the Acts of the Apostles, Chapter 28: “And when we had escaped, then we knew that the Island was called Melita. But the Barbarians showed us no small courtesy. For having kindled a fire, they refreshed us all, because of the rain falling, and of the cold.…” If there was any satisfaction for the two friends in the episode, it was that of entering into such an experience as had come to St Paul himself.
Lamy now had four churches and was making arrangements for two more, and though the parishioners were generous, times were still hard and means limited. He must turn to Purcell. “If you give me permission I will go on a begging expedition, though I am not very bold.… I am willing to go and beg, but before could you not send me a little help to settle some of the more urging affairs.” He went to St Louis, and thought of going to New Orleans from there, and a letter from the bishop would be helpful. “I hope that difficulties will only enlarge my courage.
He had heard of a woman of means at St Louis, a Mrs Biddle, called upon her, and was at once involved in an absurd financial tangle. “I proposed to borrow 300 dollars from her if she would let me have that sum without interest for some years. She consented but would not give me the money until a certain priest from Illinois would return to her a sum which he had borrowed from her for some years. She was to send it to me after my departure from St Louis, but I never received the money, I didn’t think she sent it at all.” But evidently she considered that she had Lamy’s note for the amount, and later queried the bishop about it. Explaining further, Lamy said, “I left the management of it to Father Glaizal but this father will not write me a word about it. She could not then by no means have my note it must be a misunderstanding.” As the sole result of his interview with the prudent matron of St Louis, he came away with ten dollars she had given him. The bishop was not to pay off any such note, though Lamy was grateful to him for cancelling another held by a “young man Mr Creighton for the 5 dollars he gives me.” Five dollars—it was hard to ask even for that.
He tried to see both sides of the financial difficulty of the parishes—what was needed, and what could be given. But there were moments when he was tempted to use his priestly powers, even if unworthily, to force money troubles toward some resolution. He once put it to the bishop this way:
… There are times which goes very hard with some people of those settlements to help toward the church when some thing is to be done, and also to contribute a little according to their abilities for the support of the clergyman, in regard to this last point I do not know what to do with a number of them. I wish you would advise me some means to make them do. Could I not tell them, that if they do not help [a] little, even if they are not able to do much, they have no right to the services of the priest? could I not try to scare some of them refuse to hear their confessions once or twice? you will oblige me very much if you suggest what I could do in such a case.…
It was a harsher thought than he usually expressed. Whatever Purcell told him in reply—there is no record—Lamy was more like himself a few years later, when, still struggling with issues of discipline, he appealed to the bishop for a decision about how to respond to renewed sick calls from lapsed Catholics who when they recovered decided to return to their sinful comforts. Should he go? Or should an example be made of such persons? His own character was clear when he wrote, “I know the way of mildness is the best.…” The Church had her conditions to be met, people were weak, authority was often puzzled, the material and the spiritual met at odd boundaries on occasion. Perhaps his qualms did him as much credit as his strictness.
He was still more like himself when he reported to Purcell on certain other sick calls. “These last two months I had some sick calls, for some people who were not Catholic, two men married, and a boy of twenty years. They were very low, they have got well; and the poor innocent creatures think that my visit did them more good than all the medicines; they now come to church regularly, and I hope, they will be good Catholics.…” There he spoke as the shrewd peasant, the faithful mystic, and the pragmatic Frenchman, together.
But if problems never ended, neither did they end in frustration. He was still young, comradely, energetic, and comely. On one of his infrequent visits to Machebeuf in the north, they always traded troubles and surmounted them with high spirits, saying to each other in their old Auvergnese saw, “Latsin pas!” and in 1843, Machebeuf wrote to his sister the nun in Riom that his friend was “toujours gaie [sic], grand, gros, et gras”—”always happy, hearty, huge, and hefty,”
vi.
The Materials
INCREASINGLY, LAMY TURNED TO PURCELL in friendship. At the outset struggling to learn English he asked the bishop’s pardon if he ventured to write him in the new language—”Monseigneur, je prie votre grandeur* de vouloir bien me pardonnant la liberté que j’ai prise de vous écrire quelques lignes en mauvais Anglais—” and went on to another language difficulty, for there were so many Germans swarming into his territory that he said, “one thing is wanted for me, it is the german language, and though I speak but very little English, could I speak the dutch so well, it would be very good.” He was then boarding at the house of George Sapp’s son, where they gave him a room. He longed to see the bishop, “could I be so happy as to see you, I would have it for the greatest blessing; I have so many things to tell you.…”
Through the years there were “so many things,” and also so many requests and needs. He needed altar stones—one for his home church, others for the missions. They could be broken. He had broken one. He needed vestments, a ciborium, a cheque, for the hard times continued, though to be sure the churches were flourishing, and even in its first year St Luke’s at Danville saw a thousand persons present at the Feast of the Resurrection, most of whom were not even Catholics, and the sermon, in imperfect English, was a challenge. “However,” he said, “I did not get scared; and as I had before prepared mon petit mot, I did my best to deliver it.” At about the same time, he could report, “Great many in Danville have joined the temperance Society, and some in Newark”—a national movement whose earnest power had reached the forest frontier.
In 1842 he had “yet another thing” to ask the bishop. What was to be done if a Catholic girl would insist on marrying a man who was not baptized? In the small community of Danville such a case of relentless love, before which man or woman was often helpless, was now Lamy’s concern. He told the girl she ought not to think of marrying her lover, and seemed at first able to turn her mind in the righteous direction. But he was “afraid that she will have the man,” who, he declared, had “lost his moral character.” But “suppose the marriage must take place?”—in other words, what if she should be with child? What then should he do? Would it be better to let them go to the Squire—the Justice of the Peace—or to marry them himself after all? The matter might, for reasons hinted at, be urgent. “Answer as soon as possible, what I can do …” So an ancient blind power spoke through his own concern, in the little grassy town with its new spire and its cemetery hill. It was not always simple to be the mediator between what these monuments represented.
In 1844 Newark, his second mission, demanded increasingly of Lamy more than he reasonably could give to it from Danville. The town was growing faster than Danville, yet the church at Newark had not even yet been plastered. Had he been overambitious in building? “Perhaps I ought to be blamed to do so much in these hard times, in this case I beg your pardon but I do hope good intention will be some excuse”—for he had gone ahead too with a modest rectory and by summer the first payment on it would be due—a hundred dollars. Perhaps he should move to Newark from Danville, though he still had “great many places to attend,” and was almost “constantly on horse-back.” He was not complaining of the labor and the fatigue, for he was “as hearty and strong as ever.”
* Votre grandeur—the English usage is “Your Excellency.”
Action was urged upon him from many directions—the newest one was the “already
