
The Missionary’s Companion on the Pacific Coast and
Alphabet Yakama, published in Montreal in 1871 and 1872.
Courtesy of the Archives of the Archdiocese of Seattle.
The early history of the Archdiocese of Seattle is written not in
English, nor in Latin, but in French. In a very real way, the
foundations for the Church in the Northwest, from Alaska to Portland,
were laid by a man who never set foot in the region: Ignace
Bourget, the second Bishop of Montreal.
Bishop Bourget exerted an enormous influence on the Church—and
everything else—in French Canada. Born in Lévis, Quebec, in 1799,
he was ordained at 23 and was appointed coadjutor Bishop of Montreal at
the early age of 37. He became Bishop in his own right in 1840,
reigning until 1876, and exerting an extraordinary influence on both
sacred and secular matters throughout the province of Quebec. In
his politics, Bourget was an ultramontanist, a staunch defender of the
rights and authority of the Pope. This tendency got him into hot
water with the civil authorities and ultimately with Rome as well.
“Believe me,” he wrote to Bishop A. M. A. Blanchet, “the bishop’s thorns
here are longer and sharper than those in Oregon.”
In his spirituality, Bourget was an apostle. Under his leadership,
the Diocese of Montreal became an evangelizing diocese, providing
priests and bishops for the West, including F. N. Blanchet of Portland
and our own A. M. A. Blanchet, as well as Modeste Demers of Vancouver.
It was Bourget who brought to the Americas missionary communities from
France, like the Oblates of Mary Immaculate. He also established
new religious communities—he is honored as a co-founder of both the
Sisters of the Holy Names of Jesus and Mary and the Sisters of
Providence, religious communities which began serving the poor of
Montreal, but which, within a few years, became missionary communities,
sending sisters all over the west.
For decades, the bishops, priests, and women religious in the Diocese
of Nesqually were almost exclusively French Canadian, a direct result of
Bourget’s missionary zeal. The Church in the Pacific Northwest
depended heavily on French Canada not only for personnel, but for
financial and spiritual support as well. “Your letter of April
last... gave me great joy,” wrote Bishop Blanchet to Bourget in
February, 1850. “You cannot imagine how such words of consolation,
of wisdom & news—especially ecclesiastical news—gladden us, isolated as
we are from cultivated people for months at a time. We always wait
impatiently for the Montreal Express.” Blanchet’s Vicar-General,
Father Brouillet, made his account book for the early missions do
double-duty as a scrapbook—careful pages of accounting alternate with
clippings from the Montreal papers relating the words and deeds of
Bourget and Pope Pius IX!
This close connection with French Canada is especially in evidence in
two rare booklets treasured in the Archives of the Archdiocese of
Seattle. The Missionary’s Companion on the Pacific Coast, a
grammar and prayer-book in the Chinook Jargon originally written by
Modeste Demers in 1838 and 1839, was published in Montreal in 1871. The
following year, the Alphabet Yakama was published by the Sisters of
Providence in Montreal. Secular grammars naturally focused on the
language of trade and work and were not of much use to the missionary
priests and sisters. These booklets are intended to allow the
missionaries to share the Catholic faith with native peoples as quickly
as possible. They include translations of prayers—the Creed, the Our
Father, and the Hail Mary—of rites, especially the rite of Baptism—as
well as hymns sung in new languages to familiar tunes like “Adeste
fideles.” There are also many texts set to long-forgotten French tunes
like “Loin de Jésus que j’aime” which must have been dear to the hearts
of the French Canadian missionaries.
These fascinating little booklets—small and thin enough to fit easily
in a missionary’s breast pocket—give us a vivid glimpse of the work of
the early missionaries. They also show us that the headquarters of
missionary work in the Pacific Northwest was not Rome, but Montreal.
Corinna Laughlin, Pastoral
Assistant for Liturgy
Want to know more? Read
Selected Letters of A. M. A. Blanchet, Bishop of Walla Walla and Nesqualy, available in the Cathedral Bookstore. And be sure to get
your copy of Journey of Faith, the illustrated history of the
Archdiocese of Seattle!
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