Louis William Valentine DuBourg

DuBourg selected the site of Balitmore's first cathedral.

DuBourg ministered to and provided charity to the many refugees living in Baltimore who had fled Saint-Domingue during the Haitian Revolution. With John Tessier, he also established a congregation for the many poor Black Baltimoreans who met and celebrated Mass at St. Mary's Chapel. From this congregation eventually formed the Oblate Sisters of Providence. DuBourg also established a lay fraternal organization of parishioners that provided charity for the city.[29]

DuBourg played an important role in the construction of Baltimore's first cathedral. Bishop Carroll desired to replace St. Peter's Pro-Cathedral with a proper cathedral, and DuBourg convinced him to move it from St. Peter's to a new location. DuBourg identified a site atop a hill, which would become known as Cathedral Hill, and negotiated with the sale with the owner of the land.[30] He then raised the $23,000 necessary to purchase the land,[31] equivalent to $430,000 in 2022.[32] Construction on the cathedral began in 1806.[33]

In 1806,[4] DuBourg was in New York City to sell lottery tickets as a fundraiser for St. Mary's University, where he met the future saint Elizabeth Ann Seton, who he urged to travel to Baltimore to establish a school for girls.[34] Seton opened her school in June 1808, where women from around the country joined her. DuBourg was influential in the founding of her religious community.[35] He contributed $8,000 to establish her religious community,[36] and proposed that she adopt the rule of the French Sisters of Charity. Heeding this proposal, she established a community of the Sisters of Charity on 31 July 1809, in Emmitsburg, Maryland.[35] While Seton was the head of the organization, DuBourg functioned as their ecclesiastical superior.[37]

Before long, tensions arose between Seton and DuBourg, who forbade her from communicating with her mentor, a Sulpician priest, Pierre Babade. Seton appealed DuBourg's instruction to John Carroll,[37] who referred the matter to Nagot, the Suplician superior in the United States. In response to the dispute, DuBourg resigned as superior of Seton's religious community. Despite Seton's desire that DuBourg would remain as superior, he declined and Nagot refused to order him to return.[38]

With the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, a vast new territory became part of the United States.[5] The first bishop overseeing this territory, which spanned from the Gulf of Mexico to the Illinois Territory, was transferred to another diocese in 1801, leaving the bishopric vacant. The second bishop appointed, Francisco Porró y Reinado, never took possession of the diocese and either died or was appointed to another diocese.[39] Moreover, the vicar general died in 1804, leaving no one to oversee the diocese.[40] While Carroll and the Holy See corresponded to select a new bishop,[41] Carroll named DuBourg the apostolic administrator of the Diocese of Louisiana and the Two Floridas on 18 August 1812.[5][3]

Upon becoming administrator, DuBourg found an expansive diocese with few priests, hardly any churches, and no Catholic schools or charitable institutions.[41] Upon arriving in New Orleans, he found the local Catholic population aligned with their pastor, a Capuchin priest, Antonio de Sedella.[42] Sedella rejected the jurisdiction of Carroll, an American bishop, to appoint DuBourg as administrator over the French clergy in Louisiana.[43] Due to hostility from the locals, DuBourg was forced to reside outside of the city.[3] Meanwhile, while the Holy See eventually settled on DuBourg as the next bishop, he could not be immediately appointed.[41] Pope Pius VII had been taken prisoner by Napoleon in 1809, and then forcibly brought to France in 1812.[44] In protest of his captivity, Pope Pius refused to issue any papal bulls, including those appointing bishops.[41]

The diocese became embroiled in the War of 1812. During the Battle of New Orleans in 1815, DuBourg called on Catholics to support the Americans over the British. Following the American victory, on 23 January 1815, Major General Andrew Jackson entered the city and was escorted by DuBourg into the St. Louis Cathedral, where he was greeted with a Te Deum hymn.[5]

In order to alleviate the shortage of priests and lack of institutions, DuBourg sailed to Europe in 1815 to recruit priests and fundraise.[45] While in Rome, he was officially appointed by Pius VII as the Bishop of Louisiana and the Two Floridas.[5] He was consecrated by Cardinal Giuseppe Doria Pamphili on 24 September in the Church of San Luigi dei Francesi.[46] He would continue his recruiting in Europe for two years,[5] and while in Lyon, France, he met a widow and expressed his desire to create an organization to raise funds for the church in the vast Louisiana diocese. This eventually became the Society for the Propagation of the Faith several years later.[47]

He eventually sailed to the United States from France on 1 July 1817. He returned with five priests—including several Lazarists from Rome, among whom were Felix de Andreis and Joseph Rosati—and 26 other men from Italy and France—including Antoine Blanc—who intended to become priests or brothers.[48] DuBourg also invited the Ursuline nuns to establish a ministry in the diocese, and nine postulants accepted.[49] He arrived in Annapolis, Maryland on 4 September.[48]

Upon returning to his diocese, DuBourg decided that it was not safe for him in New Orleans, and he took up residence in St. Louis, Missouri. As such, he became the first bishop to use the city of St. Louis as his episcopal see.[50] The overland journey from Maryland to St. Louis was perilous and took several weeks. He started out in a stagecoach,[51] which at one point overturned on the rough terrain, causing him to nearly fracture his skull.[42] Unable to continue by stagecoach, he finished the last five days of his journey to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania on foot. From there, he traveled by boat to Louisville and Bardstown, Kentucky.[51] DuBourg finally arrived in St. Louis in January 1818, and would remain there for five years.[42]

Unlike in New Orleans, DuBourg was warmly received by the Catholics of St. Louis.[42] Shortly after arriving, he began building up the part of the diocese in the Missouri Territory. He soon raised funds to construct churches throughout the region and staff them with priests. Among these was a grand church for St. Louis that would eventually become the cathedral of the Archdiocese of St. Louis and the first cathedral west of the Mississippi River.[42][52] DuBourg also sought to promote education in the diocese. In order to be able to train priests at home, rather than rely on a European missionaries, he established St. Mary's of the Barrens Seminary in Perryville in 1818,[42] placing it under the charge of the Lazarist fathers.[53] In August of that year, he also recruited the future saint Rose Philippine Duchesne and her religious order from France, the Society of the Sacred Heart, to open schools for girls on the frontier.[8][42] They founded the Academy of the Sacred Heart in St. Charles as the first free school west of the Mississippi River.[5] They opened another soon thereafter in Florissant.[3] DuBourg also invited the Sisters of Loretto to establish a school for girls.[49]

DuBourg Hall at Saint Louis University

In 1818, at DuBourg's instruction, the Saint Louis Academy was founded. Operating out of several rented rooms, its purpose was to educate local laymen.[54] Several years later, he requested that the Maryland Jesuits send several of their members to Missouri to staff the diocese's missions to the American Indians. The Jesuits sent several Belgian members,[53] who arrived in 1823,[42] and established a house in Florissant and began ministering to the Indians. DuBourg visited Washington, D.C. in 1823,[53] where he met the U.S. Secretary of War, John C. Calhoun, who encouraged the Jesuit missions and obtained federal funding for the establishment of Indian schools.[5] On 7 January 1824, DuBourg offered the Jesuits to assume control of the academy,[55] which became known as Saint Louis College in 1820. The Jesuits accepted this offer in 1827,[56] and Peter Verhaegen became the first Jesuit president of the college, which was chartered as Saint Louis University several years later. The school's first Jesuit treasurer was Pierre-Jean De Smet, who became a famous missionary to the Indians.[5] The lower division of the academy became St. Louis University High School.[57]

In 1823, DuBourg's time in St. Louis came to an end.[58] While he had visited New Orleans every year while his seat was in St. Louis,[3] he decided it proper to return the diocesan seat to New Orleans and requested the appointment of Joseph Rosati as his coadjutor bishop. He consecrated Rosati on 25 March 1824, and left him to oversee the church in St. Louis.[58]

DuBourg remained in New Orleans for three years, and once again met local opposition.[52] On 28 August 1825, he became the Vicar Apostolic of Mississippi, in addition to his episcopal duties.[46] He found a shortage of priests in Louisiana but faced resistance when trying to establish a seminary in New Orleans or transfer priests from other parts of the diocese. By this time, he was also weary of traveling throughout the expansive diocese.[52] Therefore, DuBourg sailed to Rome,[59] and on 26 June 1826, he resigned the bishopric. Later that year, the large diocese was split into the Diocese of New Orleans and the new Diocese of St. Louis.[5] By the end of his episcopacy, 40 new churches had been built, in addition to many schools.[8] This significant development, however, left the diocese with considerable debt.[42]

Believing that he would enter retirement,[42] DuBourg returned to France on 3 July 1826.[5] However, soon thereafter, he was named to replace Jean-Louis Lefebvre de Cheverus, the first Bishop of Boston, as the Bishop of Montauban on 2 October of that year. This was possible because with the end of the French Revolution, DuBourg's clerical rights and noble rank were restored. In his writings, he wrote of his dislike for Napoleonic titles of nobility, which carried no social responsibilities, and instead supported a noblesse oblige.[5] Pursuant to the Concordat of 1801,[60] he swore an oath of allegiance to the French government before King Charles X on 13 November 1826.[5]

DuBourg found his episcopacy in France much less taxing than that on the American frontier.[43] At the time he was installed a bishop, the Diocese of Montauban had 242,000 Catholics, 353 priests, grand churches, seminaries and lay schools, and numerous religious orders operating.[61] During his seven years in Montauban, DuBourg improved education in the diocese and increased the number of scholarships for students.[5] He also dissuaded the French authorities from persecuting Catholics in the diocese during the July Revolution of 1830.[62]

In February 1833, DuBourg was appointed to succeed Cardinal Louis-François de Rohan-Chabot as the Archbishop of Besançon. By this time, however, his health had deteriorated, and he visited the thermal baths of Luxeuil-les-Bains for relief. He was formally installed as bishop of the archdiocese on 10 October 1833,[62] and he received the pallium on 1 November. Though confined to his deathbed, DuBourg organized two retreats for the 900 priests of his archdiocese.[63] Two months after his installation, he died in Bensançon on 12 December 1833.[5] He was interred in the Cathédrale Saint-Jean in Besançon.[46]