CHAPTER VII
CREATION OF A SECULAR CLERGY
The Most Reverend Jean Marie Odin, first Vicar Apostolic and Bishop cf Texas, was a firm believer in the need of a native secular clergy. Years later, Bishop Shaw very appropriately said of native vocations, "the grace of a priestly vocation is for them as well as for the youths of other lands." Missionaries, members of religious Orders, have been, and always will be the pioneers who enter new fields before a regularly constituted ecclesias- tical jurisdiction can be set up. But as soon as a new diocese is erected it then becomes the duty of the prelate to develop a diocese clergy to carry on and spread the work." No one understood this fact better than Bishop Odin. He had first come to Texas as a member of the Congregation of the Mission. He and his fellow-member Vincentians had laid the foundation for the Vicariate Apostolic and the new Diocese of Galveston. He knew that to carry on the work begun over so vast a field, he would require the invaluable assistance of the members of missionary orders, and that at the same time he would need volunteers and recruits for the development of his own secular clergy. On every trip to Europe he tried to interest religious Orders to send their men to Texas, he begged Bishops to allow him to recruit seminarians that they, although foreign born, might come and finish their studies under his direction and patronage to give them a feeling of belonging, of having been formed in Texas or under Texas auspices. The most casual reading of his voluminuous correspondence reveals his burning desire and grim determination to establish a seminary in Galveston as soon as conditions permitted. He proposed this idea to his own Order and asked the Vincentians first to establish a seminary. That they would do so had been one of his fondest hopes. With much feeling, he wrote Father Etienne in December, 1850, after he learned upon his return to Texas that the Mother House had approved the withdrawal of the Vincentians because of the scarcity of men, "I had always cherished the idea of establishing a diocesan seminary to be entrusted to the Congrega- tion of the Mission." It pained him deeply to see this possibility vanish, but he did not thereby abandon the idea. He knew full well that a diocesan seminary develops a feeling of belonging that nothing else can. A young man who prepares himself for [251]
Powered by FlippingBook