CELEBRATING OUR 175TH
“Brutal Honesty”
While Catholic populations grew, clergy in western Virginia had a nearly impossible task. Priests were given assignments covering a 100-mile radius, traveled by horseback or on foot.
Bishop Whelan was exhausting the hospitality of bordering priests and knew he had to attract priests and seminarians from outside of Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Maryland.
So, putting pen to paper, he wrote a seminary in Ireland.
He knew he had to be brutally honest to attract young men who not only embraced a strong relationship with Christ, but also a strong backbone and an adventurous willingness to endure the many hardships required.
Bishop Whelan’s recruiting pitch to All Hallows Seminary in Dublin, Ireland, advised prospective priests:
“Catholics are very few and generally very scattered, requiring a priest sometimes to attend a circuit of 100 miles in diameter.” He described the state as “quite unimproved, less so perhaps than many portions of the remote west, exceedingly mountainous, with bad roads, and a very uncultivated population. (Any missionary) must expect a life of great labour and fatigue, much exposure to the cold, heat, and rain, bad roads, very indifferent diet and lodging, but little respect for his dignity, few Catholics, little of society, a compensation barely adequate to support him in the plainest and most economical manner. I wish no one to be taken by surprise. Many of our missions are just such as this; and I want no priest who does not come fully prepared to enter upon such a charge, certain that his recompense is not to be expected here, but hereafter. Make the young men whom you may think of selecting fully aware of this; inform them that there are places much more desirable elsewhere, where they may labour advantageously, and that if they select my Diocese I shall regard their character and honor compromised if afterwards they flinch, and I shall even refuse an exeat where there is no other good controlling motive.”
The young priests took Whelan’s warnings to heart. Not only did they travel to labor in these West Virginia mountains, but they also continued an association for more than 180 years.
