Capuchin Sandalprints in America

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The cradle of Capuchin activity in North America is the land of Acadia, Nova Scotia, where the first Capuchin missionaries arrived in 1632 and set to work among the white settlers and Indians. A chain of mission stations, churches and schools soon developed and the Indians grew to love their "barefoot" friends. The faith flourished in the missions until those dark days when the Puritans drove the Indians back to the forest, exiled and imprisoned the missionaries and killed Father Leonard of Chartres at Port Royal in 1655. Father Leonard gave himself as the first Capuchin martyr of North America. Some of the friars followed the red man into the forest to minister to him, but the year 1655 closely marks the premature end of this Acadian Mission—its finale written in blood by fanaticism. Farther south on the Atlantic seaboard, Capuchins had arrived in Virginia in 1650 to serve the Catholic settlers there. Their zealous work as convertmakers aroused the anger of some colonists who took to "hunting" them in the manner then current in the mother country. One friar of special significance in the Virginia colony was the Irish Capuchin, Father Christopher A. Plunkett. After ten fruitful years as a missionary he was captured in the winter of 1689-90, then imprisoned on an island off the coast of Virginia, submitted to torture and privations until he died, the second Capuchin martyr in America, after seven years of sufferings. A visitor at the historic St. Louis Cathedral in New Orleans will notice a marble plaque in the vestibule with the names of the priests who have served as rectors since the very beginning. From 1722 to 1829 there is a continuous listing of Capuchins whose lives were interwoven with the colorful history of New Orleans. The last of the friars mentioned is Fray Antonio de Sedella, better known as Pere Antoine. The street in the shadow of the cathedral still bears the name of the controversial figure who worked there more than forty years. In the Revolutionary War, when the colonies were fighting for their independence, France proved herself a strong ally of the infant country across the sea. A hundred Catholic chaplains came to America with the French army and navy. Twenty of those were Capuchins, four of whom made the supreme sacrifice. After a heroic wartime record, some of these friars either remained in America or returned later to help the Church in the new country. Another Capuchin missionary to America, Father Lawrence S. Phelan, worked tirelessly during Philadelphia's dread yellow fever epidemic in the 1790's. His work was truly heroic, reminiscent of the friars of former days in ministering to the plague-stricken. The first Catholic church west of the Allegheny Mountains, a log church standing at Sugar Creek, Pennsylvania, was built a century and a half ago by Father Phelan. This zealous worker spent twenty-one years in the American mission before returning to his native Ireland. The first permanent foundation of the Capuchins i…