Vincentian Higher Education Apostolate in the United States

“The Vincentian universities of the United States were not founded as such to raise the poor out of poverty.¯ Rather, a small band of Italian Vincentian priests, brothers and seminarians came to the United States in 1816 to accept Bishop Louis DuBourg’s invitation to evangelize the settlers in the upper-Louisiana Territories and to found a seminary there.”¯ Felix de Andreis, Joseph Rosati and the first band of missionaries naively assumed that they would be able to recreate the traditional apostolates and lifestyles that they were leaving behind in Europe.¯ This assumption proved incorrect from the moment that the group landed at the innerharbor of Baltimore in October 1816.¯ The needs of the nascent Church in the United States, and indeed the democratic nature of the raw new republic itself, resulted in the rapid “Americanization” of Vincentian ministry.¯ They discovered in America that other religious congregations had opened college preparatory programs to serve both local lay students and clerical prospects.¯ This model suited the missionariesí purpose, for a college could serve as a base for rural missionary outreach and the lay students= tuition supported the cost of seminary education.[3]
The intention of the first missionaries to found a seminary in Bishop Louis DuBourg’s new Diocese of Louisiana was realized in October 1818 with the foundation of St. Mary’s of the Barrens College in Perryville, Missouri.¯ Because of the absence of any other opportunities for lay students to be educated, St. Mary’s and later St. Vincent’s College in Cape Girardeau, Missouri (1838) had alternating and at times simultaneous existences as seminaries and lay colleges for the rest of the 19th century before emerging exclusively as seminaries.
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