operated in central governments and military headquarters far from the field) of the realities behind the requests of those who struggled daily with distant problems. In six years Sandusky’s original twenty-five