Fordham University - Maroon Yearbook (New York, NY)

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Father W illiam Stack Murphy), Natural Philosophy, Chemistry and Mathematics, ihe Classics, French, Spanish, Astronomy and Drawing. Classes in oratory, a dramatic society, a manuscript journal called Juvenile Jocus (sic) and other means of entertaining and instructing- the vigorous and irrepressible frontier youth had been instituted. On pleasant afternoons the woods resounded with the eloquence of Kentucky Ciceroes fulminating against the British and proclaiming the virtues of George Washington. Primitive outdoor stages witnessed the presentation of melodramas like Winterton Moreton, or The Refugee, and Elphinstone, or the Pseudo-Assassin, written, directed and staged by Father Chazelle, on feast days and national holidays. Fhe mixture of the classics and Kentucky was not accomplished without difficulty. Fhe students created more than intellectual problems for their teachers. They occasionally drank and sometimes carried on feuds. Wilderness youth did not lake kindly to French discipline. Gay and hearty, very much impressed by the learning and piety of their Jesuit professors, they lacked the preparation necessary for a classical education. Hence the classical part of the curriculum was whittled away to the vanishing point. But the students compensated for this inadequacy, to some extent at least, by a passionate love for the poetical and oratorical literature of sixteenth and seventeenth century England. They enjoyed giving declamations. On national holidays such as February 22nd, July 4th. or on commencement day, student orators fascinated their parents and themselves with bursts of elocution. This encouraged but scarcely astonished their French preceptors, whose day-books were written in precise renaissance Latin. St. Mary’s College declined in numbers, from one hundred sixty-one in 1836 to thirty in 1846, but it did hat e a measure of success. A large percentage of the six hundred seventy-five students who attended the college won more than ordinary success. Governor Proctor Knott of Kentucky, Attorney General Garland and Assistant General Montgomery of President Cleveland's first cabinet, members of the distinguished Clark, Pope, Shelby, Garrand and Breckinridge families, several judges. Archbishop Spaulding and a large number of clergymen were graduated from the school during the Jesuit regime. St. Mary’s boys might have lacked some ol the graces which their professors considered desirable in college students, but they had boundless self-confidence and a natural gift of expression. Oratory was born, not made, in Kentucky. “Whenever the graduates of St. Mary’s appear in European society they are accepted as gentlemen,’’ wrote Father Thebaud many years later. He insisted too that “St. Mary’s was in no way inferior to the non-Catholic colleges of the west in point of learning and culture.” Perhaps the truly astonishing thing about St. Mary’s was the faculty which it assembled. They came together from the four winds, by apparent accidents which cannot be explained save by the ancient proverb, “God writes straight in crooked ways.’’ A very distinguished group of men, taken as personalities, scholars and priests, assembled at this backwater’s college. There was Father Thebaud, scientist, philosopher, litterateur and prudent man of business. William Stack Murphy, a future Vice-President and Prefect of Studies at Ford-ham. was an accomplished preacher and literary man. Fhe brother of the Bishop of Cork and of a famous member of the English and Irish bar, Father Murphy was a man whose personality teas as stimulating as his stock of stories was inexhaustible. Students affectionately remembered the days when they read him their essays St. Isaac Jogues, first Jesuit to set foot in what is now New York City, landing at New Amsterdam in 1643, after a Year of captivity and torture at the hands of the Iroquois.

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Treaty between Jonas Bronck and the Indians in 1642 for land now known as the Borough of the Bronx. rawness of St. Mary’s College, Marion County, Kentucky. Sending a cultivated Frenchman, extensively trained in the classics, science, philosophy and theology, to an American backwoods college was like pouring champagne into a tin cup. 2 The Jesuit adventure in Kentucky is a slightly involved story. In 1830 Bishop Flaget had invited the order to conduct a college in his Episcopal city at Bards-town. Acceptance of his offer was lost in transit. When four weary Jesuits arrived they found their places in the Episcopal College already filled. Arrangements were made, however, for two of them, Fathers Chazelle and Petit, to stay for a year. After a few months at Bards-town they were luckily and unexpectedly presented with a college of their own. In 1821 a diocesan priest, the Reverend William Byrne, a graduate of St. Mary's Seminary, Maryland, started his own academy for boys at Mt. St. Mary, Marion County. With characteristic energy and confidence, he purchased a farm whose only building was a ramshackle distillery and resolved lo raise the cultural level ol Kentucky. Father Byrne served a parish, rode the circuit, and was a one-man faculty at the same time. His students were of different ages, at various levels of training and often opposed in their educational aims. They paid tuition in corn, hogs or potatoes, and slipped back into the primeval forests when they had acquired enough book lamin’ ” to suit their purposes. Three times the school was burned to the ground. When he had rebuilt it for the third time, Father Byrne was ready to retire. Hearing of two extra Jesuits in Bards-town, he rode over and offered them the college. The fact that Fathers Chazelle and Petit were not very familiar with English did not embarass the giver nor baffle the recipients. Father Byrne remained for one year as nominal president and occasional translator to guide the transition of the college into Jesuit hands. Within two years the two fathers were joined by five more French Jesuits. By 1836 the college numbered one hundred eighty students, many, if not most, of whom were Protestants. A charter of incorporation was granted in the same year, and a reasonably coherent program of studies based on the Ratio Studiorum drawn up. Courses were organized in Mental Philosophy, English Literature (then taught by an Irishman, 14

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Street life along the riverfront of New Amsterdam in 1689. or speeches and Father Murphy, a handsome and cheerful dyspeptic, pronounced judgment and gave them advice. Father Murphy succeeded Father Chazelle as President of St. Mary’s in 1840 when the latter went to Europe. In 1840 Father John Larkin joined the Kentucky community. Fie was an Englishman who had sat under Lingard at Ushaw with Cardinal Wiseman as a fellow pupil. He had travelled widely in Europe and Asia, joined the Sulpicians in Paris and had been sent to the Grand Seminaire at Montreal where he quickly became a celebrated professor of philosophy. But Father Larkin too had felt the same mysterious urge which brought Father Thebaud from Names to Rome. Although an honored teacher and a famous orator in both French and English, this imposing scholar became a novice in a Kentucky wilderness. A year later one of his best pupils, William Gockeln, a huge and masterful Prussian, another future president of Fordham, followed him to St. Mary’s. Like his master, Father Gockeln was a giant in size, in physical energy and mental capacity. Like several other members of the community he spoke four languages fluently and read several more. Still another recruit, Father Charles Hippolyte De Luynes, added distinction to the little college. Of Irish descent, he had been born and educated in France, and was persuaded to come over the seas by Bishop Flaget. These and others who were to play principal parts in the dramatic struggle of the Catholic Church in the United States found a common life at St. Mary’s. St. Mary’s was for them a proving ground for their scholarship, their vocation and their character. In this remote school, with pupils who required as much physical as intellectual discipline, hampered by poverty, lack of books, great distances from centers of culture, often the victims of bigotry, they were tested against the time when the crisis would be more severe and the issue more important. They became a corporate body, strong in their unity of purpose, clear in their aims. In his memoirs Father Thebaud left a record of his days at St. Mary’s that must, indirectly at least, reflect the opinions of his fellows. It is a record chiefly of opportunity seized. In Kentucky the Jesuits examined with eager curiosity American Anglo-Saxon institutions, slavery, the predominantly agricultural folk-way. They visited the Louisiana territory, with its still flourishing Creole culture, and studied the procedure in New Orleans schools. Politics, local history, the psychology of the American Protestant, reading habits of the middle class—all the social phenomena of frontier life absorbed their spare hours. They spent what we would call a rural exile learning about America, not the America of the cities, which even in those days were politically and socially corrupt, but the America of the Middle Border, the half way point between the north and the south, the east and the west. S Father Thebaud's first year at St. Mary’s (1839) was not a very active one. He attended English classes with the boys, walked through the woods, helped with the novices. Assigned to teach the natural sciences, he had immediately begun to prepare for his classes. At the same time, he was studying American democracy, reading English books in the library and refreshing his knowledge of theology and philosophy. As he felt more at home he resumed his writing, which was less an occupation than a delight. He poured out his recrim-