Our Catltolic Heritage in Texas
creation of the new Vicariate Apostolic of Brownsville, they decided to return to Notre Dame in the spring of that ye:i.r. 34 Progress of St. Mary's College in Galveston. As regards the school in Galveston, Brother Boniface declared that the initial success continued. The four Brothers were hardly able to take care of all the classes. There was need for an additional Brother, if he could be spared. Mass was being celebrated by one of the parish priests twice a week on Thursdays and Sundays. Brother Boniface had made many friends. By 1872 an enroll- ment of three hundred was confidently expected. The Ave Maria noted that Brother Boniface was named delegate from Texas to the General Chapter that year, and the Catholic Directory for 1873 still listed him as the !>uperior with Father W. Ruthmann as chaplain. It appears that Father Ruthmann 55 was sent to Galveston in 1872 and served as chaplain until his death in 1873. Decline of St. Mary's College. Unfortunately for St. Mary's College in Galveston, Brother Boniface did not return to Texas in the fall of 1873. After his visit to Notre Dame that summer, the Superior made him director of St. Joseph's College in Cincinnati, Ohio, where a man of his qualifications was needed. Brother John Chrysostom, 36 who had been in Galveston since the Congregation took over St. Mary's College, was now made the new superior. Immediately the enrollment fell. "I think a College in this place will never succeed ... not before there will be a great change in the people and in the pastors," wrote the worried Brother John. Children in Galveston, he observed, would not walk more than three blocks tc school and the pastors urged them to attend their parochial schools. With characteristic Christian charity, he attributed the drop in enrollment in part to a recent yellow fever epidemic which had driven more than a thousand persons into the country for safety. It seems that there were other causes for the decline of interest. Brother Charles, worried over the despondency of Brother John, wrote to st A.cts of tire A.jostles of t/,e Rio Grande, Mar,y Immaculate, March, 1931, P· 71. 55 Father Ruthmann died October 27, 1873. Obituary Register of tire Co11gregntir 111 or Hol,y Cross. 56 Brother John Chrysostom (Mark A. Willis) had joined the Congregation of Holy Cross at the close of the Civil War. He was a native of Pennsylvania, who served throughout the war in the 54th Pennsylvania Regiment, and had been at the Battle of Gettysburg. After joining the Congregation he was the Commander of the Notre Dame Post of the G.A.R. From the day he joined the Congregation, "he was asso• elated with the furtherance of the work of the Communitv." He died May 16, 1919, at the ripe olc\ age of eighty. Sc/10/0-Jtic, LIi, 49. ·
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