Traversing the state, he discovered approximately 300 Catholics - including one 80 year old man who, Simeon-like, had waited 30 years to receive the Blessed Sacrament. Miles arrived in Nashville in the Christmas season of 1838, and set out to see what was the nature of the land that had been entrusted to his care. The state at this point had one ramshackle “church,” a broken down building that, although bearing the name of the Most Holy Rosary, was in such disrepair that the priest who was ministering intermittantly to Nashville held mass elsewhere by this point (the church stood on what is now Capitol Hill, and had been built during the efforts to bridge the Cumberland River-the Irish workers had been brought in, seen there was neither church nor priest, and had promptly sat down and refused to work until the situation was rectified, so eager was the populace to have their bridge that the land was actually donated to the Church by a local Mason). The reality turned out to be almost as disinheartening as the prediction. He was presented the task of forging a diocese out of a state that was largely wilderness, in which there lived an indeterminate number of Catholics, most of whom had not seen a priest for years, if ever. Miles was consecrated in a well-documented ceremony in Bardstown on September 16th, 1838. Pope Gregory XVI acquiesced to this request on July 28th, 1837, by act of the brief Universi Dominici Gregis, and appointed Miles as Nashville’s first bishop through the bull Apostoluatus Officium. Miles named Bishop of Nashville by Gregory XVI Such were the straits of the Church in Tennessee, and so inadequate were the resources of Bardstown to rectify them, that in 1837 it was recommended that the state be made its own episcopal see, and that Fr. Such were the spiritual deprivations that they lived under that in some places, such as Knoxville, which had many traditionally Catholic families, the faith died out completely for want of pastoral care. In fact, developers and would-be city elders attributed the slow growth in much of the state largely to the lack of Catholic institutions, such an impediment did it present to the importation of the necessary labor. But such was the state in which all of Tennessee’s Catholics, few and far dispersed as they might have been, lived. However, they were very reluctant to come to Tennessee, much less stay there for any period, as there was not in the entire state a priest or church, and the Catholic workers were afraid of suffering a mortal wound in their dangerous work and dying without the benefit of the sacraments. Most of the laborers and craftsmen needed to build roads, bridges, and cities were at that time Irish, and they were in very high demand in the state. Tennessean Catholics suffer for want of the sacramentsĭuring this time, the population of Tennessee was growing, and the number of Catholics grew as well. Joseph (including at that point the entire eastern United States) on the first ballot. In April of 1837, Miles was elected provincial for the Dominican Province of St. In 1833 he was elevated to superior of St. Thereafter he worked as a missionary in Ohio (Kentucky, Ohio, Tennessee, Indiana, and parts of Illinois had been split from the Diocese of Baltimore and formed into the Diocese of Bardstown in 1808 – a town that has surely lost some of its former glory). Pius V.Īfter completing his studies and receiving ordination, he stayed on as a teacher at the college, where he distinguished himself. It at his investiture that he took the name Pius, after St. The record is unclear as to when he took the habit, but it was apparently in 1809. Miles entered the Dominicans’ school at 15. They also opened the second oldest monastary in the country, St. This problem was greatly alleviated by the arrival, in 1805, of three Dominicans, who established churches and the first Catholic school west of the Appalachians. The Catholic community there grew, but not without the problems endemic to any frontier: a great lack of clergy and churches. There they prospered, and, from all accounts, lived quite happily. The Miles family joined, five years later, a sizeable emigration of Maryland Catholics to Kentucky, and established themselves among fellow Catholics in Nelson County. He was born on May 17th, 1791, the youngest of seven children born to a builder in Prince George’s County, Maryland. Richard Miles is one of the unsung heroes of American Catholicism, and especially of its move beyond the Appalachians.
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