History from Here

About Grace Period Revised December 22, 2022 Introduction : During 1842 and 1843, the Rocky Mountain Mission Jesuits seem to have taken their order’s call to go forth in the world as contemplatives in action  to-heart . Superior Pierre-Jean De Smet, as well as the other Rocky Mountain missionaries, logged thousands of miles, over land and sea, to expand the Kingdom of God in the Pacific Northwest.   St. Joe River, Idaho     De Smet and Charles Go to Fort Vancouver A “bitter” winter capped off the year of 1841, an eventful one for the first Jesuit missionaries to the Pacific Northwest. According to Schoenberg in The History of the Catholic Church in the Pacific Northwest , snow fell “for three months without interruption, and even seasoned” Natives ”succumbed to snow-blindness and had to be rescued from the drifts.” The Salish leader Tjolzhitsay, who had welcomed the Jesuits into his People’s homelands during the warm days of August and witnessed a month later the f...

About Grace Period Revised December 22, 2022 Introduction  In the evening of December 31, 1840 , Father Pierre-Jean De Smet arrived back home in St. Louis, completing an eight-month round-trip journey to the Rocky Mountains. De Smet, the first Jesuit missionary to be sent to the Rockies, had fulfilled the promise his superiors had made to the Salish Peoples of present western Montana to send a priest to their country. As had his superiors, De Smet also made the Salish a promise; he promised them that he would return the following year to establish a permanent mission in their homelands. De Smet would keep his word, but within days of his homecoming in St. Louis, the missionary received news that put his pledge in serious jeopardy. A Promise Kept "On my arrival at St. Louis,” De Smet writes in a letter to the editor of the Catholic Herald dated May 1, 1841, “I gave an account to my superior [Verhaegen] of my journey and of the flattering prospects which a mission beyond the Rocky...