first Catholic bishop of Cincinnati
Edward Dominic Fenwick was the fourth of eight children born to Ignatius and Sarah Brooke (Taney) Fenwick, who were both descended from Baltimore’s first colonists and occupied ancestral lands in St. Marys County, Maryland. Like some of his forebears, Ignatius Fenwick was a notable figure: an ardent patriot, a colonel in the Revolution, a member of the Committee of Public Safety, a framer of the state constitution, and a man of affluence who was proud of his aristocratic connections.
Edward faced the trials of the war era during which both his mother and father died, the latter in 1784, leaving him dependent on relatives and tutors. Although the penal laws were abolished, there were no Catholic schools, so that the youth, following the old practise, was sent to Europe.
He entered Holy Cross College, Bornhem, Belgium (1784), an English Dominican foundation, and probably completed his classical studies at Liège.
Joining the Dominicans, he served a severe novitiate before taking the vows of a friar preacher (1790). Continuing his philosophical studies, he was ordained at Ghent (Feb. 23, 1793) somewhat hurriedly because of unsettled political conditions. Escaping with their lives, the Dominicans fled from the French invaders and sought refuge on an estate in Surrey, England, where they founded Carshalton College.
As an American citizen, Father Fenwick was left behind as procurator in the hope of saving the community property. This he was unable to do. The college was fired and partially destroyed, and Fenwick was harshly treated.
On protestation, he was released from prison and found his way to England. He spent several happy years in teaching at Carshalton, attending a mission at Woburn Lodge, and continuing his theological studies, but he felt that his life’s mission was to establish an American province of his order, as the Irish Augustinians had succeeded in doing.
After encountering many obstacles and conducting much tedious correspondence, finally, aided by Richard Luke Concanen, an Irish Dominican in Rome and later Bishop of New York, and encouraged by Bishop Carroll, Father Fenwick obtained the consent of his English provincial and of Pius J. Gaddi, the superior general in Rome. But men were scarce and the order, impoverished by war and confiscations, could not advance the necessary money.
Not until September 1804, were Fenwick and his volunteer-companion, Robert Anthony Angier, O. P. , ready to sail from London to Norfolk, Virginia.
After an absence of twenty years, the friar was welcomed by the Fenwicks of Maryland, though in this religious family given to vocations a priest occupied no unique position. Father Fenwick longed to erect a priory in his native state, but Bishop Carroll urged the claims of Kentucky where there were numbers of scattered Catholics who had emigrated from Maryland.
Temporarily assigned to the mission at Piscataway, Fenwick visited Kentucky (1805) where at first he was warmly received by Stephen Badin who had spent lonely years in the frontier missions.
Disposing of his lands in Charles County, Maryland, Fenwick purchased 500 acres in Washington County near Springfield, Kentucky, in the heart of the Catholic settlements. Here, assisted by two recently arrived Dominicans (Samuel T. Wilson and William R. Tuite), he transformed the farmhouse into the convent of St. Rose of Lima, the mother-house of the Dominican Order in the LTnited States.
The College of St. Thomas Aquinas (1807) was housed in a brick building and St. Rose’s Church was erected (1812) from bricks made by the fathers and their parishioners. Relieved by the more erudite Dr. Wilson of his duties as prior and teacher, Fenwick engaged in itinerant missionary work throughout Kentucky and Ohio and into the North.
At Cincinnati, on refusal of a site for a chapel, he built a small structure outside the city (1811). Within a few years, as the German and Irish immigrants arrived, he had a respectable frame church (1819).
Aided by his nephew, Father N. D. Young, O. P. , Fenwick’s labors in the wilderness attracted such attention that when Bishop Flaget urged that Cincinnati be constituted the seat of a new diocese, Pius VII named the Dominican as its bishop. It was a proud day at St. Rose’s when Dr. Flaget consecrated Fenwick and Bishop David preached the sermon (Jan. 13, 1822).
Accompanied by Father Wilson as his vicar-general, Bishop Fenwick traveled through the woodland trail by wagon, actually swimming the Kentucky River. The following year he paid his visit to Rome, where he attended the coronation of Pope Leo XII who displayed a practical interest in the Cincinnati diocese by presenting books, plate, and an elaborate tabernacle.
Traveling in Italy, and France, Fenwick sought volunteer priests and obtained promises of financial aid. As a result of this journey, he induced such famous figures as Martin Kundig, Frederick Rese, Samuel Maz- zuchelli, and John M. Henni to cast their lot in the frontier missions of America. Returning to Cincinnati, he continued his missionary work, preaching at court-houses to non-Catholic audiences, making conversions, gathering the isolated Catholics of Ohio into congregations, and gradually building small churches in towns like Lancaster.
In 1828, he was further burdened with a life appointment as Dominican provincial. At the First Provincial Council of Baltimore (1829), he could report a prosperous diocese with a rapidly increasing immigrant population.
While on a laborious visitation, he fell a victim to the cholera and was buried in Wooster before the nearest priest, John M. Henni, arrived. Later his remains were interred in the new cathedral and still later in a large mausoleum in St. Joseph’s Cemetery.
Near his cathedral and diocesan seminary, he erected the Athenæum, later St. Francis Xavier College as a school and a lyceum, whose public lectures attracted the élite of Cincinnati. Aware of the value of the press, he founded, in the same year, The Catholic Telegraph, which still flourishes as a diocesan weekly paper.
