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Book Review We all ask from time to time: “Who am I? What made me what I am today?” Catholic nuns called Daughters of the Cross built a large part of me during my first four years of schooling in Shreveport, Louisiana 1941-1945. We held World War II drills against air raids in the basement of St Vincent’s Academy. We learned reading and writing and arithmetic. We were prepared for our First Communions. I was also taught my first Latin (“Introibo ad altare Dei,” “I will go to the altar of God””) when the sisters trained me to be an acolyte, or altar boy. Some of our nuns were natives of Ireland. Sister Bridget comes to mind, not always pleasantly, especially when she objected to the scantily clad goddesses in my CHILD’S ILLUSTRATED ILIAD which she caught me reading at recess. The founding Daughters of the Cross were French (Bretons). Their story is told in THEY CAME TO LOUISIANA: LETTERS OF A CATHOLIC MISSION 1854-1882, Baton Rouge, LSU Press, 1970. Translator and editor was one of my old teachers, a Texan, Sister Dorothea Olga McCants. I recently found this out of print work through a Shreveport antiquarian. Letters written by Mother Marie Hyacinth Le Conniat make up the bulk of the text. Some letters are from her priest brother Father Yves-Marie, who died young in Louisiana. Other letters are from her relatives, nuns in France and from members of the Catholic clergy. In late 1855 Sister Marie Hyacinth led eight
other teaching
sisters to Avoyelles Parish in Louisiana. The Bishop of the diocese of
Natchitoches (only created in 1853) had invited them to teach children
of Catholic families in North and Central Louisiana. Catholics were few
in Shreveport and North Louisiana but a large minority in the central
part
of the State. Marie Hyacinth wrote often of the low level of
understanding
and tepid practice of religion in the Creole and Mulatto populations
she
served. Those few who ever came for Mass would usually leave after the
sermon. In November 1861 her brother, Father Yves-Marie Le Conniat,
wrote
his parents in France about the immoral “custom of the boys and the
girls
running around in the summer time in their homes as naked as worms” (p.
145).
Initially appalled by slavery, Mother Marie Hyacinth soon found it necessary to rent a slave for farm work and not long after actually bought one. In May 1863 he, Simon, went off with retreating Union troops, taking along a convent horse. But when the war ended she rejoiced that finally the white and colored slaveless landed gentry would be forced for the first time in at least two generations to work with their hands. This reversion to practices of their French peasant ancestors was good for their souls. Historians treasure the hundreds of letters in French written by the Daughters of the Cross and the clergy. To hard working but refined middle class Bretons, a diet built around corn bread was a cruel aspect of the Civil War. They believed that the girls they educated in half a dozen schools among the nominally Catholic plantation population would later teach their husbands and children deeper faith and morals . Even so, most of their pupils by far were Protestant at a time when all education in Louisiana was still private. Many of the French nuns and priests never mastered English. Still, they were keen observers of the local scene: its mores, the dreadful climate, the usually fatal outbreaks of yellow fever, occasionally as far north as Shreveport, architectural styles, superstitions and even politics. The nuns and priests were strong for the Confederacy while it lasted and after 1863 saw marching, and sometimes fighting, armies of both sides pass near or across their properties. Who I am was therefore distantly determined by
French
nuns who later attracted Irish nuns to my part of Louisiana. Their
congregation’s
motto: O crux ave! “O Cross,
Hail!” is a good one for any Christian, is it not? Lucky for me and many others that “they came to Louisiana.” -OOO- For INDEPENDENT TORCH revisited 3/14/2006 |