The story of Catholicism in the Archdiocese of Louisville begins much earlier than 200 years ago.

It stretches back to Britain’s Maryland colony on North America’s East Coast, back to Europe’s religious and social conflicts, back to the dynamism of the Renaissance. Amid the great movements of thought and the migrations of peoples, committed Catholics carried their faith westward.

In the late 15th century, Western Europe was showing new signs of life. The dazzling technology of printing had made its debut. Michelangelo, Leonardo and Raphael were in their youth. And restless explorers were turning their eyes westward with a yearning to explore beyond the known boundaries.

It would be Columbus who most dramatically took ship and landed in a place he thought to be Asia. Before long, though, it became clear that new continents lay over the vast ocean, and many of the major European powers were drawn by the allure of that which lay beyond.

By the 16th century, even as Reformation convulsed much of Christianity in the heart of the old continent, not only explorers, but missionaries wended their way to the new continents in the Western Hemisphere. The Spanish were the first of this group to arrive in the land that is now the United States. St. Augustine was established in 1565, named for the feast day of the great African saint whose feast day was being observed on the day they came to port.

Eventually the Spanish, often accompanied by Franciscan Friars, made their way further west to areas we know today as Texas, the Southwest and California. In the 18th century, the chain of 21 missions up the Pacific coast would be established. They would leave behind them not only heritage and properties, but a series of religious names that still dot the American landscape in places like San Francisco, Los Angeles and San Diego.

In the 17th century, the French, often with Jesuits along, made their way to Canada, into the Great Lakes region and down the Mississippi. Here, too, place names commemorate those historic times: Sault St. Marie, St. Louis and New Orleans. But the French would have a second wave of influence in the late 18th century that would have a deep influence on Kentucky Catholicism. For it would be exiles from the French Revolution near the end of that century who would provide clerical leadership on the frontier.

English settlement began in earnest with settlements of Anglicans at Jamestown (1607) and Puritans at Plymouth (1620). And in 1634, two ships, the Ark and the Dove, would arrive in Maryland, establishing the primal Catholic settlements in the British colonies. Here they set up a new colony with a granting of religious toleration notable for its time.

But eventually, after a revolt later in the 17th century, the Catholics themselves were returned to penal status, and many of the old civil and religious restrictions they had known in their homeland reappeared in the new world. Still, attended by some stalwart Jesuit priests, they continued on, attaining religious freedom only when the new American nation had been established after the completion of the Revolution that severed the 13 colonies from Britain and George III.

The exploration of the interior lands west of the Allegheny Mountains in the 1770s coincided with this revolutionary era. And it would be to the land that Alistair Cooke termed “the first American West,” Kentucky, that many of the Maryland Catholic settlers turned their eyes and hopes by the middle of the 1780s.

And so the westward movement of Catholic believers that had begun three centuries before would continue, this time not across the vast waters, but across the formidable mountains. The Maryland Catholics — seeking better land and prospects rather than religious liberty as had their ancestors — were poised to make their first settlements in the rich farming areas that today are known as the Kentucky Catholic Holy Land.

Pioneer Times: 1775-1811

The first individual Catholic settlers began to enter Kentucky in the area of Fort Harrod in 1775. Among this early group were to be found George Hart and Jane Coomes, arguably the first physician and the first school teacher, respectively, in the state.

But the first significant groups of people of the ancient faith were to arrive in 1785. These Maryland Catholics settled along the creek-ways near the village of Bardstown, beginning with Pottinger’s Creek in the year 1785.

Soon, with other arrivals from the East, they had populated a string of settlements, initially known only by the name of the nearest waterway. More traditional religious names would not be used for about 20 years.

Some of these earliest places where the Catholics would gather together in private cabins were: Pottinger’s Creek, Hardin’s Creek, Cartwright’s Creek, Rolling Fork, Cox’s Creek, Holy Cross (1785), St. Charles (1786), St. Ann/St. Rose (1787), Holy Mary (1788) and St. Michael/Fairfield (1792).

These first Kentucky congregations were being formed in the years when the United States had just won its freedom from Great Britain and was governed under the Articles of Confederation. In the epochal year of 1789, the Constitution went into effect, George Washington became president and Baltimore was established as the seat of jurisdiction for all Catholics in America. John Carroll was named the first Bishop of Baltimore in that same year, and the Kentucky frontier was, of course, part of his diocese that covered the vast new nation.

Bishop Carroll had few priests — only about 25 — to serve throughout the country, and very few indeed to send to the frontier. For this reason, Kentucky Catholicism would be distinctive in that the earliest groupings of settlers or nascent congregations were formed by devout laity who carefully said their prayers, observed holy days as best they could and continued to petition for priests.

A few priests, such as Father Charles Whelan, had come to Kentucky and ministered briefly, but the first to arrive who would stay permanently was an exile from the French Revolution, the first priest to be ordained in the United States, Father Stephen Badin. He was only 26 years of age at the time of his arrival in Kentucky in 1793, the year after Kentucky had entered the union as the 15th state.

Father Badin was a man much respected by his flock, but often considered overly strict by many. Briefly he would be aided by other priests who arrived, but these were not to prove long-term companions, as they either moved elsewhere or died on the frontier. Father Badin attended the small congregations of Kentucky from his residential base called St. Stephen’s or “Priestland” on land that is now the Motherhouse of the Sisters of Loretto in Marion County.

His was a daunting ministry. He traveled the circuit of his primitive parishes on horseback, spending most of his time in catechizing children, hearing confessions, offering Mass and officiating at weddings, baptisms and funerals. In addition, there were frequent “sick calls” when family members would call their priest to stand beside their dying relatives and offer the consolation of the sacraments. Often this meant that Father Badin had to travel great distances at night and in all sorts of weather conditions.

The year 1805 was to be something of a landmark for the lonely Father Badin (the title Father was not in regular usage at that time in this region.) There arrived that year Father Charles Nerinckx, a priest from Belgium who also had escaped the excesses of the French Revolution and had spent many years in hiding.

Father Nerinckx was a large man, strong and sturdy, who often would take part in the actual laborious construction of the earliest church buildings in the area. He and Father Badin divided the congregations among themselves, and thus the new arrival came to share in Father Badin’s strenuous clerical labors. He would remain in the state until 1824 when, in the face of many quarrels, he moved westward, only to die later that same year.

It was in the autumn of 1805 that Trappist monks would arrive and attempt their first American foundation, but they, too, would move west to the Mississippi Valley in 1809. But there was a lasting development as well in 1805. The Dominican Fathers arrived, being successful in making their first U.S. foundation in the United States in the area around Springfield.

There they would serve in parish work, establish a priory at St. Rose and open a school named in honor of St. Thomas Aquinas. The lasting historical claim to fame of that institution was that it numbered among its early pupils the young Jefferson Davis, who would eventually be the president of the Confederate States of America.

There were lay leaders as well in the frontier period. These included John Lancaster, who would eventually serve as a state senator, and Grace Newton Simpson, whom the 19th century historian Benedict Webb would call “one of the most extraordinary women of her day in America.” Zechariah Riney of the Cartwright’s Creek settlement has traditionally been thought to have been Abraham Lincoln’s teacher.

But all was not smoothness between the clerics and their congregations. Several quarrels would break out (especially in the congregation in Scott County) over a variety of issues, including clerical salaries, differences in moral strictness (for example, the holding of dances was an issue), land-title disputes and the extent of lay involvement in congregational decisions.

Appeals had to be sent to Bishop Carroll in faraway Baltimore. Such was the case in other areas of the young nation as well. This would provide at least part of the rationale for the formation of additional American dioceses with bishops closer to each region.

Accordingly, in 1808, Pope Pius VII, recently released from his imprisonment by Napoleon, sub-divided the vast Baltimore diocese into additional sees at Boston, New York, Philadelphia — and Bardstown.