1. For fine examples of existing scholarship, see Appleby, R. Scott, “Present to the People of God: The Transformation of the Roman Catholic Priesthood,” in Transforming Parish Ministry: The Changing Roles of Catholic Clergy, Laity, and Women Religious, ed. Dolan, Jay P. et al. (New York: Crossroads, 1989), 1–107;Google ScholarSullivan, Robert E., “Beneficial Relations: Toward a Social History of the Diocesan Priests of Boston, 1875–1944,” in Catholic Boston: Studies in Religion and Community, ed. Sullivan, Robert E. and O'Toole, James M. (Boston: Archdiocese of Boston, 1985), 201–238;Google Scholar and, in a closely related vein, White, Joseph M., The Diocesan Seminary in the United States: A History from the 1780s to the Present (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1989).Google Scholar

2. I have been working on a collective biography of Michigan's Catholic priests from the late eighteenth century to 1914. Biographical data comes mainly from the deceased priests' files housed in the Archives of the Archdiocese of Detroit (hereafter AAD) and from information scattered throughout other collections in the AAD as well as from the Western Home Journal and the Michigan Catholic. Priests' correspondence (and letters to priests from bishops and other chancery officials) are found mainly in the various parish files of the AAD, the personal papers of Detroit's bishops, and (for the nineteenth century) in the bishops' letterbooks. A substantial number of priests' letters from the nineteenth century are located in the Archdiocese of Detroit papers at the Archives of the University of Notre Dame (hereafter AUND). Also in the AUND are the papers of Fathers John Cappon and Peter Baart. The papers of Father (later Monsignor) Frank O'Brien are housed in the Archives of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Nazareth in Nazareth, Michigan; those of Father (later Monsignor) Edward Joos are at the Archives of the Sisters, Servants of the Immaculate Heart of Mary in Monroe, Michigan (hereafter SSIHM). Translated transcripts of Father Frederic Baraga's letters are available at Sacred Heart Seminary in Detroit (some of the originals are at the AUND); photocopies and transcripts of Father Gabriel Richard's letters (in French and English) are at the Michigan Historical Collections in Ann Arbor. The Michigan Historical Collections also house the papers of the Birney-McClear-Hankerd family, which contain information on small-town parish life and social supports for religious vocations. This article is based primarily on the above-mentioned archival sources.Google Scholar

3. Michigan Catholic, 1 Oct 1891, 5, col. 4.Google Scholar

4. These broad assertions are based on archival sources too numerous to list individually. But see, for example, Father Francis Xavier Pierz to Bishop Peter Paul Lefevere, 28 January 1850, for an impassioned but not unrepresentative sample of a priest's frustrations with episcopal decision-making; Father Martin Marco to Bishop Peter Paul Lefevere, 4 July 1860, for grievances against a neighboring pastor; and Father Edward Joos to Lefevere, 3 November 1858, for grievances against a parish assistant (all in AUND, Archdiocese of Detroit papers). Father Frank O'Brien to A. Dittrick, 9 September 1886, speaks to sisters in the context of clerical politics (Archives of the Sisters of St. Joseph at Nazareth, Letters of Monsignor O'Brien, vol. 1). Monsignor Edward Joos speaks to other related aspects of the relations between priests and women religious in his various conferences to the Sisters, Servants of the Immaculate Heart of Mary: see “Charity,” 8 July 1885; “Points of Rule,” 30 July 1885; “The Holy Virtue,” 24 July 1887 (SSIHM, Chaplains of the Motherhouse, Father Edward Joos). On dancing, see below, note 26.Google Scholar

5. Father John DeNeve to Father John Cappon, 18 September 1862 (AUND, Father John Cappon papers). The physical conditions in which priests lived is the subject most thoroughly covered in their extant correspondence, at least before the last three decades of the nineteenth century. More comfortable conditions of life apparently merited less comment.Google Scholar

6. This assertion is based on surviving parish budgets for the Diocese of Detroit in the nineteenth century, which are housed in various parish files in the AAD.Google Scholar

7. For clerical living standards in the Archdiocese of Detroit in the late nineteenth century and after, see Tentler, Leslie Woodcock, Seasons of Grace: A History of the Catholic Archdiocese of Detroit (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1990), 147–8, 385–86, 388–89.Google Scholar

8. Although I lack systematic evidence to prove this statement, it is probably a conservative assessment. Those nineteenth-century priests for whom I have information on family background were overwhelmingly from families of at least middle-class status; this is particularly true for the early and middle decades of the century. Bishop Michael Gallagher's decision in 1919 to pay the tuition of all students at Detroit's Sacred Heart seminary (which opened in 1919 as a high school) made it possible for the first time for large numbers of working-class boys to aspire to the priesthood. Systematic information on the family background of priests is lacking even for the mid-twentieth century, but where it exists it makes clear that the sons of working-class families were by the late 1920s being ordained in fairly large numbers.Google Scholar

9. As representative of letters expressing these sentiments, see Father Gabriel Richard to Bishop John Carroll, 8 July 1803 (microfilm copy in Michigan Historical Collections, Gabriel Richard papers, original in Archives of the Archdiocese of Baltimore); Father Frederic Baraga to Bishop Peter Paul Lefevere, 27 December 1843; Father Francis Xavier Pierz to Lefevere, 1 April 1852; Father Desiderius Callaert to Lefevere, 2 January 1860 (all in AUND, Archdiocese of Detroit papers). See also Father Cornelius Moutard to James Birney, 5 April 1865 (Michigan Historical Collections, Birney-McClear-Hankerd papers). Those Catholics who were slow to embrace a regular religious practice or who persisted in behavior frowned upon by priests were, by contrast, a principal source of unhappiness for most priests—about which they complained nearly as much as they did about a chronic shortage of money.Google Scholar

10. Father John DeNeve to Father John Cappon, 2 November 1865 (AUND, Father John Cappon papers);Google ScholarFather Louis Baroux to DeNeve, 09 1862, reprinted in An Early Indian Mission: Correspondence of Rev. Louis Baroux to Rev. DeNeve, M. J., ed. and trans. Rt. Rev. Kelly, Edward (Ann Arbor: Ann Arbor Press, 1913), 88. The letters were originally published in France in 1865.Google Scholar

11. My work on the twentieth century has dealt principally with the Archdiocese of Detroit and to a much lesser extent with the other Michigan dioceses, of which there are now seven. The Archdiocese of Detroit is, however, by far the most populous of these. The territory encompassed by several of these smaller dioceses, moreover, belonged until quite recently to the Archdiocese of Detroit.

12. The ethnic composition of the various nineteenth-century parishes is recorded in annual parish reports, which are housed in the parish files of the AAD, and is sometimes referred to in clerical or episcopal correspondence.Google Scholar

13. Figures on the priest population come mainly from various Catholic Directories. Especially before the mid-nineteenth century, figures listed in said Directories were not always strictly accurate. But the trend in priest populations recorded by successive volumes is certainly correct. The Vicariate of Sault-Ste. Marie (soon to be the Diocese of Marquette) was created in 1853; coextensive with Michigan's upper peninsula, it had fourteen priests in 1869. The Diocese of Grand Rapids had thirty-six priests at its creation in 1882.Google Scholar

14. Bishop Peter Paul Lefevere to Father John DeNeve, 12 March 1866 (AAD, letterbooks, vol. 3). Priests typically arrived in Michigan with more than one language, and acquired a third or even a fourth “on the job.” “He is applying himself diligently to the Indian language,” Frederic Baraga wrote of fellow Slovenian Father Otto Skolla, “and is also making considerable progress in French” (Baraga to Bishop Peter Paul Lefevere, 16 February 1846 [AUND, Archdiocese of Detroit papers, my translation]).Google Scholar

15. On Baraga, see Verwyst, P. Chrysostomus, O.F.M., Life and Labors of Rt. Rev. Frederic Baraga (Milwaukee: M.H. Wiltzius, 1900).Google Scholar See also Walling, Regis M. and Rupp, N. Daniel, eds., The Diary of Bishop Frederic Baraga (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1990).Google Scholar

16. Bishop Peter Paul Lefevere to Bishop George Carroll, 20 12 1861 (AAD, letterbooks, vol. 3). Complaints about hard-drinking clergy and about the larger problem of “floaters” are a staple of episcopal correspondence in the Lefevere period (1844–1869).Google Scholar

17. The changing climate of American seminaries in the early twentieth century is discussed in White, Diocesan Seminary, chapter 12, and (with regard to Boston) in Sullivan, “Beneficial Relations,” 222–23.Google Scholar

18. On the use of lay men and women as interpreters in the Indian missions see Father Vincent Badin to Father Stephen Badin, 25 December 1825, Annales de VAssociation de la Propagation de la Foi 9 (November 1826): 119–38; Father Pierre Dejean to Father Frederic Rese, 26 November 1827, Annales 16 (January 1829); Father Stephen Badin to “Mon cher ami,” 12 December 1831, Annales 32 (April 1833): 165–77; Father Francis Xavier Pierz to Bishop Peter Paul Lefevere, 24 October 1843, 22 October 1844, 25 October 1844 (AUND, Archdiocese of Detroit papers); Father Frederic Baraga to Bishop Lefevere, 16 February 1846 (AUND, Archdiocese of Detroit papers); Father John DeNeve to Father Van Dorpe, 25 April 1859, Annales 31 (1859): 446–55.Google Scholar

19. Vincent, Fathers and Badin, Stephen, Pierz, Francis, Dejean, Pierre, and Deseilles, Louis are known to have employed female interpreters.Google Scholar

20. Father Frederic Rese to the editor, 24 December 1832, Annales 32 (April 1833): 204–205. On the generally unassuming dress of Catholic priests in the United States in the early-to-mid-nineteenth century see Mazzuchelli, Samuel, O.P., The Memoirs of Father Samuel Mazzuchelli, O.P. (Chicago: Priory, 1967), 310–11.Google ScholarSee also Bishop Peter Paul Lefevere to Father Bonaventure, 27 September 1854 (AAD, letterbooks, vol. 2) and Father Peter Kindekins to “Mon cher ami,” 23 September 1856 (SSIHM: Chaplains of the Motherhouse, Father Edward Joos papers).Google Scholar

21. Father Pierre Dejean to M.***, n.d. but late 1820s, Annales 16 (January 1829): 306–308. Many priests reported in similar fashion, sometimes indicating that the laity they visited were more disposed to go to confession than to receive communion. Catholics too long neglected, however, were sometimes beyond the reach of would-be confessors. See Father Frederic Baraga to Carl A. Lichtenberg, 2 June 1831 (Bishop Baraga transcripts, vol. 2, Sacred Heart Seminary, Detroit).Google Scholar

22. Crews, Clyde has written perceptively in this regard. See his “Benedict Joseph Flaget: First Bishop of the West,” in Patterns of Episcopal Leadership, ed. Fogarty, Gerald P., , S.J. (New York: MacMillan, 1989), 60.Google Scholar

23. J. Verwilghen to Father John Cappon, 31 October 1891 (AUND, Father John Cappon papers, my translation). It is not clear from the letter precisely when the mutual friend visited Cappon, although it was probably the mid-1880s. Rural priests persisted (often of necessity) in essentially frontier modes of living long after their urban brethren were enjoying comfortable lives. Cappon first came to the Niles area in 1858.Google Scholar

24. On seminarians living with priests, see Father Frederic Baraga to Bishop Frederic Rese, 25 April 1835, 27 May 1835. Concerning rectory “servant girls,” see Father Charles Chambille to Bishop Lefevere, 16 June 1859; and Father Desiderius Callaert to Lefevere, 25 July 1859 (all in AUND, Archdiocese of Detroit papers). On youthful housekeepers and those with children, see Father Peter Hennaert to Father Adrian Montaubrieg, 22 April 1869 (AAD, letterbooks, vol. 3); Bishop Caspar Borgess diary, entry for 25 April 1872 (AAD, Borgess papers, bound volumes); Bishop Borgess to Father Charles Reilly, 3 March 1881 (AAD, letterbooks, vol. 11). Concerning priests “adopting” adolescent boys, see Father Vincent Badin to Father Stephen Badin, 25 December 1825, Annales 9 (November 1826): 119–38; Walling and Rupp, Diary of Bishop Baraga, entry for 18 October 1865, 62 and also n. Ill; Father Camillus Maes to Sister De Sales, 18 February 1873 (SSIHM: Chaplains of the Motherhouse, Father Edward Joos papers). Father Thomas Cullen lived in Ann Arbor with his widowed sister-in-law and her two young children: Richard R. Elliott, “Rev. Thomas Cullen, Pioneer Irish Catholic Priest of the Diocese of Detroit, 1833–1862,” Researches of the American Catholic Historical Society 13 (October 1896): 183. Father Martin Kundig evidently lived for a time in Milwaukee with “two young girls as housekeepers with boarding boys and girls and teachers (male and female), a carpenter, an architect and hostler”: see Bishop John M. Henni to Bishop Peter Paul Lefevere, 13 May 1844 (AUND, Archdiocese of Detroit papers). Detroit's bishops did indeed worry about “scandal” (actual and imagined) as a result of young women living in rectories, though they were necessarily tolerant of the practice for much of the nineteenth century. See Bishop Caspar Borgess, “The Priest,” undated MS sermon (AAD, Borgess papers, sermons) and diary entry for 25 April 1872 (AAD, Borgess papers, bound volumes.) They seem to have had no such fears with regard to adolescent boys. I have found no references in my nineteenth-century sources to homosexuality.Google Scholar

25. Father John DeNeve to Father John Cappon, 18 May 1860 (AUND, Father John Cappon papers).Google Scholar

26. Lefevere, Bishop Peter Paul on 24 October 1850 issued a pastoral letter ordering the priests of his diocese “to disapprove, forbid and condemn in their sermons and in their instructions whether public or private balls and dances.” But priests in the diocese were warring against dancing much earlier than this: see, as typical of their sentiments, Father Pierre Dejean to M***, Annales 16 (January 1829): 306–308.Google Scholar See also McAvoy, Thomas, The Catholic Church in Indiana, 1789–1834 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1940), 52. An equally strenuous campaign was waged against excessive drinking, with Bishop Lefevere requiring temperance of his priests (he much preferred abstinence) and abstinence of his seminarians. See Lefevere to Father Deloul, 24 February 1842 (AAD, Pare papers). His successor, Caspar Borgess, who served in Detroit from 1870 until 1887, was an equally determined opponent of both dancing and drinking. See Borgess circular letter, 18 April 1881 (AAD, Borgess papers).Google Scholar

27. Detroit's synodal regulations in this regard reflected those laid down by the various Baltimore councils. See Guilday, Peter, A History of the Councils of Baltimore, 1791–1884 (New York: MacMillan, 1932). See also Bishop Caspar Borgess, “The Priest.”Google Scholar

28. On DeNeve's spirituality, see DeNeve to Father John Cappon, undated but 1860 (AUND, Father John Cappon papers). Baraga's extensive correspondence is filled with evidence that bears on his asceticism and devotion to duty. See, for example, Baraga to Bishop Peter Paul Lefevere, 24 April 1848, 30 January 1849 (both in AUND, Archdiocese of Detroit papers).Google Scholar

29. Michigan Catholic, 22 August 1889,5, cols. 3–5.Google Scholar

30. Rev. Dempsey, M. J. P., “Report of Cathedral Parish for the Year 1893,” 31 December 1893 (AAD, parish files).Google Scholar

31. Between 1888 and 1918, 75 percent of the priests ordained for the Diocese of Detroit were born in the United States or English-speaking Canada.Google Scholar

32. The career patterns of priests in the Archdiocese of Detroit have been compiled from biographical data located as per note 2 above.Google Scholar

33. Foley, Bishop John (1888–1918) apparently did not insist on elderly women as housekeepers. See Foley to Bishop Joseph Lynch, undated but 1916 (AAD, deceased priests' files). But young women seem largely to have disappeared from rectories by the early years of the twentieth century.Google Scholar

34. “Parish Manual, St. Augustine's Church, 1892” (copy in AUND, Archdiocese of Detroit papers, emphasis in original). The three priests stationed in the parish kept office hours on weekdays from 9 to 10 A.M. and were also available “for parish business” on Fridays afternoons and evenings.Google Scholar

35. Michigan Catholic, 1 October 1891,5, col. 4.Google Scholar

36. Michigan Catholic, 19 09 1895, 5, cols. 3–5.Google Scholar

37. On changing sacramental practice in the Diocese of Detroit, see Tender, , Seasons of Grace, 169–74; on preaching, see 38–42.Google Scholar For discussion of earlier efforts at religious revitalization in a diocese better developed than Detroit, see Light, Dale, “The Reformation of Philadelphia Catholicism, 1830–1860,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 112 (06 1988): 375–405.Google Scholar

38. Michigan Catholic, 12 August 1897, 4, cols. 6–7.1 do not mean to imply that eucharistic devotion was not important to priests before the late nineteenth century. But eucharistic devotions take on a kind of collective significance then—members of the Priests' Eucharistic League promised to spend at least one hour a week in prayer before the Blessed Sacrament—and become a more prominent focus of parish devotional life.Google Scholar

39. Father Frank O'Brien to Father Lafayette Brancheau, 29 July 1886 (Archives, Sisters of St. Joseph at Nazareth, Letters of Monsignor O'Brien, vol. 1).Google Scholar

40. Rev. O'Brien, Frank A., “Organization and Maintenance of Parish Societies,” American Ecclesiastical Review 14 (06 1896): 481–511; quotations are from 492. Other clerical voices in the 1890s echoed Father O'Brien.Google Scholar See, for example, Rev. Stang, William, Pastoral Theology, rev. ed. (New York: Benziger Brothers, 1897), 296–97Google Scholar

41. O'Brien, , “Organization and Maintenance,” 492–93, 500–501.Google Scholar

42. On the more athletic style of young priests see Tentler, , Seasons of Grace, 367, 375, 391.Google Scholar

43. Father Frank O'Brien to Rev. D. O'Connor, C.S.B., 20 April 1885; O'Brien to Father H. J. Schutjes, 10 February 1886 (Archives, Sisters of St. Joseph at Nazareth, Letters of Monsignor O'Brien, vol. 1); Annual report, Church of the Immaculate Conception, Lapeer, 1890 (AAD, parish files).Google Scholar

44. Loretto Hankerd to Vincent Hankerd, 9 10 1904, 11 November 1904, 19 February 1905; quotation is from 1905 letter (Michigan Historical Collections, Birney-McClear-Hankerd papers). Detroit's Bishop Foley (1888–1918) never issued prohibitions against dancing, picnicking, or other forms of parish entertainment.Google Scholar

45. Between 1930 and 1939, some 228 priests were ordained for the Archdiocese of Detroit; roughly 200 were ordained between 1940 and 1949, and about 205 in the course of the 1950s. Ordinations of Detroit students at European seminaries were not invariably recorded at the Detroit chancery; hence the less than exact figures.Google Scholar

46. See, for a fairly typical expression of concern about student attrition, Father Frank Juras to “Dear Bishop,” 1 01 1957 (AAD, St. Mary, New Baltimore parish file).Google Scholar

47. I hazard this assertion based (1) on the growing volume of complaints about rectory life and fellow priests in the various files of the AAD; (2) the growing concern with priests' psychological difficulties in the professional literature of the 1950s, for a Detroitproduced sample of which see Trese, Leo, Tenders of the Flock (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1955); and (3) the rapidity and vehemence with which clerical discontent surfaced in the years after Vatican II.Google Scholar

48. On contraception and pastoral practice in the Archdiocese of Detroit see Tentler, , Seasons of Grace, 101–104, 263–67, 478–83.Google Scholar

49. The 4 06 1945 announcement of a mandatory conference for priests on “the morality of artificial birth control and rhythm and the treatment of these matters in the pulpit and the confessional” and copies of the two papers delivered there can be found in the Michigan Historical Collections, St. Mary's Student Chapel papers. Interestingly, I found no record of this conference in the AAD.Google Scholar

50. On the views of Detroit's Catholics in the 1950s with regard to birth control, see Lenski, Gerhard, The Religious Factor: A Sociologist's Inquiry (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1961), 165–67.Google Scholar

51. Data with regard to priests' career patterns are drawn from biographical information found mainly in the AAD. Priests who were tapped for other than parish work normally escaped lengthy service as assistants. Their growing numbers by the late 1940s seem to have occasioned some resentment among parish-bound priests in the archdiocese. Such “alternative” forms of ministry as teaching and service in the chancery bureaucracy may also have raised questions about the meaning and value of full-time parish work.Google Scholar

52. Cardinal Mooney's expectations with regard to clerical conduct are nicely summarized in the notes taken by then seminarian James Cusack in the spring of 1956 during four lectures delivered by the cardinal to the deacons at St. John's Provincial Seminary (copy in the AAD, Mooney papers). A 29 May 1958 “memo” by Joseph M. Breitenbeck concerning an ongoing rectory dispute is illuminating on the question of social relations with the laity (AAD, Our Lady of Good Counsel parish files).Google Scholar

53. Numerous letters can be found, mainly in the various parish files of the AAD, with regard to driving “solus cum sola.” See, for a particularly troubling example, Rev. Bernard C. Loeher to Rev. John A. Weier, 7 01 1955 (AAD, All Saints, Detroit parish file).Google Scholar

54. Edward Mooney was named archbishop of Detroit in 1937 and served in this capacity until his death in 1958. He was Detroit's great “centralizer,” creating for the first time something approaching an efficient bureaucracy at the chancery. See Tentler, , Seasons of Grace, 347–52.Google Scholar

55. Father Begin, Robert, “Some Preliminary Thoughts on Becoming Pastor of St. Margaret Mary,” 7 06 1970 (AAD, St. Margaret Mary parish file).Google Scholar

56. Schoenherr, Richard A. and Young, Lawrence A., Full Pews and Empty Altars: Demographics of the Priest Shortage in United States Catholic Dioceses (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press), 72.Google Scholar

57. Though poll data has its limitations as a nuanced gauge of religious belief, the data reported by Gallup, George Jr and Castelli, Jim in The American Catholic People: Their Beliefs, Practices, and Values (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1987), confirm that vast changes have occurred in Catholic belief and practice since the 1950s and the extent of the theological pluralism that now exists. See especially Chapters 2, 3, and 4.Google Scholar See also Antonio, William V. et al. , Laity: American and Catholic (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1996).Google Scholar

58. Pin, Emile, , S.J., “The Priestly Function in Crisis,” in The Identity of the Priest, ed. Rahner, Karl, , S.J. (New York: Paulist, 1969), 48–49.Google Scholar

59. See Gallup, and Castelli, , American Catholic People, 50–52.Google Scholar

60. The Priests' Senate, a body mandated in all dioceses by the Second Vatican Council, was in the Archdiocese of Detroit a mostly popularly elected body at its inception in 1966. Its 1969 constitution stipulates that twenty-two of its twenty-eight priest-members should be elected by their fellow clergy; four additional members were appointed by the ordinary and two were elected by religious order clergy working in the diocese. On celibacy, see minutes for meetings of 21 July 1970, 20 October 1970,15 September 1970, 23 February 1971, 9 March 1971, 25 May 1971, 12 September 1971 (AAD, material on Priests' Senate). This material was uncatalogued at the time I used it; at this writing, it is off-limits to researchers, as is most post-1958 material in the AAD.Google Scholar