Apologia

Several years ago Fr. Bill Spencer, who was at that time the minister provincial of Sacred Heart Province, asked me to work on a history of the Province.

I immediately said "yes," not appreciating what that project would entail. Let me justify my use of the last six or so years of my life. (I don't recall when I began this, but I think it was in 2012.)

When I said yes I was 77 years old. I had taught more or less full time at Quincy University for 28 years, and did administrative work along with teaching for another six or seven years. I earned my retirement. And I was going to enjoy that retirement, not by traveling, which is what many retired folks in our society seem to do, but by staying right here at Holy Cross Friary in Quincy, reading, writing, and not going to committee meetings or preparing for classes. I regularly preside and preach at Masses in the QU chapel, and help pastors, mostly across the River in Missouri, by covering for them on their vacation weekends.

My background is in sociology, in which I earned a doctorate from Harvard University in 1973. Already back in the 1970s I began to create a database of all the men who ever entered Sacred Heart Province from its beginning in 1858. I kept that database up to date, and it was that database that I had in mind when I agreed to do a history. I had no background in historical research, except that I knew that demographic data could lead to valuable historical insights. I had in mind one of my Harvard professors, Charles Tilly, who used historical data from the French revolution to challenge some prevailing historical theories about that event. Many historians had suggested that the Revolution was fomented by landless peasants flowing into Paris in the 1780s. By examining the actual arrest records of people involved in the Revolution, Tilly found that the leaders of the Revolution were mostly established citizens of Paris, not landless peasants.

Early on I decided that I had to make use of the Province archives in St. Louis if I wanted to do a history. I spent several months making short trips to St. Louis, reading materials in the archives. That experience taught me that I should have been writing the history while I was reading the materials. 

Recently I began to question whether the history I write will ever be published. The Province no longer has a press; when Fr. Marion Habig wrote his massive history of the Province in 1958, the Franciscan Herald Press in Chicago published it. I considered self-publication, and then thought about writing something that a publisher with wider interest might take up. The latter strategy would leave out much of the historical information that Province friars would like to see. That historical information would be of little interest to readers outside the Province.

So I decided to create a blog and put materials on the blog as I write them. That way some of the work have done will be preserved. Maybe at some point some of it will be worth publishing in book form. My health could give out--I am going on 83 years old as I write--or it could hold up and allow me to keep writing.

Let me begin with some observations about the origins of the Province back in the 1850s.