John Louis Ann Magdalen Cheveru was born on January 28, 1768 in Mayenne, Province of Maine, France. He was the son of a lieutenant of police with judicial powers, John Vincent Lefebre, and his pious wife, Anne Lemarchand des Noyers. No local family was more respected; the mayor was his uncle and the pastor was another uncle.
Cheverus attended the local college until at the age of twelve years. Thereupon, he was sent to the College of Louis-le-Grand in Paris, but suffered no ill effects in its radical atmosphere. In public competition, he was selected for the Seminary of St. Magloire (Oratorians) in Paris where he had the advantage of attending lectures at the Sorbonne. He was ordained in the last pre-Revolutionary public ordinations in Paris in 1790.
About 1790 Cheverus was assigned to assist his uncle in Mayenne. To enter orders at this time was courting persecution. He soon succeeded to the pastorate, but on refusal of an oath to support the civil constitution of the clergy, he was deprived of his parish. Sent to Paris, he was imprisoned in the ill-fated convent of the Cordeliers. In June 1792 he escaped and found a hiding place in the city. Thus he avoided the September massacres when so many of his clerical associates were put to death.
In disguise, Cheverus made his way to Calais and thence to London where he found a hospitable asylum. He refused the usual bounty and found employment as a French tutor in a Protestant private school and in a gentleman’s family. He also preached to a congregation of refugees. In 1795 Dr. Francis Matignon, his former seminary professor, urged him to come to Boston, where Abbe La Poitrie, a chaplain with the French troops, had gathered a small French and Irish congregation in 1784, to which the erudite Matignon had succeeded in 1792. Renouncing his patrimony, Cheverus sailed for Boston in the fall of 1796. He wrote to Bishop Carroll to send him anywhere with no worry concerning his support for he was both able and willing to earn his own livelihood.
For a time, he served among the Penobscots of Maine, living on an annuity of $200 appropriated by the Massachusetts General Court for a Catholic Indian missionary. He also made visitations to scattered New England congregations and isolated families, frequently tramping long distances to save the cost of transportation. Carroll offered him St. Mary’s Church in Philadelphia, but the missionary preferred to serve his New England people as priest and doctor.
In 1800, when Matignon and Cheverus planned Holy Cross Church, their Protestant admirers headed by President Adams signed the subscription list. Three years later Bishop Carroll consecrated the church and Cheverus preached to a curious crowd. Thereafter Matignon and Cheverus attracted auditors of every creed. The scholarly, urbane, humble Frenchmen were confessors to Catholics but often advisers to Protestants in matters of conscience. No incident suggested the affection in which Cheverus was held more than his seat of honor at a banquet tendered President Adams by his aristocratic fellow-townsmen. On the conclusion of the Concordat, friends urged Cheverus to return to France but Carroll asked him to remain at his post.
Of personal persecution there was none, but even the beloved priest faced annoyances. On marrying two Catholics in Maine, though he sent them to a justice for a second civil ceremony, Cheverus was tried in a criminal action but declared not guilty. The civil action was soon dropped. With the aid of two rich Irish merchants of Newcastle, Maine, he built a chapel, but the superior court declared that even if there was a resident priest the Catholics of the region must continue paying Congregationalist tythes. Again in 1820, when he brought the Ursuline nuns to Boston, there was an outburst which he silenced by a communication to the press. He soon forgot these inconveniences, for in later years he extolled American toleration to King Charles X. He occupied Protestant pulpits on invitation; when an oath of allegiance was framed he was appealed to by the legislature lest Catholic conscience be violated; he was a patron of learned societies, assisting in founding the Athenauim to which he left his library.
Harrison Gray Otis and Quincy were among his warmest friends, as were Lemuel Shaw and Colonel Samuel Lorenzo Knapp, the litterateur, for whom he procured an honorary degree from Paris. In 1808, at the request of Matignon, Archbishop Carroll recommended that Cheverus be made bishop of Boston with New England for a diocese. Pius VII made the appointment and Cheverus was consecrated by Carroll in 1810. This elevation brought no change in his mode of life. His dress was still shabby. He walked on his visitations. He occupied a humble cottage. His house became a seminary, and in the cholera days a hospital. He continued his missionary labors. Frequent were his visits to the Maine Indians, the lowly Irish construction camps, and religious functions in Canada.
After Bishop Concanen’s death, he ministered to the New York diocese. He conferred the pallium on Archbishop Neale in Georgetown but refused a possible selection as his coadjutor. He urged the selection of Maréchal, whom two years later he consecrated as Neale’s successor in the See of Baltimore. Cheverus was too active to write much even if he had not had a distaste for what he termed the “scribomania” of his age: a few letters, an occasional journalistic contribution, a manual of hymns and prayers, and a French edition of the New Testament formed his literary contribution.
Cheverus was not destined to end his career in his “dear Boston. ” Matignon died in 1818 and Romagne after twenty years with the Indians returned to France; Cheverus missed their association. Hardship and exposure brought an attack of chronic asthma which physicians believed would be fatal if he did not seek a milder climate. Bishop Cheverus refused the appointment to Montauban (1823). The Catholics were worried; two hundred Protestants petitioned the grand almoner of France against his removal; the press in eulogistic notices urged that he remain. Dr. Ellery Channing spoke the mind of Boston: “Has not the metropolis of New England witnessed a sublime example of Christian virtue in a Catholic bishop ? Who among our religious teachers would solicit a comparison between himself and the devoted Cheverus ?” But the king demanded Cheverus and, with hopes of returning, he obeyed. Three hundred carriages— and few Catholics had carriages—are said to have escorted him out of Boston. Threatened by shipwreck in the Channel, he gained the esteem of the passengers by his heroism.
In France, his reputation spread, and even the Huguenots of Montauban became “bishop’s men. ” In 1826, he was elevated to the archbishopric of Bordeaux and made a peer by Charles X, but declined the ministry of ecclesiastical affairs. In 1828, he was named a counselor of state, and two years later a commander of the Order of the Holy Ghost. When the July Revolution broke forth, he maintained order in Bordeaux, which accepted the de facto government. All France clamored for his elevation to the cardinalate, and Louis Philippe gladly urged the appointment in Rome. In 1836, he became a peer of the Church. On July 7, 1836, he fell prostrated at the conclusion of a day’s preaching, and when he died all France mourned.
Cheverus was distinguished for his significant service for the Catholic church in New England and France. He was noted for the foundation of the Church of the Holy Cross in New England and his missions among Indians in Maine. During the epidemic of yellow fever in 1798, he won great praise and respect for his courage, charity and his preaching.
Jean-Louis Lefebvre de Cheverus was a member of the Catholic Church.
