by Fabian Parmisano, OP

CHAPTER 4 : SETTLING IN: BENICIA [1]

Apparently Sr. Mary's letter achieved little, if anything, for almost two years later we have a similar, equally forthright plea for priestly help from the commissary general himself. In a long letter in which he first asks for the resolution of various problems that have arisen, Vilarrasa finally gets down to his main concerns. He speaks of the need for a school for boys so that they might be preserved from Protestant influence; also, such a school would draw respect and affection for the Order. But, since there were no religious to tend to a school, Vilarrasa asks for male teaching tertiaries who might take simple vows and be under the authority of the local superior, and in general live the full religious life. He then speaks his heart:

I cannot pass over in silence the necessity of receiving some reinforcement from Europe. Fr. Aerden conducts himself well and is very useful, but in matters of religious observance I cannot have sufficient confidence in him to place him in some office for the governance of the convent. Fr. Langois has become so scrupulous that he can do nothing but celebrate holy Mass. I also fear that one of those professed in Monterey will also be of little use because of lack of health. Brother Thomas O'Neill has only one year of profession, and one of the other professed is short on talent, while the other novices remain secluded in their novitiate. My only hope is in Brother Vincent Vinyes who, however, does not have robust health. Thus we must make do with our own efforts, and year after year will pass without any advancement. At different times this has made me lose heart entirely and make me determined to ask to return to some convent in Europe. But the desire to see the Order well established in California, the thought of some young people already bound by their profession, respect for the Monsignor (Archbishop), and the certainty that you, Venerable Father, will never abandon us -- all this has restrained me.  Therefore I warmly ask you to send immediately at least two good priests. It is not important whether or not they speak the language so as to start preaching immediately. They may still be of great use in the convent. As long as they are obedient and dependable, flexible, promoters of religious observance and fidelity, and zealous for the work of the Order.

Vilarrasa adds that he may have to send Fr. Langlois back to Canada for the good of his health, thus leaving the Master General with the thought that soon what little help Vilarrasa had from this source would be no more. Only he and Fr. Aerden would be left to share the impossible work load.[7]

But one year later we find the situation unchanged. Jandel had sent Fr. St. Mard, but, as we have seen, he was proving to be more of a hindrance than a help in the ministry. As the French Dominican left for Europe on his projected begging tour, Vilarrasa entrusted to him detailed information for the Master General concerning the needs in Benicia, but he himself writes personally to Jandel in November of 1858, once again pressing his idee fixe: "I have given various commissions to the said Father St. Mard among which the principal one is the most urgent need we have for good priests, and he is to make every effort to find them." Considering the present population of California "Irish and Spanish fathers would be most useful," but if these could not be had, "we would be most content with those of any other nation," as long as they were good religious. The situation is so bad that Vilarrasa has to ask that his novices and students have their formation in Europe: "Each day I am more convinced of the advantage of educating our novices and students in Europe, at least for a few years, and to retain in California only a few. Thereby the Fathers would have more time for the missions and the novices might be better educated." He repeats his request for two tertiaries who can teach, as he would like to establish a school for boys. But once again no help came. Apparently Jandel could do nothing for the struggling new congregation.

To add to Vilarrasa's work and worry, once Fr. Aerden arrived in 1856 giving some hope for the maintenance of religious life and ministry in Benicia, another mission was thrust upon the Dominicans, that of Vallejo. Now there were three locales to be managed by only two priests. It was, then, a happy day indeed when young Vinyes and Costa were ordained. At least the number of available priests -- a grand total of four -- had now edged closer to matching the increase in ministerial demands.

In the late '50s, with more to share in the ministry, each of the Benicia priests may have been able to relax some and begin to entertain new hope for a proper novitiate and studium and contemplative life. But once we enter the '60s and early '70s we wonder -- as in fact the friars themselves often wondered at the time -- how they survived or would continue to survive. So much to do with so few hands to do it. We must remember that the territories embraced by the parishes of Benicia, Martinez, and Vallejo were vast -- comprising the whole of present day Contra Costa and Solano counties -- and travel was slow. In the '50s one, two, or three of the priests on hand might have to absent themselves for several days as they journeyed to tend to the needs of their parishioners, much as we find the eastern missionaries having to do when traversing the extensive lands of Ohio, Tennessee, and Kentucky. But throughout the '60s while all of this land together with the people occupying it remained, new territory was added with the addition of each new Dominican priest. Thus when Fr. St. Mard arrived in 1858-1859 the parish of Notre Dame was given into the care of the Dominicans. And even when a Dominican was "subtracted," as in 1863 when Fr. Costa left the congregation for Chile, St. Brigid's in San Francisco became a Dominican responsibility, requiring one man full time and another to help out on weekends. In 1865, Fr. Antoninus Migliorini, an Italian Dominican, arrived to bolster the congregation's numbers, but almost immediately upon his arrival St. Dominic's in Benicia found itself with still another mission, that of Holy Rosary in Antioch. In 1866 with only a modest increase in priests, yet another parish in San Francisco, St. Francis of Assisi, became Dominican, requiring the services of two, sometimes three of the brethren. By 1869 the Dominicans also found themselves with the care of missions in Pachecoville (St. Michael's) and Somersville (St. Patrick's). All of this in addition to a central concern, if not the central concern, of the friars, the novitiate-studium of St. Dominic's. We ask how many priests could be there at the convent at any given time for the regular observance required. This is certainly the major reason why, as we have seen in his letter to Jandel, Vilarrasa wanted the novices and students trained abroad. They would get blessed little training at home.

At least this last -- formation abroad -- Vilarrasa managed to secure. By 1869 four professed brothers and one simple novice were in Woodchester, England, undergoing their formation for the California congregation. Some, both clerics and lay brothers, remained in Benicia, but we cannot help thinking that they were being short-changed. They, together with Fr. Vilarrasa or Fr. Vinyes (seldom both at once), would be the only ones living a monastic, community life, which, they must have thought, would soon be over for them too, leaving them only with one half of their Dominican vocation, the ministry. The contemplative religious life as demanded by the Constitutions and the whole of Dominican tradition seems to have been more a hope for the future (if that) than a present reality. Not that the missionary fathers were wanting in contemplative prayer. There was silence aplenty within the house when they were there, and outside the house too. The quiet of Benicia may not have matched that of Monterey but it came close. And the often long treks of the missionaries through many miles of unpopulated country would have been conducive to quiet prayer, especially in men already trained and experienced in it. It was the contemplative life -- living, praying, working, playing together, worshiping in a common liturgy, studying and discussing toward a common ministry, all of which was cumulatively known as regular or monastic observance -- that was in good measure missing in the life of the western Dominican in his congregation's nascent years.

But however few there were to fulfill it, regular observance was not neglected in Benicia, thanks to the vigilance and example of the commissary general, who, it may be remembered, had been the assistant novice master of the present Master General, Vincent Jandel, famous (or notorious) for a like preference for the monastic over the ministerial. Vilarrasa did some missionary work -- there are notations of his having given parish missions in and around San Francisco and an archdiocesan retreat for priests -- but most of the traveling by far was left to whatever other priests might at a given time be stationed at St. Dominic's. Vilarrasa for the most part stayed at home, tended to the parish, but most especially to the important work of formation and the maintenance of regular observance, at least among the novices and students. We have a draft of the statutes he drew up in 1856 for the whole of the California region. They are evidence of the care and strictness of Vilarrasa with regard to regular life. Throughout his lifetime there is not the slightest hint that he had ever let up on his love for and insistence upon the monastic, communal aspect of the Dominican vocation, no matter how unreal, impractical it might often seem. On the contrary, whenever the active ministry appeared to work against regular religious observance, Vilarrasa was there upholding the latter -- as we have seen when he opposed the selection of Alemany as provincial of the Eastern Province precisely on the grounds of Alemany's failure in religious observance, and as we shall further see in his future conflicts with his archbishop.

Vilarrasa's pleas for priests from Europe may, with few exceptions, have gone unanswered, still there was growth -- incipient but steady -- toward a more viable priesthood in the near future. In 1859 we find three novices from Ireland on the California scene, committed to the California congregation: Eugene Jordan Caldwell, Bernard Mannes Doogan, and John Louis Daniel, soon to be joined by a fourth, Hyacinth Derham. Already present in the convent was another novice, Pius Murphy, who had been admitted as a postulant when he was only twelve years old and then formally received into the novitiate when he reached the required age of sixteen. Other postulants and novices, both cleric and lay brother, appear in the '60s, whose names feature in the Dominican ministry of the last decades of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth: Thomas O'Neill, Martin Cassin, John Luney, Bernard Gaynor, Anthony Perry, Edmund Harrington, Patrick Callaghan, Anthony Horgan, Thomas Fitzsimons, Vincent de Marzo. In the early '70s some few priests, too, would come from foreign lands to pray and serve in the new congregation slowly moving out of its infant stage: Dominic Lentz, an exile from Germany at the time of Bismarck's Kulturkampf and former vicar general of the Austrian Province, who came to California in 1873 and died here in July, 1883; Benedict McGovern from St. Joseph's Province who came to California in 1872 for his health and stayed on for more positive reasons until his death, September 21, 1918; Brother William Dempflin, exiled from Guatemala in 1872, and made priest by Archbishop Alemany in 1875. He stayed on in California ministering to the Indians until his death, December 3, 1912, beloved by the Indians as the good "Padre Blanco." And it was, as we have noted, from the mid-'60s all through the '70s that we find Vilarrasa's desire for Dominican priestly formation abroad realized. In 1865, as a result of Vilarrasa's face-to-face consultation with the Master General in Rome and with the brethren in England, Brothers Pius Murphy, Vincent Carpentieri, and Edmund Harrington were sent to the English novitiate in Woodchester, England. In 1867 Anthony Horgan, Thomas Fitzsimons, and Vincent deMarzo joined them. In 1869 there is a further California addition to Woodchester, Cyprian Walters, as a simple novice. In 1872, when most of the first batch were ordained and now functioning as priests in California, we find other affiliates of California taking their place at Woodchester: Dominic Mannes Bowler, Cyprian Walters (now professed), James Reginald Newell, Raymond Johns, Thomas Augustine Dyson, Benedict Mann. In 1876 Raymond Johns and Augustine Dyson are still in England, while Reginald Newell and Dominic Maher are students at Louvain, Belgium. In 1879, with Reginald Johns now a priest in California, Dyson, Newell, and Maher are priests in Louvain. The following year we find the Louvain group in Benicia, part of a community now numbering 14 priests, four professed students (Albert Lawler, Alphonsus Riley, Henry Stoeters, and Ambrose Wilson), and two lay brothers (James Fahy and Simon Dwyer). Add to this number the six priests and three lay brothers at St. Dominic's in San Francisco, established in 1876, and we can see the shoot at last sprung from its seed and beginning to flower.

Around the mid-1860s the friars were becoming aware that they were a congregation on its way to becoming a full-fledged province with an ever-expanding ministry before them. So they held their first biennial congregation[8] in Benicia on August 8, 1865, with consequent Acta professionally printed and published the following year. Vilarrasa records the event in his Chronicle:

Beginning August 8, 1865, under my presidency the first Biennial Congregation of California was held in the convent of Benicia. The Acts of this Congregation were confirmed by the Master of the Order on the following January 1. Those present were: Father Vincent Vinyes, superior of the convent of Benicia, Father James Henry Aerden, vicar of the house of the Most Holy Rosary [Antioch], Father Antoninus Migliorini, Father Thomas O'Neill, Father Jordan Caldwell, and Father Louis Daniel.

Two years later, beginning July 9, 1867, the second biennial congregation was held in Benicia. Present were Frs. Vilarrasa, Aerden, Vinyes, Langlois, Doogan, and Callaghan. However, as Vilarrasa notes in his Chronicle for this year, the resulting Acts "did not obtain confirmation from the Master of the Order." No reason for the lack of confirmation is given. The next congregational gathering is not until 1875, but from then on the meetings are, for the most part, biennial in fact. >>>

Partial Endnotes
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[7] And so it happened. In 1857 Vilarrasa wrote to the Master General that because of excessive scrupulosity Langlois was "unable to offer Mass and indeed, since his profession in Monterey, he has shown himself a somewhat useless member of the Order." He was granted permission to sojourn in Canada this same year, where he remained with his brother until 1866, when he returned to Benicia. Within the year, however, he applied for secularization (leave the Dominicans, not the priesthood), and was granted it. He served briefly in the parish in Spanishtown near Half Moon Bay, then as chaplain to the Notre Dame Sisters in San Francisco, and finally as chaplain of the Christian Brothers novitiate, first in Oakland and later in Martinez, where he served for some twenty years until his death in 1892. (Cf. J.B. McGloin, "Anthony Langlois, Pioneer Priest in Gold Rush San Francisco," Southern California Quarterly, December 1967, pp. 407-424)

[8] The title given to the legislative gatherings of the congregation, to be changed to "provincial chapter" once the congregation became a province.

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