Anniversaries are meant to be a time of celebration for reaching a milestone in life. But they also are occasions for giving thanks to God for blessings bestowed. And they are a time for rededication and renewal.

All of these things can be said of the 200th anniversary this year of the Archdiocese of Louisville and of the celebration of its establishment in Bardstown next Tuesday, April 8. The Diocese of Bardstown, forerunner to the Louisville archdiocese, was established on April 8, 1808.

It is appropriate that this founding date on Tuesday will be a day of prayer. There will be a Mass at 8:30 a.m. April 8 at St. Thomas Church in Bardstown, Ky., a Mass at noon at the Cathedral of the Assumption and a 7 p.m. vespers service at the Basilica of St. Joseph Proto-Cathedral in Bardstown.

We have many reasons to thank God for these 200 years of our church’s development and growth, for the faith that was brought to Kentucky by the pioneer Catholics and for those who have passed this faith on to us. As Archbishop Joseph E. Kurtz said at a recent Mass, “Think of the many blessings and gifts that have occurred to individual people and the church at large over these blessed 200 years.”

The faith community that they know today — and perhaps take for granted — is the legacy of those first Catholics who came from Maryland to the Kentucky wilderness in the 1770s, three decades before the Bardstown Diocese was formed. They planted, developed and nurtured the faith and laid the groundwork for a church that has grown to about 200,000 Catholics today in the Louisville archdiocese.

These early Catholics were “a quietly remarkable people,” Father Clyde Crews wrote in his 1987 history of the archdiocese, An American Holy Land. “No strangers to weakness and failures, they were also sturdy and enduring. They were survivors who, for the most part, knew how to suffer and to serve and to celebrate.”

The early settlers were “not casual Catholics but were fiercely committed to the faith,” Father Crews pointed out in a 1973 history of Kentucky Catholicism. And he noted in his 1987 book: “Kentucky Catholicism would be distinctive in that the earliest groupings of settlers and 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.”

The priests eventually came to the frontier, and so did religious communities of men and women. The early priests rode many miles on horseback to serve communities of Catholics, and they paved the way for the establishment of the Bardstown Diocese in 1808.

This first inland diocese in the United States, headed by Bishop Benedict Joseph Flaget, not only served Kentucky but also contributed to the expansion of the Catholic Church west of the Allegheny Mountains. At its establishment, the Bardstown Diocese covered an expansive territory from the Great Lakes on the north to Tennessee on the south and from the Allegheny Mountains on the east to the Mississippi River on the west.

Over the years, the Bardstown Diocese, which was transferred to Louisville in 1841, would give birth to 44 dioceses in such states as Ohio, Indiana, Tennessee, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota.

As John B. Boles noted in his book, Religion in Antebellum Kentucky, “as Baltimore was the mother of the Catholic Church in America, so was Bardstown, Ky., the mother of the Catholic Church west of the Appalachians.” Bardstown was “the stepping stone by which Roman Catholicism spread throughout much of the Midwest,” Boles said.

There is much for the Catholic faith community to celebrate and to give thanks for in this bicentennial year. Much has been accomplished in spreading the faith over the past two centuries, not only here in Kentucky but throughout the Midwest and parts of the South.

There is cause for celebration. But the legacy that we have received from our ancestors in faith calls for us to be the bearers of the good news of Jesus today. The work of continuing to build up the church, the work of service to others and the work of passing on the faith to future generations and to those who have not heard the Gospel is ours. This is where the renewal and the rededication enter this bicentennial year celebration.

Are we as “fiercely committed” to the faith as were our ancestors? Are we “sturdy and enduring” in the face of the challenges of today’s society? Do we know “how to suffer and to serve and to celebrate” in our time?

These are questions for each one of us as we begin the third century of the Catholic Church’s presence in Central Kentucky.