Arkansas by John Gould Fletcher

Book Review

In this publication Arkansas John Gould Fletcher recounted the catholicism first reached in Arkansas by Spanish explorers and a French Jesuit missionary, and there were a couple of Catholics dwelling at Arkansas Post (Arkansas County) throughout the French and Spanish colonial era of the eighteenth century. Once Arkansas became adhered to the American Union by the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, the locality underwent a demographic and devout metamorphosis. A signal of Anglo-American Protestants overran the locality in order that, by 1850, Catholics made up roughly one per hundred of the total community of the state. The large European migration to the United States between 1840 and 1920, which comprised millions of Catholics, missed the South usually and Arkansas in particular. The Catholic Diocese of Little Rock was established in 1843, and both then and now, its ecclesiastical jurisdiction embraces the present boundaries of Arkansas.

Arkansas did know-how an upsurge of anti-Catholicism in the first two decades that Morris assisted as bishop. Tom Watson after 1910, and the Klan throughout the 1920s, initiated anti-Catholicism to enlarge in the South, and it furthermore influenced Arkansas. In 1915, the state legislature passed the Posey Act, or Convent Inspection Act. This proceed authorized shire and localized regulation enforcement administration to make yearly inspections of Catholic convents, rectories, and monasteries. This proceed was calmly repealed in 1937. Some bigotry absolutely stayed, but it usually subsided after World War II.

According to Fletcher, the forty-year episcopacy of Morris seen marvellous development in the Catholic Church in Arkansas. There were only sixty clerics when he came in 1906, yet by the time of his death, there were 154 clerics in the diocese. In 1900, there were only 150 devout sisters in the diocese, but by 1946, there were 582 sisters employed in schools, clinics, and orphanages. Twenty Catholic high schools and sixty parish schools were teaching some 7,710 scholars by the end of his episcopacy. In 1905, there were only two little very dark Catholic churches; four decades subsequent, there were nine very dark Catholic parishes, with seven affiliated schools. By 1946, the Catholic community equaled about 1.7 per hundred of the total population.

Arkansas had its first native-born Catholic prelate with the consecration of Albert L. Fletcher (1896-1979) as auxiliary bishop at St. Andrew's Cathedral in Little Rock. Born in the state capital, increased mainly in western and to the north Arkansas, and educated ...