The Barber Conversion: Eight Nuns, Three Priests and a Bishop - Part I
Part 1
Jerusha Booth was 18 and had a suitor. It was 1807 and she, the youngest of four daughters, lived with her widowed mother in Newtown, Connecticut. Marriage was really her only option, the one expected route for all women. Her suitor seemed, at least on paper, to be a good catch. He was Virgil Barber, son of an Episcopal clergyman, and about to be ordained himself. He had two years of teaching under his belt, two years of education at Dartmouth College and before that, training as a surveyor.
Yet…Jerusha feared her family would object to their marriage. What was it that gave her this concern? She prayed, and promised God that she would give herself and any children born of their union back to Him, if only she could marry this man. Years later, looking back, if she could have known…..would she agree to marry him? Would she have made that promise to God?(1)
Jerusha would become famous in certain circles. She was part of the Barber Conversion, an event that caused both consternation and joy. She and her husband’s family were held up as a model of Christian sacrifice and piety for nearly 150 years among Catholics, an example of great faith. To most modern eyes, her story is one of horror, a long trauma inflicted on her and her children.
The Barber Conversion, in a nutshell, was this: In still-Puritan New England, the Barbers did the unthinkable. They converted to the Roman Catholic Church. It was then a despised and persecuted church in the U.S. The family conversion began when Virgil’s father, Rev. Daniel Barber, had such disturbing thoughts and questions about the legitimacy of his ordination as an Episcoplian that he traveled from his New Hampshire home to New York to seek answers from a Catholic priest. Ultimately, this led to Virgil and Jerusha joining the Church, followed by Virgil’s mother Chloe, his aunt Abigail Barber, known as Nabby; Nabby’s husband Noah Tyler and their daughter Rosetta, eventually all of Nabby’s eight children – and finally, Daniel.
It led to the annulment of Jerusha and Virgil’s marriage. It led to her taking the vows of a Visitation nun, and he, the vows of a Jesuit priest. It led to their four daughters taking the veil with the Ursuline and Visitation sisters, and their only son becoming a priest. And it also led to all four of Nabby’s daughters becoming Sisters of Charity, and one of her sons becoming the first bishop of Hartford, Connecticut.
Daniel Barber (1756-1835) was the oldest of eleven children born to Daniel Barber Sr. and his wife Martha Phelps, in Simsbury, Connecticut. He served two “tours of duty,” as we would say today, in the Revolutionary War. He was 23 when his father died. The baby of the family, Abigail, known as Nabby, was only a year old. Daniel Sr. had some unfortunate financial reversals and many debts before his death, leaving Martha with little. Daniel Jr. also said that her meager estate was “managed incompetently.” She was forced to place her children in apprenticeships, keeping only baby Nabby and four-year old Sarah with her. How she managed to support them is unknown, but probably involved family help.
A year after his father’s death Daniel Jr. married Chloe Owen, daughter of a probate court judge and the young widow of a friend who was killed in the war.
Late in life Daniel wrote a bit about his childhood. He said his father, Daniel Sr., “had a greater taste for reading than his neighbors in general.”(2) The senior Barber became a Congregational dissenter who eventually withdrew from the official state church of Connecticut and joined a dissenters’ group known as Sergeant Dewey’s meeting, “for which he was made to feel the severity of the law.” (3)
Daniel also wrote, “My father and mother…could never agree as to the points of their faith. In their conversations on this subject both had recourse to the Bible as the main or ultimate judge between them. Each by habit had become well skilled in managing their own side of the question. Each had at command a multitude of Scripture passages which, to use a military phrase, they exchanged shot for shot.”(4)
The First Conversion
Daniel Jr. trained for a life as a Congregational minister. His faith was shaken, however, when a man he identified only as his Episcopal neighbor, D.P., challenged him to read a book. The book D.P. gave him delved into the Apostolic order and sacerdotal, or priestly authority. It shook Daniel so much that he took it to his minister and asked him to read it to give him insights as to how he could argue against it. After a while, his minister returned the book, disappointing him by refusing to weigh in. “There’s already been enough said and written on that subject,” the minister told him.
Undaunted, Daniel took the book to a second Congregational minister who told him the first had done the right thing in refusing to get embroiled in a theological dispute.(5)
Soon after, there was a special day in which the Simsbury militia put on a parade and performed exercise drills. Townsfolk gathered in large numbers to watch. Daniel found D.P. surrounded by a crowd of listeners, arguing with another man about Apostolic succession. His talk was so convincing, Daniel said, that the other man, “seemed to me very apparently to sink under the weight of the argument,” and went to get a Congregational minister for help. The minister “prudently,” Daniel said, refused to jump into the crowd.(6)
These incidents caused a year of reflection on Daniel’s part. He was convinced of the truth of what D.P. said, but making a final separation from the church he’d belonged to all his life, was difficult. It was also a difficult decision to make because there was great disapproval of the Episcopal Church in New England. He gave one anecdote as an example. An Episcopal priest named Muirson died, followed soon after by a parishioner named Isaac Knell. A pamphlet “filled with reproaches against the Church of England” was published, with a rhyme that included this:
Isaac Knell has gone to hell
To tell Mr. Muirson his church is well.
It had so recently been the Church of England, the church of the king, the church of Loyalists. It was “Catholicism with the head removed.” New England, after all, was settled by the Puritans who wanted to be free of the trappings of “popery.”
To be a member was to face a “sort of disenfranchisement in the public esteem,” Daniel said. Joining the Episcopal Church meant “breaking off from a friendly connection, with such as were my nearest relations and best friends,” he wrote. Yet he faced their disapproval to join “strangers.” This was painful but his conscience told him it was necessary. He was 27.(7)
At age 30 he was ordained an Episcopal deacon in Middletown, Connecticut and ordained a priest in Schenectady, New York. In 1786 he and his family moved to the little town of Manchester, Vermont where he found a position.
Making a Living
Daniel must have been desperate or a crazy optimist to settle in Manchester. Today it is a charming, popular tourism area nestled in a valley at the foot of Mount Equinox. It is best known as the home of the country’s oldest mail-order retailer, Orvis.
Founded in 1761, the village had a population of about 1,200 when Daniel and his family settled there. The first church organized was a Baptist one in 1781, followed soon after by a Congregationalist one, and then Daniel, organizing an Episcopal Church.
Manchester at first didn’t seem like the most promising of places. A local historian said the Revolutionary War left a bad influence on the townspeople, who formed habits of drinking and gathering at taverns. At the time the Barbers settled there, the local historian said, “Manchester village might be called an immoral place. Drinking, gambling and whoring were common.” (8)
The Episcopal parish was so small that there was no church, no diocese was organized in the state, and members met in each other’s homes. Even in 1802, 16 years later there were only 20 active members in Manchester and 80 to 90 in the entire state. The need to organize a diocese was considered essential.
Being a crazy optimist who enjoyed challenges seemed to be a requirement for the job. Daniel got busy. He and another Episcopal priest organized the first annual convention of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States in 1791. One of their driving missions was to appeal to the Vermont State Legislature to retain land that had been granted to the Church by the king before the Revolutionary War. Part of this was very personal. At that time, churches owned what were called glebe lands. A substantial part, even all of a priest’s income, was derived from managing this land – raising crops upon it and renting it out.
Daniel was elected secretary of the board at the first Episcopal convention and again in subsequent years. In 1793 he was appointed to a committee to recommend a bishop, and in 1794 was chosen as one of two delegates to a national convention. They continued to lobby the legislature to let the Church retain its land. And of course he served as minister in Manchester and officiated every third Sunday in Kingsbury, New York, about 55 miles away.
Meanwhile, the town board of Manchester made a decision: they were taking his glebe land. But Daniel continued to fight, taking the town to court. “He clung to his glebe land when the town of Manchester brought a suit of ejectment against him,” a county historian wrote decades later. He won his suit against the town, but his victory was short-lived. The legislature finally made a decision about glebe lands. They would fall under town control and be rented out for 14-year periods. Other church land was to be set aside for schools.(9)
Daniel was “expelled from Vermont by starvation,” according to the historian.(9) In other words, without the glebe land, he couldn’t make enough on what the parish paid to be able to support his family.
Daniel and Chloe arrived in Manchester with their three sons, Truworth, Virgil and Jarvis, and a daughter, Laura. Little Jarvis died the year they arrived, at age three. A fourth son was born in Manchester, Belah. In another three years little Belah would also be buried, with the following inscription on his gravestone:
My lovely Babe,
Sleep here in Dust
Till Jesus comes
To claim the just.
Little Belah would be left in his grave there. Daniel knew he had no choice but to move on.
Claremont
He found a new position in Claremont, New Hampshire, in a state where glebe lands had not been taken away. It was a town settled in the 1760s and had many other Connecticut natives. Importantly, the church had, he wrote, “the provision of comfortable support.” There he would remain as the minister for the next 24 years.
When the Barbers arrived in 1795, Union Episcopal Church was not completed. A wooden church, it was 50 feet wide and 100 feet long. The rectory was across the street. Under his leadership the interior was completed, and a tower and belfry was built in 1800. In 1806, a bell weighing more than 600 pounds was installed and an organ that was the wonder of the town was placed in the gallery.
Although a nineteenth century county historian, E. LeRoy Pond, described him as an “eccentric character, doing and saying many things in want of dignity,” he conceded that Daniel kept the church together and increased membership. (10) He also started the first Episcopal convention in New Hampshire, and the first Masonic lodge in Claremont.
Truworth, Virgil and Laura were ages 14, 13 and 10 when they moved to town. There they grew up in the shadow of the church across the street, and walked down the dusty, or snow-covered, or slushy or muddy road to the local school. Nearby was the town blacksmith and a general mercantile store. Later Virgil and probably Truworth, were sent to Cheshire Academy in Connecticut, an Episcopal school still in existence today. (11)
Truworth tried life out “west” in Marietta, Ohio, a town settled by Connecticut natives, but returned in 1802. Virgil trained as a surveyer, taught at Cheshire Academy, and studied at Dartmouth College for two years. Then he followed in his father’s steps into the Episcopal clergy. He was ordained in 1807 and married Jerusha Booth soon after. Laura lived at home with her parents and seemed to be settling into spinsterhood. (She would marry at age 35.)
A First Glimpse
In 1807 Daniel was asked to baptize the 21-year old daughter of the famed Ethan Allen. Frances “Fanny” Allen had asked her parents’ permission to study French at a convent in Montreal, probably a subterfuge for wanting to join a religious order there. They agreed, under the condition that she receive a Protestant baptism first, although the family was not religious. During the ceremony, Daniel had to stop and admonish her as she would not stop laughing.(12)
In Montreal Fanny converted to Catholicism, which in itself was startling to New Englanders. In 1807 she was received into the novitiate of the Religious Hospitaliers of St. Joseph in Montreal. When she took her final vows in 1811 many Americans – including Daniel, it was said – came to the ceremony. She was the first New England woman to become a nun. For most of the New Englanders who knew her, it was the first contact with a Roman Catholic that they’d ever had.
Virgil
A Novena to St. Francis Xavier. Daniel’s son, Rev. Virgil Horace Barber spotted the book laying on a table in his house sometime around 1811. It belonged to his Irish servant girl. He picked it up, and reading a biographical chapter on the saint he became intrigued. He read and reread the book, keeping it with him night and day, even keeping it under his pillow. The book gave Virgil his first doubts about the authenticity of Protestantism.(13)
Virgil was four years into the ministry, and four years into his marriage. He served at St. John’s Episcopal Church in Waterbury, Connecticut. Already he and Jerusha had three little daughters, Mary, Abby and Susan.
In 1814 when his son was born he suggested naming him Francis Xavier, but his wife Jerusha opposed the “popish” name. He continued to suggest it; she continued to protest that they could not give their son such a Catholic name, and finally he told her to name the baby. At the baptismal font Jerusha chose the biblical Samuel.(14)
That same year, Virgil found a new position as the principal at Fairfield Academy, an established Episcopal school in Fairfield, New York. But after so many years, he continued to have unsettling thoughts, doubts about his faith, just as his father experienced.
The Barbers had a comfortable life in Fairfield. The academy was flourishing to such an extent that there was serious talk of expanding it into a college.(15) Virgil made a good living from his salary as minister, and the principalship. Why rock the boat?
Daniel Doubts Again
Around 1812, Daniel was on a trip when someone gave him a book by a Catholic author. The first passage contained reflections on the consecration of Matthew Parker, chosen by Queen Elizabeth and elected as Archbishop of Canterbury in 1559. His consecration as archbishop gave rise to a dispute, unsettled in some theological circles even today, as to its correctness.(16)
It’s an obscure topic now, but was of vital importance to Daniel. On Parker’s consecration hinged the legitimacy of the Anglican Church. If Parker did not have the proper authority, neither did any of his successors. This would mean the Episcopal Church was not a legitimate one.
Once again, this filled Daniel with deep and disturbing doubts. Had he dedicated his life to a church that was not legitimate? Did his ordination mean nothing? He wrote to a “very learned” clergyman, someone more steeped in church history, who he thought was far more knowledgeable than himself, but got no reply.
After attending the 1812 Episcopal convention in Boston, Daniel called on Rev. Jean-Louise Lefebvre de Cheverus, bishop of Boston, the first Catholic priest he’d ever sat down with. He also attended mass. The priest treated him with kindness and respect, Daniel wrote, and answered all his questions “in a very pleasant and sensible manner.” The priest loaned him several books explaining the Catholic faith, and Daniel returned home. (16)
“These proved quite a treat in my family,” Daniel wrote. “They, by reading, soon appeared well convinced of the truths they contained, and wished to see a priest, but the nearest was a hundred miles distant.”
The books were loaned to neighbors and caused a bit of a sensation. Soon, some of the leading members of his church began to complain that the books would do harm to the church community. Daniel argued, but finally a parishioner - probably a member of the vestry, which controlled his salary - announced with finality, “We are Protestants.” End of story. Members should not be reading Catholic doctrine.
Daniel locked the books in a cabinet in his home but Truworth and Laura still loaned the books out, only more discreetly. Around the same time, Virgil and Jerusha came for a visit. One morning, while Virgil was shaving, Daniel read him some excerpts from a book by an English Catholic bishop, John Milner, The End of Religious Controversy. Jerusha listened too.
“Sometimes I could prevail on them to listen to an argument or an explanation of some particular point of doctrine,” Daniel wrote. “Hearing me read, they would sometimes reply saying, that is good reasoning.” For Virgil, they stirred memories and questions he’d had when he read the little book about Francis Xavier.
As they were departing their stay, they asked for the loan of the book Daniel shared. “Glad, indeed, was I of the opportunity to grant the request,” Daniel continued. “They took the book with them and departed. But little did I think that before I should see them again, himself and family would become converts and his wife a nun!”(17)
A Book’s Impact
The book Virgil borrowed from his father continued to weigh on him. He visited with the New York Episcopal Bishop John Henry Hobart, sharing his concerns and asking questions. He felt like the bishop did not take him seriously. One day he wrote a list of fourteen questions and invited several ministers over. The men settled in with cups of tea, but kept demurring as Virgil pressed them to have a discussion about the questions. “We’ll see about it after tea,” they said. But after tea there was entertainment around the piano instead.(18)
Thwarted in his attempt to put his mind at ease about religion, Victor gained Jerusha’s approval in venturing to New York City to spend a week in study at the library of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church. He spent his time “toiling indefatigably at his business of life or death, on which the destinies of his family for time and eternity depended.” Frenetically, he took notes and copied passages in Latin and English. At last he returned home to share his findings with his wife. Jerusha consulted different ministers including the Episcopal bishop to see if their translation of Latin lined up with each other. Night after night Virgil and Jerusha sat up discussing the notes. Feelings of dread, consternation and pain came over her.(19)
New York City, 1816. Rev. Benedict Fenwick received a visitor. A young Episcopal priest with a parish 12 miles from Utica, who struck him as open, candid and sincere, wanted to talk to him about religion. It was like a replay of Daniel’s visit, although there was a special connection between the two clergymen. Fenwick and Virgil were exactly the same age - 34. They had each been in the ministry almost exactly as long as each other. Virgil was ordained in 1807 and Fenwick in 1808.
Fenwick was from a devout Maryland planter family and believed if others would just remove their prejudices, he could quickly persuade them of the truth of Catholicism. Head of the only Catholic Church in New York City, he’d had success in converting hundreds of Protestants to the Church. After their visit, Fenwick gave Virgil Barber a number of books and a promise. If he read them, and prayed sincerely, he would find the truth.(20)
This was especially important because one’s very soul was at stake. The Roman Catholic Church taught that there is no salvation outside the Church. You could only get into heaven if you were Roman Catholic. In a way that is difficult for most Americans today to understand, the country in Daniel and Virgil’s time was “a God-centered, theology-ridden world concerned with the fate of man’s eternal soul.” (21)
Today, only 16 percent of American Catholics believe the Catholic Church is the only way to salvation (versus 50 percent of evangelical Christians). Interestingly, twice as many Catholics as Protestants (68 percent versus 34 percent) believe that people who don’t believe in God at all can still go to heaven. Among Christians, only 31 percent now believe that their religion is the one, true faith and only way to get to a heavenly home in eternity. (22) However, in the Barbers’ day, heaven was viewed as much more exclusive, and the decision one made was of the highest importance.
Fenwick realized that Virgil’s situation made conversion far more of a sacrifice than it would be for another man. A cooper, farmer or shoemaker didn’t lose his livelihood by converting. But as an Episcopal priest, teaching at an Episcopal academy, of course Virgil would have to give up much.
The Decision
In their archives at Georgetown University, the Jesuits have a diary Virgil kept. Two pages are digitized. The diary is undated, although scrawled in pencil is "April 1809." Typical of the time, the right-hand page is a list, with entries like the following:
8 - Clear. Received a letter from H. Closed the school.
11 - Windy. We visit to New Town.
14 - Cloudy. We returned home.
On the 30th Virgil wrote in Latin. Not being a Latin scholar and struggling with someone’s handwriting it looks a lot like, “Diexi in conjugio funnulam nominue Jerusha Booth Felixies]! Putting this through the online ‘Latin to English’ translator, the result was, “I married a bride named Jerusha Booth. Happiness!”
On the left hand page, there is a detailed drawing of a very attractive dark-haired young woman in an empire waist dress. It doesn't seem unreasonable that it is Jerusha.
In later years, Jerusha described herself and her marriage to her youngest daughter. She and Virgil had the closest relationship; Virgil’s greatest joy was time spent with family, and he was secretly annoyed by intrusions from visiting friends and neighbors. In trouble and sickness, he turned to her alone. She shared in all of his thoughts, plans and projects. “She was, in everything, his chief advisor and assister.” In fact, according to what Jerusha said, “his happiness seemed to depend on her presence and participation.” (23)
“My father would never willingly read without her, and she has told me oftentimes, when she became so overpowered with sleep as actually to doze, such was the habit of attention that she had acquired, as to know what my father had read….if she failed to comment on some striking passage he had expected her to notice, he would stop and say: “There now! You are not paying attention!” Whereupon she would repeat the words he had just read…”(25) Poor Jerusha was pregnant with her last baby during this time.
As they became increasingly convinced that the Catholic Church was the only true church, and as he began sharing his beliefs with other Episcopal ministers, of course he was told he would have to make a decision. Virgil’s mind was already made up. It was persuading his wife.
Shortly before Jerusha was due to deliver, she agreed to convert. The day after Josephine was born, August 9, 1816, a group of professors and trustees from the Episcopal academy came to the house to try, one more time, to talk Virgil out of his plan. Jerusha asked that they meet in the room next to hers with the door left ajar so she could hear their arguments. She concluded that her husband had the stronger arguments. (24)
New York
Several months after his first visit, Virgil again appeared at Fenwick’s office door. He anguished over his dilemma. Protestantism could not be defended, he told Fenwick. But what was he to do? How could support his family? Fenwick advised him to trust in the Lord. Return home, resign your position, he said, and move to New York City. In the meantime, Fenwick would rustle up some students so he could again establish a successful school. A few days later, Virgil renounced the Episcopal Church and was baptized in the Roman Catholic faith. (25)
Virgil then did all that Fenwick told him. He returned home, reported his conversion, and as he anticipated, Fenwick said, “his parishioners all, to a man, turned against him.” They forced him to sell at a loss some land he’d bought adjoining the school. Virgil brought Jerusha and their five children to the city, where Fenwick put them up at his own home at 15 Jay Street until quarters could be arranged for them. He’d found a building for the school to operate - which was ironically next-door to Bishop Hobart. Fenwick also lined up students as promised. He wrote of his feelings at the time (using the third person), “He considered that as one of the happiest days in his life, in which he received and entertained these martyrs in the faith.”(26)
When he wasn’t teaching, Virgil studied Catholic doctrine and the lives of the saints. Jerusha read too, and soon was baptized. Likewise, they had their children baptized. Soon, a thought entered Virgil’s mind. He didn’t want to be merely a Catholic parishioner, going about the daily grind of a schoolteacher. He wanted to be a priest again, the leader of a flock again.(27)
Of course one thing stood in his way, or maybe we should say six: Jerusha, Mary, Abby, Susan, Samuel and Josephine. The children were six, five, four, two, and baby Josephine at the breast. What could be done?
When did Virgil decide he wanted to break up his family? Was it when he was badgering an exhausted, pregnant Jerusha? Or was it earlier? In his conversation with Father Fenwick, did he tell him then that he wanted to leave his family and become a priest? That he wanted a life like Fenwick’s, unencumbered by a wife and children?
Fenwick wrote that Virgil believed God “required something more of him than to edify simply his neighbor in the state of a layman.” He knew he had “obstacles” that prevented him from the priesthood, but he also knew that if it was God's will, such obstacles could easily be removed. Specifically, the only way the Church would allow him to enter the priesthood was to end his marriage, have Jerusha agree to enter a convent, and find someone to take their children. It would be as if they’d never been married, and as if they’d never had children.
In Fenwick’s telling, Virgil told Jerusha this plan and, “She readily assents to all and is equally anxious to carry into effect so laudable a design, if prudently practicable.” From Fenwick’s point of view, this ready assent was completely true because it was all Fenwick saw. He didn’t see tears and anguish.
He reported that Jerusha came to him and asked if it was even a possibility that her husband could become a Roman Catholic priest, and whether there was any precedent for a married couple to become a priest and nun. Fenwick told her there were other cases, one in particular in England, a Lord and Lady Warner who ended their marriage, made arrangements for the care of their two daughters (who later took the veil) and entered orders. The Church never prevented married couples from consecrating themselves to God in religious service, he said, “if it were done in mutual consent, and if proper provision were made for any children.” Fenwick said he dissuaded her because there was no other means of support for the children, and they would suffer. Soon after this conversation, Fenwick was recalled from his position and sent to Georgetown College where in June 1817 he was installed as president.
Josephine said that many times her mother told her about how other Episcopal ministers would accompany Virgil to mass and vespers. One in particular believed in the correctness of the Church. Why didn’t he convert, then? Virgil asked him. “My family are the only obstacle,” the man replied. “I would have no means of maintaining them.” After Virgil’s death, Jerusha would relate this with tears streaming down her cheeks.
After Fenwick moved to Georgetown, he and Virgil corresponded. Virgil normally read letters he wrote and received aloud to Jerusha. One day he read her a reply he’d written to Fenwick, who asked him his intentions. Virgil answered that only his family blocked him from the priesthood. “The letter was the death blow of her happiness,” Josephine wrote. “From that hour, she said to me, “I enjoyed not a moment’s peace.” (28)
A Heart Crushed and Sunken
Josephine’s account was meant to be faith-promoting. At the time she wrote her mother’s story, she’d been a vowed member of the Visitation Sisters for nearly 60 years; her mother died almost 30 years earlier. Life in a convent was all Josephine had ever known. She had always been surrounded by people who thought her parents made a heroic, noble sacrifice that was an example to others – the right decision. She hastened to add that the tears streamed down her mother’s cheeks not because she was devastated that her husband no longer wanted to be with her, not because she would be separated from her children, and not because she was all but forced to take on a radically different role living cloistered as a nun. No, her tears were out of distress that she was keeping her husband from serving the Lord as he wished.
Jerusha became convinced that if she refused to go along with the plan, God would punish her by either ending her life or Virgil’s. The children would be motherless anyway, or they’d all be suffering and destitute if Virgil died. Further, God would deprive her of her children in the afterlife, too. “Of this I felt the strongest conviction; that in case of a refusal one or the other of us would die and our children be left orphans.” These thoughts daily preyed upon her mind to such an extent that periodically, “she was obliged to call him [Virgil] from his school room to give her comfort.
“Then,” said she, “he would take me in his arms, wipe away my tears and talk to me until my fears were almost dissipated.” While he “lavished upon me all this tenderness,” a thought came to her mind: This was not something God would demand of her. At first, Virgil said comforting things. But eventually, he told her, she needed “to prefer eternity to time, and to look forward to their reunion in a better world.” She was only 27 years old.
“A thousand times would I willingly have had a dagger plunged into my breast, and found it a relief! For not only did my heart ache with the sentiment of grief; but it ached physically – my very flesh ached, just as your head aches,” Jerusha said. She asked Josephine to put her hand over her heart and feel it. “You cannot feel it beat; it is not in its natural place; it is sunk in back.” Josephine pressed her hand over her mother’s chest, and sure enough, she confirmed, she could not feel the slightest heartbeat. Only by pressing her hand to a spot between her mother’s shoulders could she feel the pulsations.
“I need not say I was much astonished at it and wondered at the moral and physical strength with which God must have endured her to sustain an assault of mental suffering, and for so long a time,” Josephine wrote. She added in a footnote that Sister Alphonso Jenkins, the Infirmarian at the Visitation convent in Mobile, Alabama, where Jerusha spent her last years, examined Jerusha and also found this to be the location of her heart. (29)
Josephine continued her mother’s story. Virgil would periodically become depressed. Jerusha would always suggest kneeling and reciting the collect for peace.
“Give unto thy servants that peace which the world cannot give; that our hearts may be set to obey thy commandments.” (30)
Prayers to the Choir of Thrones was a great comfort to him, too. The Choir of Thrones are part of an angelic hierarchy in the Catholic Church. Probably most important to Virgil is that they are characterized by peace and submission, remaining always in God’s presence, chanting glorias and maintaining cosmic harmony.(31)
This was comforting to Virgil but did not lead to immediate submission for Jerusha. “Yet I did not immediately surrender myself to grace,” Josephine wrote that her mother said, “I resisted as long as I could and as long as I dared; striving to turn a deaf ear to it, and to persuade myself that God did not demand such a course from me. But in vain. I was compelled to yield.”
The Move
Virgil operated his school in New York City for about seven months. The entire time he’d tried to persuade Jerusha to go along with his plan. She was in a big new city where she knew no one. Women were completely dependent on their husbands financially, and expected to obey. With another breastfeeding baby, she was in a very vulnerable position. In a little pocket diary Jerusha recorded a few items. Typical of diaries and journals of the times, it had no comments on her feelings:
Christmas Eve 1816, little Josephine was baptized by Father Fenwick at his house.
February 9, 1817, Virgil and Jerusha took communion for the first time.
February 23, 1817, Virgil and Jerusha told Father Fenwick that they wanted to devote themselves to religion. (32)
Once Jerusha yielded, Virgil shut up his school, packed but a few possessions - they would not need much anymore - and the family traveled to the nation’s capital. They stayed at the home of Father Fenwick’s widowed mother, Margaret. Josephine described it as a large and pleasant mansion. It would be an important place for her. Father Fenwick arranged for his mother to care for 10-month old Josephine and three-year old Samuel until they were old enough to be placed in boarding school. The older girls, Mary, Abby and Susan were being accepted as charity students at Visitation Academy; Jerusha would join the Visitandine sisters.
The Visitandines
Alice Lalor, an Irish immigrant, founded the Visitation Monastery in 1794, or at least, the embryonic start of the monastery. (Since the nineteenth century, “convent” in modern English usage refers to a religious community of women; “monastery” refers to a men’s community. However, historically they were used interchangeably and some religious sisters’ community homes are still called monasteries.)
She began with a small house in Philadelphia under the direction of Rev. Leonard Neale where she and two widows she met on her voyage to America taught a girls’ school to support themselves. The two widows died in a yellow fever epidemic that swept the city in 1797-1798.
By that time, though, Neale had been appointed as president of Georgetown College and invited them there to establish a girls’ school near the college. The school opened in 1799, became an academy in 1802 and is still in operation as the Georgetown Visitation Preparatory School.(33) It was only the second Catholic girls’ school in the U.S.
They were still not officially sanctioned as a religious order, and were known as the Pious Ladies. Leonard determined that the Visitation order best served the mission of the devout group of women, and in 1808, when a Poor Clares group of sisters decided to return to Europe, he purchased their monastery. The Visitation sisters were (and are) a semi-contemplative group and were considered more “relaxed” than the Poor Clares, who went without shoes and rose during the night for prayer.
Orders of religious sisters fall into three categories: contemplative, who remain cloistered and devote their lives to prayer; apostolic, who work outside the convent, typically in hospitals, orphanages and schools; and semi-contemplative. The latter remain cloistered but operate schools within their walls.
The Georgetown group first began to take vows and dress in the habit in 1813. This, then, was how new the order was when it was chosen for Jerusha and her daughters.(34) Neale would remain their spiritual director for the rest of his life. He was appointed Archbishop of Baltimore in 1815 and was expected to move there, but remained in Georgetown.
Entrance
From Jerusha’s pocket diary:
June 12, 1817 - Archbishop [Leonard] Neale met us at the college chapel, and concluded the business relative to my going to the convent.
Virgil, Jerusha, and their five children were escorted into the Georgetown College chapel. There, in the presence of other priests and laity, a unique ceremony was held: a Roman Catholic archbishop dissolving the bonds of marriage. Archbishop Neale asked each in turn if the dissolution was what they wanted. Their oldest child, Mary, was eight, and may have understood what was going on, but the other children were too young. The elders Barbers answered affirmatively, and the archbishop pronounced their marriage ended. He gave remarks that drew tears to the eyes of those present, commending them for following so faithfully God’s plan for them. (28) The family was granted the rare honor of dinner with the Jesuits in their refectory. Jerusha was the first woman ever invited to share a dinner with them. Then the next day, Virgil entered the novitiate at Georgetown, and Jerusha and her children returned, for the time being, to Mrs. Fenwick’s.
Her pocket diary continued:
June 18th - Mr. Barber leaves for Rome.
June 19th - A letter from Mr. B. I came to the convent accompanied by Fathers Grassi, Kohlman, Marshall, and Mr. Ironside [The latter was Rev. George Ironside, a converted Protestant minister and classical scholar, formerly chaplain to the Episcopal Bishop Hobart. He was named Josephine’s godfather.]
June 25th….28th - Father [John] Grassi leaves for Rome. I wrote Mr. Barber a letter. [Grassi was the American Superior of the Jesuits and president of Georgetown College.]
June 29th - A letter from Mr. Barber (from the Bay).
July 1 - I commenced a novena for my husband, Father Grassi, etc.
July 2 - The Visitation. The community began a novena for Fr. G. and Mrs. B.
Father Grassi had been recalled to Rome on business. He took the occasion to personally escort his notable convert and novice to the Jesuit College.
June 18th Archbishop Neale died. The day after his funeral, Jerusha formally entered the Visitation convent. Josephine Barber wrote that when the ailing archbishop introduced Jerusha to the Visitation sisters in their assembly room just days before he died, he told them, “not to give her the black bean.” This meant not to put her through any hazing rituals, to treat her well. Alice Lalor - now Mother Teresa, the superior, took her to see the newly sealed sepulchre containing the archbishop’s corpse. Another sister told Jerusha she would have to spend the next night in vigilance at the vault. “Well, I will be in good company,” Josephine said she replied, adding, “The poor convert had been through too many trials to be daunted at the prospect of one night’s vigil.” On July 26th she was given her religious habit and the name Sister Mary Augustine. (34)
The First Trials
Josephine was already considered a small baby for her age. Some historians have suspected she was born prematurely due to the tremendous stress Jerusha was under during her pregnancy.(35)
Soon after she was placed in the care of Mrs. Fenwick, little Josey became gravely ill and it was feared she would not survive. This caused great anxiety in the Catholic community as the Jesuits and parish were concerned about optics. A mother leaving her baby to join a convent…however inspiring they thought her story, they realized Protestants did not view it that way. They had “great anxiety for my recovery,” Josephine said, “fearing that if I died blame would be thrown on religion for permitting my parents to leave an infant of ten months.” It was a potential public relations crisis. Mrs. Fenwick’s daughter-in-law, who had a nursing baby herself, took Josephine, and the Jesuits offered many masses on her behalf. She was carried about on a pillow – and she survived.
In October, leadership in the convent believed that Jerusha was pregnant, and sent her away in spite of her strenuous denials. Off went the habit, and she was given only one cast-off old dress, cloak and bonnet as she’d given all her clothes away when she joined the monastery. She went to Baltimore where she stayed at a boarding house until April, rarely going out except for mass. Josephine did not record how her mother supported herself. She was allowed to return when it was abundantly evident that there was no pregnancy.
Her trials as a novice did not end with these incidents. The fledgling religious community was impoverished and struggling. The Catholic Church in America mostly consisted of poor immigrants and leaders like Fenwick struggled to raise funds to build churches. When Jerusha entered the convent, she did so under the understanding that a kind benefactor paid her dowry; and Mary, Susan and Abby’s tuition and board. She wrote in her little pocket notebook:
Aug. 13th, 1818 - I had an interview with Father [Joseph Pierre Picot de] Cloriviere, in which he made known to me the narrow state of the finance of this house, and suggested that my brother [Virgil] should become a secular priest.” [Cloriviere was the sisters’ new spiritual director.]
Virgil was receiving extensive training with the Jesuit order in Rome. A secular priest, or diocesan priest, lives “in the world,” does not take vows of poverty, can own property and manages his own finances. They can keep inherited money, whereas a member of an order is required to give it to his order. Those in religious communities are entirely dependent on their order for support. In a nutshell, if Virgil became a secular priest, he could financially support Jerusha and the children.
A few days later she mentioned the matter to Mother Teresa and to Sister Agnes Brent, the director of novices. They must not have been forthright in telling her all they knew. It was not until October 1st that Sister Mary Augustine understood her situation. “I and my four babes have, by some oversight, been cast upon this institution,” she wrote in the pocket diary. She continued:
The charge was taken with a full expectation of remuneration. I embraced the supposed free bounty as a blessing sent from heaven through the channel of the holy church, considering it to be deliberately conferred upon us by these her chosen children. But the mystery is at length solved. Providence has withdrawn the veil and I behold myself and my family feeding upon the bread of dependence, necessarily continued because ignorantly and involuntarily commenced. Though we have no just claim of the Institution of which we are, in some sort, members, still our children have a claim upon us. Now, what is this claim and how far does it extend? (36)
When Jerusha entered the community, she noticed, of course, the conditions at the monastery, but rather than ascribing them to their true cause - desperate poverty – she thought it was just “the austerity of monastic rule.” Self-denial and a life stripped of luxury, with only the simplest food, was part of most monastic orders. Fasting was simply part of religious life. Self-mortification was encouraged. The new Sister Mary Augustine didn’t know the sisters were fasting because there wasn’t any food. The school the sisters operated was struggling and did not receive enough students to support them. In fact, she told her daughter later, the hardships and frequent fasts and vigils were so extreme that she believed she would only live another three or four years.
Archbishop Leonard initially opposed the plan to place Jerusha and the girls with the Visitandines because he knew of their extreme poverty. Placing them with Elizabeth Ann Seton’s Daughters of Charity in Emmitsburg, Maryland was explored. Somehow, this idea wasn't pursued. The Jesuits were asked to pay for the children’s support but this idea was turned down. Apparently Mother Teresa and Sister Agnes Brent accepted Jerusha and the Barber girls thinking financial support was on the way.
On October 16, 1818, Jerusha recorded in her diary a visit from a sick and dejected Virgil. He’d returned to the U.S. when he heard that she’d been turned out of the monastery due to the belief that she was pregnant. By the time he sailed across the ocean again, she was already back at the convent. His superiors decided not to return him to Rome, but to have him complete his education at Georgetown. Virgil was sickened and despondent at the sudden turn in their fortunes. Now he was not being given any encouragement that the Jesuits would continue to support him; his superiors gave him no timeline for him to take his vows, and he was preparing to go live with his father Daniel.
The Visitation community offered communion for Virgil and began a novena that Virgil’s financial needs would be met in his continuance of the priesthood, if it was God’s will. Virgil wrote Daniel saying that he would be coming to Claremont, but Daniel suggested they meet in New York. (37)
Claremont
Daniel arrived in the city with his sister Nabby Tyler. Nabby was the baby sister who was 22 years younger than Daniel. She and her mother moved to Claremont in 1796 where she met and married George Noah Tyler, who went by Noah. Noah was the son of the wealthiest man in Claremont and its largest employer, Benjamin Tyler. Benjamin was an early settler of Claremont, arriving there on foot in 1767 from Connecticut. He built a saw, grist, flax and smelting mill on the Sugar River and was elected a selectman at the first town meeting. He was also an inventor who patented a flywheel that was perfected by a grandson and known as the Tyler turbine water wheel, an improvement that was used all over the country. He also owned a quarry on Mt. Ascutney and made millstones from their granite. Benjamin bought a farm for each of his sons. (38)
Nabby and Noah initially moved to Vermont, then returned to Claremont where they were members of Daniel’s church. Nabby was influenced by the Catholic books Daniel subsequently locked in his cabinet after facing the disapproval of his vestry. In 1816 she named her last son Calvin Ignatius. Now, while awaiting her nephew Virgil’s arrival she met with Father Charles D. Ffrench at St. Peter’s, where he was the pastor. Father Ffrench was a Protestant Irishman who, along with his brother, converted to Catholicism. Both became Dominican priests, forfeiting an inheritance to do so, with the brother remaining in Ireland. After several meetings with Father Ffrench, Nabby converted to the Catholic faith. Surprisingly, Daniel disapproved as he thought she made an impulsive decision.(39)
When Virgil arrived he too met with the Dominican. Father Ffrench asked if he could accompany the Barbers to Claremont, and on receiving permission, the four traveled by stagecoach. The next morning, Father Ffrench said mass in Daniel’s parlor with Virgil assisting and the family present. Afterwards, Daniel walked across the street to his congregation for Sunday services.
Every day for the next week, Father Ffrench held mass in Daniel’s parlor. After each mass, he answered questions. At the end of the week, he had seven converts. The first was the Episcopal priest’s wife – Chloe. Daniel and Chloe’s daughter Laura and son Truworth, Nabby’s oldest daughter Rosetta and three others from the town joined.
Daniel wrote, “My wife was a woman who possessed a strength of mind and resolution which qualified her for so important an investigation, and by which she set at naught, the fear of man and the voice of the multitude.”(40) In other words, she didn't care what the neighbors and the members of her husband’s congregation thought.
Virgil and Father Ffrench departed, one to Georgetown and one to New York. Bishop Cheverus could only have been pleased to hear the news of seven conversions and sent a priest to Claremont. As might be imagined, Daniel’s parishioners were not pleased. In fact, they hadn’t been pleased in a while. Several members of the congregation demanded his resignation and the clamor continued until the vestry was forced to take up the matter. While he was in New York, they met. First, they wanted to find a replacement so the church wouldn’t be without a minister. In late September 1819 they voted to approve the hiring of another minister on a one-year trial basis. October 12th they met again to look into firing Daniel, but when the vestry postponed action, three men, including Noah’s brother, Benjamin Tyler, Jr., wrote to the Episcopal bishop, Alexander Griswold.
Apparently, Daniel told members of his parish that Bishop Griswold agreed with him on many points of faith about the Catholic Church, and now Griswold denied all. “Nothing can be more remote from what is the fact,” he replied in a letter to the parishioners. “I have never defended or spoken in favor of the particular tenants of the Romanish church, either in public or private, but have ever, when called upon to give my opinion, condemned them. Mr. Barber must have strangely misunderstood my words.”(41)
November 12th the vestry finally voted to dismiss Daniel and negotiated the terms of his departure. Daniel asked for payment of $300. In the end, they settled on $241. Daniel preached a farewell sermon, left his farm in charge of Truworth, and traveled south to Maryland. He was baptized into the Catholic Church in December 1818.
Virgil continued to struggle with his health and in January he and his father went to a Jesuit study house and mission in St. Inigoes, Maryland. In spring, Virgil returned to his studies at Georgetown, where the idea of him becoming a secular priest was quietly dropped. Daniel remained either at the mission or stayed with a large number of Catholic families for the next three years, immersed in study and prayer. He stayed in touch with his family in Claremont, and old friends there, by letter.
Daniel first encountered slavery on a large scale while living in Maryland. Virgil and Jerusha witnessed the work of slaves but did not write about it. The Jesuits and the Visitandines owned slaves and would until slavery became illegal. Both organizations not only used enslaved people for their labor, but sold them, separating families when that was more convenient for them, in order to pay debts.
Unfortunately, Daniel didn’t have any moral qualms about one human owning another. He wrote a friend in Claremont that the enslaved people were well-treated by all the slave holders he had seen in St. Mary’s County, Maryland, and that he knew of only one case where they were treated harshly. Apparently, that didn’t bother him much if at all. (42)
At the Monastery
Alone at the monastery, no longer in charge of her children, Jerusha watched them suffer. Now she knew they were all charity cases, drains on the already scant resources. Some of the sisters did not hide their opinion from her that they believed the children should not be there. After a year separated from little Josephine, Jerusha requested a chance to see her. The toddler was brought into the assembly room and a delighted Jerusha opened her arms wide to have her daughter come to her. But Josephine had forgotten who her mother was. This was a stranger to her, and she ran back to her nurse. Told it was her mother, the little toddler said, “No she’s not!”
Jerusha was devastated and after the visit, rushed back to her cell in gales of weeping. Sister Agnes Brent, the novice mistress, followed her. “Why are you crying?” she asked.
“My God! To think my own daughter doesn’t know me!” Jerusha sobbed.
“Well, why did you give her up?” Sister Agnes asked.
Agnes Brent told this story to Josephine, and in her telling, her question was meant kindly, and as a distraction. If Jerusha thought about her desire to serve God wholeheartedly, to free her husband to do so, and about the souls of her family and their eventual reunion in heaven….well then, how could she stay sad?
Worse than this one sad event was watching her daughters suffer on a daily basis. Here Josephine tells her mother’s story:
She continued to suffer inexpressibly on account of her children; feeling them to be a burden on the community in its state of poverty, and knowing the opposition of some of the sisters to their remaining, we were necessarily poorly clad; and she had told me that many a time she has sat up nearly half the night patching the children’s clothes and knitting stockings for them; and that on cold winter mornings when the girls were going to mass, she used frequently to take down from the window an old baize curtain to throw about Abby or Susan’s shoulders, they having no shawl or cloak. I just now asked mother (for I am writing in her room) if she had not told me that the girls used frequently to give us their old dresses.
“Nearly all your clothes,” said she, “were made out of what the other girls had cast away. “Polly Spalding adopted one of you (and some of the girls did the same occasionally) and made you new dresses out of her old ones.
“When you were in want of shoes we used to go to the pile where the girls’ old ones were thrown away and select the best among them for you. Sometimes they were so large that you could hardly walk in them. You had not always sheets on your beds; and in winter when your bedsheets were insufficient I used to cover you with the other girls' cloaks and shawls. Many times, when you four, as well as the other pupils, were quite ill, I had to sit up with you secretly all night, and resume my usual classes and duties next day. Once when Mary had the measles very badly, I could get no proper nourishment for her.”
“I would have put myself under the feet of anyone who would do anything for my children,” Jerusha added.
Josephine found a letter from Virgil to her mother around this same time period. After scolding her for “complaining of my silence” and letting her know he’d written her three months earlier, he dismissed her concerns. “Why do you indulge in those anxieties which your repeated representations of the embarrassment of your community indicate? Give yourself, my dear sister, no uneasiness. Almighty God will always provide for them that love him. And it is a very small part of my concern whether He will take care of us, in comparison of my solicitude that we, in love and obedience, render ourselves worthy of his fatherly protection.” He told her to teach the children to say daily, “My God and my all!” (43)
It was easy for Virgil to say. He didn’t have to watch his daughters constantly receive a message that they were second-class citizens, charity cases, unworthy of new clothes and shoes or even sheets and blankets on their beds. He didn’t have to see his daughters’ ribsy bodies and hollow cheeks, to sneak up to the dorm to toss other girls’ cloaks over shivering, blanket-less bodies, or to see them clomping about awkwardly in cast-off, too-big shoes. He wasn’t pulling a curtain down to wrap around his children when they went outside on a winter’s day. He didn’t have to face a sick child and have no food to give her. He didn’t have to face the disapproval and little remarks of coworkers who resented the girls being there, taking bread out of their own hungry mouths.
Jerusha did.
Vows
A joint announcement was made February 2, 1820. Virgil and Jerusha would each be taking their vows. That morning, they and their children gathered at the convent chapel. Two years and eight months had passed since their separation. It is thought to be the only occasion in which children witnessed their parents each take solemn vows in Catholic orders. After a mass, Jerusha read hers first. Virgil followed in Latin.
Then came their parting. Samuel was placed at the Georgetown school as a boarding student. Virgil was transferred to Gonzaga College to complete his studies.
Missioned
Jerusha had teaching experience and a keen interest in chemistry. To support themselves the Visitation sisters had to make a go of their school. Before Jerusha, it had not been a success. The sisters were inexperienced teachers and the parents who gave them a try tended to withdraw their daughters. The novice master Sister Agnes Brent recognized Jerusha’s abilities. After Agnes was named Sister Superior, she named Sister Mary Augustine director of the school in 1821 and ordered her to train the other sisters. Mary Augustine taught her own classes, and during recreation she taught the other sisters lessons in pedagogy. Her classes were mandatory. She revamped the curriculum, probably based on that of Fairfield Academy. The low educational standards were reversed. Father Cloriviere himself began teaching French and drawing. The school began to attract the social elite and build a reputation for excellence. By 1828, Catholic newspapers were describing it as the best in the country. (44)
In late November 1822, Virgil said good-bye to his former wife and children and left by stagecoach for the long jolting ride to Boston. In December he finally achieved his goal and was ordained a Roman Catholic priest by Bishop de Cheverois. He assisted with the Christmas season in Boston, and in winter 1823 he received his first assignment. It was what he requested. Virgil wished to return to Claremont where his family members would form the nucleus of a parish he hoped to grow. He knew it would be a challenge. New Hampshire retained a hostility towards Catholics. Members of the church were barred from holding state office. Not until 1879 would the state change its constitution to allow Catholic office holders - the last state to make that change. It would also be the last New England state to form a bishopric.
Anti-Catholic Virulence
Today few Americans are aware that anti-Catholic sentiment was baked into colonial settlement and state constitutions. After all, the celebrated Pilgrims were children of the Reformation. Early colonists eagerly passed a series of “anti-papist” and “no-popery” laws. In all the colonies except Rhode Island, Catholics were denied basic civil and religious rights. In the Massachusetts Bay Colony, for example, laws were passed prohibiting Catholic priests from entering the colony, prohibiting the “importation of Irish Catholics,” and mandating an oath of allegiance that ridiculed the pope. In New Hampshire, Catholics were considered outlaws. Any priest caught conducting mass was subject to large fines and deportation.
Anti-Catholicism subsided somewhat during the American Revolution in part because of Famed Catholic volunteers like Lafayette of France and Kosciuszco of Poland, but seven of the new state constitutions excluded Catholics from holding office. (45)
Members of the Barber and Tyler families were affected directly and indirectly by a rise in anti-Catholicism as many Americans felt threatened by rapidly increasing numbers of Catholic immigrants. Some of the Barbers would literally flee for their lives. Several, through tremendous hardships and sacrifice, worked to meet the needs of a rapidly changing society, founding schools, orphanages and hospitals.
Notes:
De Goesbriand.
A History of My Own Times. Daniel sold copies of this for 12 ½ cents. (Letter from Daniel Barber to Thomas Mills, 7 Jan 1831, found in Mary Angela Spellissy’s “Sketch of the Life of Phillip Francis Scanlon (1794-1888),” Records of the American Catholic Historical Society of Philadelphia, Vol. 11, No. 4 (December 1900), pp. 385-416.)
Sergeant Dewey was a wheelwright who organized a group of dissenters from the state’s official religion, Congregationalism. They met at his home on Sundays. Following prayers he would explain passages from the Bible as he interpreted them, and others would do the same. Connecticut law required Sabbath observance and that taxes be paid to support the Congregational Church. Daniel, Sr. was arrested on his way to Dewey’s one Sunday. He was tried and found guilty of breach of Sabbath, fined 20 shillings and court costs. (Rouillard)
Barber, A History of My Own Times.
Barber.
Barber.
Barber.
Pettibone.
Pond.
Pond.
Today Cheshire Academy is a very exclusive school with a tuition just short of $60,000 for full-time boarding students in the 2023-2024 school year, with an additional $10,000 for foreign students.
De Goesbriand.
De Goesbriand.
De Goesbriand.
De Goesbriand. This entire section is sourced to this editor.
de Cheverus sounds like a truly exceptional man, who won praise and respect during a yellow fever epidemic, and inspired more Protestants than Catholics to donate to construction of the Church of the Holy Cross, which he founded in Boston in 1803. He was known for his devotion to duty and for his tactful, poised approach to others.
A History of My Times.
Rouillard.
De Goesbriand.
De Goesbriand.
Milton Rugoff, preface.
“Views on the Afterlife,” Pew Research Center, 23 Nov 2021, https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2021/11/23/views-on-the-afterlife/
(The position of the Roman Catholic Church as to the one truth faith and salvation has not changed.)
De Goesbriand.
De Goesbriand.
De Goesbriand.
De Goesbriand.
De Goesbriand.
De Goesbriand.
De Goesbriand.
This is the modern version, though the one Virgil and Jerusha recited was similar.
The Choir of Thrones were described in a book published in the fifth or sixth century, part of Catholic angelic hierarchy. The hierarchy has nine levels in three orders. Seraphim and cherubim are still familiar to people today and are in the highest order. The choir of Thrones, which are less known today, are also. They look like great wheels containing many eyes, living in the cosmos where material form begins to take shape. They have been described as creatures that function as chariots of God, driven by cherubim. (The most familiar form of angelic beings, angels and archangels, are in the lowest order.)
De Goesbriand.
Visitation Prep is a day school today, with an enrollment of just over 500 girls and 52 teachers on a 23-acre campus. (Boarding was discontinued in the 1970s.) Cost to attend in the 2023-2024 school year was $35,450. The first convent founded in the U.S. was the Carmelite monastery in Port Tobacco, Maryland in 1790. Religious freedom was denied Catholics until the 1787 Bill of Rights. Prior to 1790, those who wished to become women religious moved to Europe.
De Goesbriand.
Rouillard.
De Goesbriand.
De Goesbriand. Everything in this section, unless otherwise noted, is from Josephine’s account.
Hubbard.
Rouillard.
A History of My Times.
Rouillard.
De Goesbriand.
De Goesbriand.
Rouillard.
Barry.
Sources:
Barber, Lucius I. A Record and Documentary History of Simsbury, Simsbury, Connecticut: Abigail Phelps Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution, 1931.
Barber, Mary Josephine. “First House of the Sisters of the Visitation at Kaskaskia, Illinois, A.D,” Records of the American Catholic Historical Society of Philadelphia 13, no. 2 (1902): 211–26. http://www.jstor.org/stable/44207787
Barry, Stephen L. “The Forgotten Hatred: Anti-Catholicism in Modern America,” NYLS Journal of Human Rights, Vol. 4 No. 1 (Fall, 1986), pp. 203-238.
Sr. Mary DeSales Tyler: Chapter Three: Weathering the Storms. https://via.library.depaul.edu/daughtersofchurch/1
“Conversion of Rev. Daniel Barber. His Own Account.” The American Catholic Historical Researches 11, no. 2 (1894): 81–87. http://www.jstor.org/stable/44373819
“Conversion of the Rev. Mr. Barber and His Family,” The Catholic Standard and Times, 14 April 1842, p. 118. https://thecatholicnewsarchive.org/?a=d&d=cst18420414-01.2.9&e=-------en-20--1--txt-txIN-----
Cullen, Thomas F. “William Barber Tyler (1806-1849): First Bishop of Hartford, Conn.” The Catholic Historical Review 23, no. 1 (1937): 17–30.
DeGoesbriand, Louis. Catholic Memoirs of Vermont and New Hampshire (Burlington: Press of R.S.Styles, 1886), 90, Princeton Theological Seminary, Theological Commons,
https://commons.ptsem.edu/id/catholicmemoirso00dego
“Establishment of the Ursulines at Kaskaskia, Illinois, 1833,” The American Catholic Historical Researches 7, no. 3 (1890): 110–12. http://www.jstor.org/stable/44373665.
Lucius G. Fisher, and Milo M. Quaife. “Pioneer Recollections of Beloit and Southern Wisconsin.” The Wisconsin Magazine of History 1, no. 3 (1918): 266–86. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4630084.
Gallen, Susan M., "A Woman for Our Times: How Marriage and Motherhood Shaped Cornelia Connelly's Religious Life" (2022). Th.D. Dissertations. 18. https://digitalcommons.lasalle.edu/religion_thd/18
Hannefin, Daniel D.C., "Daughters of the Church: A Popular History of the Daughters of Charity in the United States 1809-1987" (1989). Vincentian Digital Books. 17.
Hill, Owen Aloysius. Gonzaga College, An Historical Sketch, Washington D.C.: The College, 1922.
Hubbard, Guy. “Leadership of the Early Windsor Industries in the Mechanical Arts, A paper read before the Vermont Historical Society at Windsor,” 4 Sept 1922, https://vermonthistory.org/journal/misc/EarlyWindsorIndustries.pdf
The Jesuit Heritage in Connecticut, Chapter 9, College of the Holy Cross, 1970.
Kenneally, James J. “The Burning of the Ursuline Convent: A Different View.” Records of the American Catholic Historical Society of Philadelphia 90, no. 1/4 (1979): 15–21. http://www.jstor.org/stable/44210914
The Metropolitan Catholic Almanac and Laity’s Directory for the Year 1844, Villanova University, https://digital.library.villanova.edu/Item/vudl:419944#?c=&m=&s=&cv=65&xywh=-1650%2C132%2C4686%2C2374
Metz, Judith S.C. (1996) "The Sisters of Charity in Cincinnati: 1829–1852," Vincentian Heritage Journal: Vol. 17 : Iss. 3 , Article 4. Available at: https://via.library.depaul.edu/vhj/vol17/iss3/4
Mitchell, Hudson, S.J. “Virgil Horace Barber,” The Woodstock Letters, Vol. 79, No. 4, 1 Nov 1950, Society of Jesus.
Mullen, Lincoln A. “The Contours of Conversion to Catholicism in the Nineteenth Century.” U.S. Catholic Historian 32, no. 2 (2014): 1–27. http://www.jstor.org/stable/24584671.
O’Grady, Patrick. “Historian Highlights Early Contributors to Claremont,” Valley News, 28 Dec 2014, https://www.vnews.com/Archives/2014/12/b1notableclaremont-vn-pog-122814.
Pond, E. LeRoy. The Tories of Chippeny Hill, Connecticut, New York: The Grafton Press, 1901.
Protestant Episcopal Church in the Diocese of Vermont Including the Journals of the Conventions, 1790-1830, New York: Pott & Amery, 1870.
Mannard, Joseph. “Widows in Convents of the Early Republic: The Archdiocese of Baltimore, 1790-1860,” U.S. Catholic Historian, Vol. 26, No. 2 (Spring 2008), pp. 111-132.
Pettibone, Judge John S. “The Early History of Manchester,” Proceedings of the Vermont Historical Society, Vol. 1, No. 4 (December 1930), pp. 147-166.
Rouillard, Theodore J. Sr. Virgil H. Barber “My God and My All, The Lives and Marriage of Mary Augustine and Father Virgil H. Barber, S.J., A Pious Romance, Nantucket, Massachusetts: Theodore Rouillard, Jr., 1994.
17-30.
Schultz, Nancy Lusignan. Fire and Roses: The Burning of the Charlestown Convent 1834, New York: The Free Press, 2000.
Waite, Otis Frederick Reed, History of the Town of Claremont, New Hampshire, for a period of one hundred and thirty years from 1764 to 1894, Manchester, New Hampshire: John B. Clarke Co., 1895.
Newspapers:
“The Public Charities of Detroit – St. Mary’s Hospital,” Detroit Free Press, 29 July 1858, p. 1.
“The First Novice. Death of an Historical Sister at the Visitation,” St. Louis Globe-Democrat, 15 July 1887, p. 9.
Copyright by Andrea Auclair © 2023
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