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Succession of de jure Ecclesiastical Jurisdictions

1493-1851

Which ecclesiastical jurisdictions were set up that encompassed or touched the present diocese, if only in a vague de jure way. Which statesmen, ministers, diplomats, princes, emperors, priests, bishops, and popes concerned themselves to apply the normative legal principles of jurisdiction established in the Old World to this New World wilderness? Let us use our historical imagination and cast the eye of our minds back to the secular and ecclesiastical roots of our universal polity founded on Roman law and carried on by the traditions of the Holy Roman Empire and the Roman Church.

Seville became the patriarchal see for the Indies after 1503, the first seat of the ecclesiastical metropolitan of the country now included in the diocese of Cheyenne, or Wyoming. The establishment of Seville was the logical solution to the problem of how to organize the Church in the New World because it was decided that all communications with the new lands should pass through Seville, and its choice followed as a consequence the famous bull of donation, or demarcation, of 1493. At the time of the birth in European consciousness of the idea of a New World, Pope Alexander VI published the bull Inter caetera [“Among other things . . .”], dated 4 *** May 1493, in which the Spanish-born pope congratulated the Catholic Queen Isabella of Castile and Leon, and her husband King Ferdinand V of Aragon, upon receiving the startling news that Christopher Columbus had returned from the discovery of “remote and unknown mainlands and islands through the sea, where hitherto no one had sailed.” Alexander praised the queen for her pious intention of bringing “the worship of our Redeemer and the profession of the Catholic faith” to their residents and inhabitants.” Accordingly, the pope conceded to the queen a title to the lands in question on condition that she and her heirs fulfill their evangelizing role, and drew the first line of demarcation “from the Arctic pole, namely the north, to the Antarctic pole, namely the south.” It was a line, later corrected by the Treaty of Tordesillas, 1494***, to distinguish between Castilian and Portuguese claims to newly discovered lands and islands. *** O’Boyle returned with Columbus on his return voyage to the New World in ***1494 as vicar apostolic.

Santo Domingo was the first actual diocese erected in the New World, in 1511, a part of the implementation of the provisions of the bull Universalis ecclesiae [“Of the Universal Church”] published by Julius II (28 July 1510) which conferred the Patronato on the kings of Castile and Leon. Patronage of the Church meant that only the Catholic kings had the right to say who would go to serve the Church in the Indies. An ecclesiastical state was set up parallel to the secular state, following the injunctions of the Theodosian Code (450) which laid down the rule that the offices of the Church must be established in an order corresponding to the hierarchy of secular offices in the cities of the empire. Therefore, in Mexico City, the viceroy and the metropolitan archbishop balanced each other; in other states, captains-general and governors shared power with bishops. Since the government of the state had already been conceded to Isabella as Proprietress of Castile, and to her heirs in perpetuity, in 1493, the concession of Julius II in 1510 of the government of the church in the Indies by right of patronage sealed the legal foundation for the dual regime that was set up in the kingdom of New Spain, and it lasted for three and one half centuries. When, in 1821 the royal Spanish regime collapsed in Mexico, the ecclesiastical regime was hamstrung because clerics born in Spain were exiled, or fled, and those who remained could not be replaced because Ferdinand VII would not give up his right as patron of the Church. By the time he died in 1835, there almost ceased to be bishops in Mexico.

Religious orders, especially the Franciscan and Dominican friars, were charged with the task of evangelizing America. So the regent, the Franciscan Cardinal Ximénes and the young king, Charles of Habsburg, desired. And so Leo X ruled that the friars were to be the ordinary evangelists permitted to go to America. Pope Adrian VI (I 522-1523), as Cardinal Adrian of Utrecht, a former regent of Spain after the death of Cardinal Ximénes and tutor of the teen-aged king-emperor Charles V, he did some important legislation regarding the orders of friars. Members of the aristocratic military orders, which still flourished at the end of the Reconquista, had a place in the New World, principally by providing administrators for the governments erected there. About the status of the highest military order, Santiago de Compostela, one can see in the portraits hanging in the Castle of Chapultepec the faces of the sixty-two viceroys of New Spain (***1535-1821) with the red Gothic cross insignia of the order of Santiago adorning the jackets of most of the somber, black-velveted viceroys of the Habsburg era and, after 1700, decorating many of the bright waistcoats of the bewigged Bourbon viceroys of New Spain. Communities of monks were not allowed to go to Spanish America because the emperor preferred the active evangelizing ways of friars, and their poverty, and perhaps because the emperor sought to avoid the establishment in the New World of great and often sovereign estates that the monks had built up in the Old World, particularly in the Holy Roman Empire. Nevertheless, Benedictine monastic communities were founded in Brazil later in the century, even while King Philip II of Castile was also king of Portugal. The Society of Jesus, approved by Paul III in 1540, was only allowed into America in the 1570s, and for two centuries the Jesuits were among the most active and successful missionaries, educators, and state-builders in the Indies, equally at home as teachers, preachers, and confessors in the cities as they were brave and persistent missionaries on the pagan frontiers.

Mexico, formerly Tenochtitlán, fell to the army and allies of Cortés in 1519, was established as the capital of the kingdom of New Spain, and created the seat of a diocese in 1530 by Clement VII at the request of Charles V. Fray Juan de Zumárraga, O.F.M., the first bishop figured in the story of the appearances of Our Lady of Guadalupe at Tepeyac. Mexico was raised to a metropolitan see in 1546 by Paul III. The archdiocese of Mexico included all of the kingdom of New Spain and, in terms of future evangelization, extended beyond the north-west frontier of the kingdom (along the line: Vera Cruz-Mexico-Michoacán-Guadalajara) to include all of Chichimeca, a generic term for “barbarian country,” evidently to the Arctic Pole. Mexico remained the distant metropolitan see for all of Wyoming until the French claimed Louisiana in 1682, but continued for the western side of the continental divide until the Mexican cession of those lands to the United States in 1848. During these three centuries Mexico actively directed the evangelization of the northern peoples. But by the beginning of the eighteenth century missionary efforts had reached only as far as New Mexico (Villa de [Nuestra Señora] de Santa Fe founded by Franciscans in 1610, the only permanent capital founded in the seventeenth century by the Spanish) and Arizona. After 1699, San Xavier del Bac near Tucson was founded by Father Eusebio Kino, S.J. 1718 saw the establishment of Chihuahua and Texas by the Spanish, and by the French, New Orleans; no doubt the impetus for these enterprises was stimulated by the end of the fifteen year long War of the Spanish Succession (1700-1715). Baja (Lower) California and Arizona became a special field for Jesuit missions until the members of the Society were expelled by the Bourbon King Charles III in 1768. The expulsion of the Jesuits was ruinous for many missions, and many never recovered despite the energetic efforts of Dominicans and Franciscans to fill the places forcibly vacated by the blackrobes. At the same time, the last great missionary enterprise of the old regime was led by Fray Junipero Serra, O.F.M., and his companions and successors, extending from 1769 to 1823 the centuries-old mission system into Alta (Upper) Califomia, our present state of California.

Michoacán, Guadalajara, and Durango were the seats of three successive dioceses detached from the metropolitan see of Mexico and established along the northern Chichimec frontier. All were suffragan to metropolitan Mexico, which always directed the evangelical enterprise. Michoacán, the first of these suffragan dioceses, was created in 1536 in the highly civilized Indian kingdom of the Tarascans, who had been allies of the Spaniards against the Aztecs in the recent war. The see city was first located in the Tarascan capital, Tsintsuntzan, 1537-1540, then moved to Pátzcuaro, 1540-1580, and finally to Valladolid, since 1828 called Morelia, after the priest*** and revolutionary hero Morelos. Don Vasco de Quiroga, the first bishop of Michoacán, belonged to the Renaissance humanist circle of Adrian VI and Erasmus, he was a friend of St. Thomas More (author of Utopia) and of Charles V. Don Vasco became famous among the Tarascans and neighboring peoples for his gentle and wise rule in the evangelical spirit of the peace and justice of Christ. Preparation for evangelical work among the Indians was centered at Querétaro where native languages were taught to missionaries from Spain who would periodically depart for missions in Chichimeca. Compostela-Guadalajara (in modern Jalisco), created in 1548, was the second frontier diocese established even farther west and already the capital of a captain-general. Finally, the third see established close to the evangelical frontier in the northwest was Guadiana-Durango, erected in 1620, just as the first permanent English settlers, the Pilgrims, were arriving in New England. The bishops of Durango were famous for their support of missions over a vast and difficult land and only in 1730 did the Durango Bishop, Benito Crespo, appoint a vicar for Santa Fe, the secular priest Santiago Roybal.

Quebec, like Santa Fe, was established in 1610. It was the capital of the kingdom of New France and Cardinal Richelieu placed all the new French territories under the metropolitan archbishop of Rouen, in Normandy. In 1658 the vicariate apostolic of New France was established; the great noble, Francois de Montmorency Laval, was the first vicar apostolic, then first bishop of Quebec in 1674.>1493>20 Clement X, ignoring the protests of Louis XIV and his Gallican supporters, made the see of Quebec immediately subject to the Holy See and not subject to any French metropolitan. The territory of the diocese was to include all present and future possessions of France in the New World, which meant that the boundaries of this immense diocese extended from the Atlantic Ocean to the Rocky Mountains and even covered the Hudson Bay country. Then in 1682 the Cavelier de LaSalle sailed and rowed from Quebec up the St. Lawrence river and through the Great Lakes, then down the Mississippi to its mouth, and there claimed the entire area drained by the Mississippi for France, naming it “Louisiana” after St Louis IX, ancestor and patron saint of the reigning King Louis XIV. Thus, the diocese of Quebec was extended to include Louisiana, a jurisdiction terminated in 1763 by the Peace of Paris, which ended the French and Indian, or Seven Years War (I 756-1763). France ceded Canada and Louisiana east of the Mississippi to the enemy, Great Britain; and Louis XV ceded Louisiana west of the Mississippi, with the city of New Orleans, to the ally, Spain, a disproportionate compensation for the Spanish loss of Florida to the British. In 1800, when Napoleon was Consul, the Second Treaty of San Ildefonso stipulated that Spain retrocede Louisiana back to France, receiving the promise that the province would never be ceded to any power except Spain. Nevertheless, in 1803 the Consulate sold Louisiana for cash (80,000,000 francs, ***$20,000,000 silver dollars) to the United States.

New Orleans under the Spanish regime was placed first under the ecclesiastical jurisdiction of the diocese of Santiago de Cuba (founded 1522), then under that of Havana when it was erected in 1787. In 1793 the Diocese of Louisiana and the Floridas was created by Pius VI with its cathedral in New Orleans. The city was thereafter destroyed by fire and entirely rebuilt in 1796; that is the “French Quarter” that can be seen today with its cathedral of St. Louis. The diocese of Louisiana and the Floridas stretched from the Atlantic to the Rockies, and from the Gulf of Mexico to Canada. The United States of America was recognized in 1783 and its subsequent aggressive expansion radically changed the situation in the once remote West. But the purchase of Louisiana west of the Mississippi in 1803 by the government of President Thomas Jefferson, and which included the eastern watershed of Wyoming, made no change in the ordinary ecclesiastical jurisdiction of New Orleans.

Baltimore is the senior see, both ordinary and metropolitan, in the United States and, from 1808 until the erection of the archdioceses of Oregon City in 1846 and St. Louis in 1847, was the metropolitan see for the whole United States. John Carroll was ***prefect apostolic, 1784-1789. Before that time, Maryland Catholics came under the jurisdiction of the prefect, ***or vicar, apostolic of London. Created a diocese by Pius VI in 1789, Baltimore was raised by Pius VII in 1808 to the rank of a metropolitan see that included the whole United States until 1846. John Carroll, himself a former Jesuit, and took care that after their suppression the property of the Society was preserved and put to good use for the Church. Maryland, named for St. Mary, had been founded in 1634 on the principle of toleration, particularly toleration for Catholics. John Carroll, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, strongly supported the principle of toleration for all religions; his position was maintain both in the Articles of Confederacy and as the First Amendment to the Constitution of 1789. Regarding the West, Archbishop Carroll was as solicitous as he could be and encouraged efforts to develop the Church by supporting priests and sisters to go there and to found institutions. It was the Seventh Provincial Council of Baltimore (1849) which petitioned Rome to establish new dioceses in view of the vast new areas recently annexed to the United States and open to settlement.>1493>new23b

St. Louis, founded 1764 at the confluence of the Missouri and the Mississippi, and created a diocese for the Missouri county in 1827, covered all of the former diocese of Louisiana north of the southern boundary of Arkansas. By 1827 St. Louis had become the major point of departure for the far West and center of the flourishing fur trade which was bringing an increasing number of Europeans into the headwaters of the great rivers to trap beavers. And it was the first bishop, Joseph Rosati, who sent Father DeSmet in 1840 on the first of many of the Jesuit's missions to the Indians. St. Louis became an archdiocese in 1847 which included in its metropolitan province most of Wyoming, then all of Wyoming when it the United States Congress created the Territory of Wyoming in 1868.

We might also mention that Monterey, in Nuevo Leon in Mexico, might be added to our list when we consider that because the territory claimed by the Texas Republic of 1835 touched a piece of modern Wyoming, and the diocese of Linares-Monterey, erected in 1777 for the eastern Sierra Madre and Texas, also somehow imperceptibly touched Wyoming. As the result of the Mexican War of 1846-1848 by the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo, 1849, Mexico ceded to the United States the great southwest, from Texas to California and from the 42 parallel, the northern boundary of California, Nevada, Utah, and through southwestern Wyoming to the continental divide.

The apostolic vicariate of Oregon was established by Pope Gregory XVI, as early as 1843 in response to a request by the American bishops, and with the endorsement of Joseph Signay, Bishop of Quebec (***). The new vicariate included lands in Wyoming west of the Rocky Mountains and north of the 42 parallel, a line fixed in the Florida convention of 1819; the Oregon territory had been jointly occupied by Great Britain and the United States since 1818.*** In the 1840s United States citizens, following the challenge of “Manifest Destiny,” were streaming westward in ever increasing numbers and agitation for the annexation of Oregon was expressed in the campaign slogan of the Democrats in 1844, “54 40'' or fight!” But prudence and cool diplomacy, not war, set the boundary in 1846 between the United States and Canada at 49 , the line of the original grant of Queen Elizabeth of England to the London Company in ***; British Columbia was the northern half of that original “Oregon” condominium. Seeing this things, the Holy See immediately, in 1846, erected a metropolitan see at Oregon City with two suffragans at Vancouver Island and Walla Walla. Oregon City, by the very name an obvious choice for curial officials and the pope, proved to be less convenient than Portland on the Columbia, in which city the first archbishop, *** Blanchet, S.J. (***), a friend and sometime companion of Father DeSmet, fixed his residence in 1862. In 1928 Rome changed title of the see to Portland in Oregon.

The apostolic vicariate of the Indian Territory was established by Pope Pius IX on July 19, 1850, in response to another petition from the American bishops in 1849 which reflected the growing concern of the bishops for the spiritual and temporal welfare of the Indians who were being relocated in the area of the Great Plains. The apostolic vicariate of the Indian Territory covered the country between the Missouri River and the Rocky Mountains, an area which included the future states of Kansas, Oklahoma, Nebraska, Montana, the Dakotas west of the Missouri River, and Wyoming and Colorado to the crest of the Great Divide.

The vicariate apostolic of Nebraska, which included Wyoming, was established by the Holy See in 1857. This was done in response to the initiative of the first vicar apostolic, Miège, who had persuaded the bishops of the area meeting in the First Provincial Council of St. Louis in 1855 to petition the Holy See to divide the vicariate of the Indian Territory. In 1885 when the vicariate of Nebraska was erected into the diocese of Omaha, Wyoming was still included.

The diocese of Cheyenne was erected on August 2, 1887. Soon after the diocese of Omaha became a reality, the bishops of the province of St. Louis, after meeting with Archbishop Peter Kenrick on June 18, 1886, requested the Holy See to establish two new dioceses: one for the territory south of the Platte River in Nebraska, the other to include the entire territory of Wyoming. Roman authorities acted on the recommendation of the bishops of the province and established the dioceses of Lincoln and Cheyenne. The boundaries of the Territory of Wyoming defined the boundaries of the diocese of Cheyenne and thus Wyoming had its own diocese and its own bishop before Wyoming became a state in 1890. The diocese of Cheyenne remained in the metropolitan province of St. Louis, until Denver, erected a diocese in 1887, was raised to a metropolitan see in 1941 with Pueblo, Colorado, and Cheyenne, Wyoming, as suffragan sees.

So we see that in the period, 1493-1887, the area of modern Wyoming was included in *** metropolitan sees and *** ordinary dioceses. But Wyoming was too remote for any until quite late. Seeing the picture of this succession of constitutions, really, may remind us of the universalist mind of the Church which represents one of the oldest unbroken tradition of government resting on law and divine decree.