Rare missionary pamphlet published for the benefit of the Kentucky mission by Étienne-Théodore Badin, the first Catholic priest ordained in the United States.
Born in Orléans on 17 July 1768, Badin began his ecclesiastical studies in France before emigrating to America during the Revolution. There he completed his theological training, learned English, and was ordained to the priesthood on 25 May 1793 by John Carroll, Bishop of Baltimore and a founding figure of American Catholicism. This ordination was historic: Badin thus became the first Catholic priest ordained on the soil of the United States.
In the autumn of 1793 he was sent on mission to Kentucky, where he traveled immense distances on horseback to visit Catholic families, celebrate Mass, baptize, marry, hear confession, bury the dead, teach catechism, build chapels and maintain a religious bond within a world of pioneers. The work published in Paris in 1821 arose from this firsthand experience and bears witness to the earliest days of Catholic evangelization in the interior West, before the establishment of dioceses, schools, parishes and institutions. It is also a rare French imprint on Catholic missions in the United States in the early nineteenth century, at a time when the American frontier was becoming a field of apostolate as much as a space of colonization.
Howes, B28; Streeter, III, 1654; Sabin, 2710