When I was growing up, my family wasn’t into organized religion much. My brothers and I went to the local Methodist church, but my parents had moved to New Orleans from Georgia and I’m not sure which faith they’d been brought up in. They seemed pretty normal, however, and I don’t think it involved snakes and gibberish (not that there’s anything wrong with that if participants from all species are consenting adults).
Regardless of my family’s beliefs, it became pretty obvious to me early on that we were out of step with just about everyone else in our neighborhood, and the city for that matter. We were aliens in a Roman Catholic world. Everyone went to Catholic school and wore uniforms, or went to public schools and left early for Catechism classes. Everyone had a smudged forehead on Ash Wednesday. Everyone crossed themselves on streetcars as we passed churches.
And most important, everyone ate seafood on Fridays, and every day for weeks at a time during Lent. Imagine that – a religion that forces you to eat seafood in New Orleans! It was this practice that gained my deepest respect for the Roman Catholic Church. These people really knew how to suffer. This notion was, of course, reinforced by other mass sufferings involving St. Patrick’s Day celebrations, St. Joseph Altars, Mardi Gras, king cakes, etc.
Being immersed in a culture like this gives one a skewed sense of reality. It was not until I went off to basic training in the military that I fully realized that the whole world wasn’t overwhelmingly Catholic like New Orleans and the food wasn’t nearly as good.
I was thinking about this recently after reading an article on United States religious demographics. I had always assumed that Louisiana was percentagewise the most Catholic state in the country. Alas, ‘tis not true. Rhode Island wins this title by a large margin with over 60 percent of churchgoers Catholic. Can you imagine that? This probably accounts for that state’s world-famous Mardi Gras celebrations. Sure! You probably couldn’t even fit the Bacchasaurus or Bacchagator in Rhode Island.
Louisiana barely makes it into the top ten, with about a third of its population Roman Catholic. South Louisiana has a much, much higher percentage, but apparently I-10 and I-12 proved to be insurmountable barriers to Spanish and French missionaries spreading the faith. Southern Baptists, who predominate in Northern Louisiana, constitute the largest religious group in the state.
Whatever the numbers say, Louisiana is in fact a very, very Catholic place. This is not by chance, nor because of some wetlands-focused marketing campaign by the Catholic Church. The reasons lie deep within our historical bones.
For most of Louisiana’s formative years in the 18th Century, the Bourbon cousins – Louis XIV and XV in France and Carlos III and IV in Spain – were our more-or-less benevolent rulers. It is no accident that they were referred to as their “Catholic Majesties.” They took their religion very seriously. During most of our colonial history, it was illegal to practice anything but Catholicism in the state. At one point an agent of the Spanish Inquisition was sent here to whip us into shape. Fortunately, Governor Miro decided that although we were Catholic, we were not that Catholic. He sent this would-be Torquemada packing back to Europe, and we were spared burnings, racks and other such sport.
Louisiana was one of the major centers of Catholicism in what is now the United States. In 1793, it was granted status as the “See of St. Louis of New Orleans” with a bishop. Baltimore was the first to gain such status; Louisiana was second. The See held sway over a territory stretching from Key West, Florida to the Rockies and Canadian border. It has been subdivided many times over the years, and is today administered by six archbishops and 20 bishops.
Despite an influx of frontiersmen from the American colonies following the Louisiana Purchase, the imprint of the Catholic Church was still deep when we became one of the United States in 1812. That was a good thing, because it was probably the best organized, most efficient institution around. Like all states entering the union, we were subdivided into “counties,” but since everyday life was already organized around church parishes, the new county boundaries were more or less contiguous with these. After several years of confusion when the terms were used interchangeably, we gave up and changed the state constitution to make the name “parish” official.
Even St. Tammany and the other Florida Parishes, which are not thought of as being particularly “Catholic” places, have been greatly affected by the Church. Mandeville’s Our Lady of the Lake Church, with over 17 thousand parishioners, is the largest Roman Catholic Church in the state. And that’s after at least two other large Catholic congregations were formed to accommodate the explosive growth in the immediate area.
One of the most interesting figures in the Catholic history of St. Tammany is Abbe Adrien Rouquette. He was a brilliant academic, priest and poet, who at the height of his church career, left New Orleans to spend the rest of his life doing missionary work among the Choctaw Indians. His surname is perhaps best known in connection with the Rouquette Lodge retirement community in Mandeville, but he had another name that is more venerated elsewhere. The Choctaws loved and respected him, calling him “Chahta Ima,” which means “like a Choctaw.” Schools and other public buildings in the Lacombe area carry this name to honor him.
Another interesting chapter in the history of the Catholic Church in St. Tammany is the Chinchuba Institute, which was the only facility for deaf mute children operated in the South by the Catholic Church. Established just before the turn of the last century, the Institute was operated by the School Sisters of Notre Dame until it burned to the ground in the early 1940s. It was relocated to the south shore and is now in Marrero, Louisiana.
The Institute was named after Bayou Chinchuba (Choctaw for “alligator”), which ran alongside it. I had an opportunity to visit this site in the early 1980s and see the ruins, old graveyard and other once-beautiful grounds. The property was deconsecrated by the Church and sold shortly thereafter. The large tract is now home to the Premier Center, Botanica Apartments, Mandeville Post Office and several other small commercial centers.
As a both sad and comical sidebar to this story, some may remember a few years back that a new Mandeville school built off West Causeway Boulevard was to be called Chinchuba Middle School. Legal action by the Chinchuba Institute forced a name change to the Tchefuncte Middle School. Well, at least we kept the alligator as a mascot, and they probably don’t know what a “chinchuba” is in Marrero.
There are many other interesting stories about Catholic-related institutions in this area: St. Joseph’s Abbey, St. Paul’s, St. Scholastica and large, growing congregations throughout the Florida Parishes. Regardless of our religious affiliations, the Roman Catholic Church has figured prominently in our history and culture, and continues to play a large role in our communities.