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Dictionary of Miramichi Biography

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ROGERS, JAMES (1826-1903)

ROGERS, JAMES, Catholic priest and first bishop of Chatham, 1860-1902; b. Mountcharles, Co. Donegal, Ireland, 11 Jul 1826, s/o John Rogers and Mary Britton; ordained 1851; d. Chatham 22 Mar 1903.

James Rogers was brought to Nova Scotia by his parents at five years of age and grew up in Halifax. After pursuing the classical course at St Mary's College he was trained for the priesthood at the Sulpicians' seminary in Montreal and was ordained in 1851. His first assignment was to the Church Point mission in Digby Co., N.S. He was later a missionary in Cumberland County. In 1858-59 he was stationed in Bermuda, which was then within the Halifax diocese, and he played a part in building the first Catholic church on the island. In 1859 he was appointed secretary to Bishop Thomas L. Connolly of Halifax and began to teach at St Mary's College.

In 1860 the diocese of New Brunswick was divided into two, with seats at Saint John and Chatham. On 22 August 1860, at age thirty-four, Rogers was installed as the first bishop of Chatham. With his appointment, observed Father William C. Gaynor, "a revolution in Catholic activities began....He was a strenuous worker, unsparing of himself in his zeal; gentle yet firm; ever sociable and approachable [and] constant in his planning for the advancement of religion."

Although the diocese of Chatham covered most of the northern half of New Brunswick, it had only seven priests in 1860, and thirty churches, "of which nearly half were structurally incomplete." Rogers's priorities were to bring more priests to the diocese and to establish a boys' school. He made a first move towards the achievement of both of these goals several months after his arrival when he opened St Michael's male academy in his own residence in Chatham. This was a combination boys' school and theological training center, in which several seminarians, under his tutelage, doubled as teachers. Most of the trainees stayed for a year or two and were then sent to Montreal to complete their studies for the priesthood. After they were ordained they sometimes returned and served as missionaries in remote parts of the diocese or were offered appointments as parish priests. Priests who were engaged to administer the school, such as Father Dugald S. MacDonald, were also expected to act as pastoral assistants to the bishop.

Rogers believed that the religious orders of sisters and brothers had a vital contribution to make to the spiritual and temporal welfare of the diocese, and he spared no effort in trying to convince them to undertake responsibilities on the Miramichi and elsewhere. His first success in this regard was in arranging for the Sisters of Charity of St Vincent de Paul of Halifax to open schools at Bathurst and Newcastle in 1864. In 1868 six members of the Religious Hospitallers of St Joseph came from Montreal to take over the management of the hospital for leprosy patients at Tracadie, and the next spring three members of the same order arrived to establish the Hotel Dieu Hospital in Chatham. After the Sisters of Charity were recalled to Halifax in 1869 he convinced Montreal's Congregation of Notre Dame to open a school at Newcastle. When that order declined a request from him to start a school at Chatham as well, he asked the Religious Hospitallers of St Joseph to consider doing so and received a favorable response. With major assistance from Chatham teacher Anne Quinlan, St Michael's Academy (for girls) was opened by the Hospitallers in 1871. Five years later, "in response to Rogers's persistent overtures," members of the Christian Brothers came to Chatham from Montreal to take over operation of the boys' school.

From the beginning of his term Rogers pursued an ambitious building program at Chatham, both in respect to St Michael's pro-cathedral and the required educational and health facilities, but almost all came to naught in February 1878 when the church and its associated complex of classrooms, library, and living quarters, having some 20,000 square feet of floor area, was razed by fire. The disaster turned the financial problems, which were endemic to the diocese, into a crisis and led to the boys' school being closed and other austerity measures being taken. It also prevented the bishop from erecting a cathedral in stone to replace the burned out wooden structure, the core of which dated from the 1830s. Instead, a contract was let to George Cassady in the summer of 1878 to construct a new wooden church building as speedily as possible on the foundation of the former one.

Inevitably, much of Rogers's time was consumed by financial and administrative concerns and by personnel problems, not the least of which were the difficulties posed by wayward and fallen priests and nuns. He had his first exposure to the latter in 1862 when one of three women whom he brought to Chatham from Saint John allowed herself to become an object of attention to some of his young priests. Problems such as those presented by John H. Cushing and Dugald S. MacDonald, or the light-fingered F. X. L. De Langie, whom he had imprudently admitted to the diocese after he had been "cashiered" by the bishop of Charlottetown for a long list of offenses, paled beside that posed by Father Hugh McGuirk, a veteran priest in Kent County whom Rogers had forcibly removed from his church for "insanity." Rather than accept such a diagnosis of his mental state, or yield to the authority of his religious superiors, McGuirk launched a highly embarrassing and successful lawsuit for damages and let flow from his acid-tipped pen the most devastating characterizations imaginable of the "braggart bully" Rogers and his allegedly debauched, liquor-crazed underlings.

There were several large questions on which Rogers found it necessary to take a stand during his forty-two-year reign as bishop of Chatham. One of the earliest of these was the issue of Confederation, on which he emerged as a strong supporter. Another was the New Brunswick Common Schools Act of 1871, which imposed a non-sectarian public school system on all, and to which there was universal Catholic resistance. He too was stalwartly opposed, but once the act was law he urged the faithful to end the struggle and accept what they could not change. He encountered his greatest difficulty in contending with the growth in Acadian power and influence within the Chatham diocese and with the rising demand for Acadian control over the affairs of the church in northern and eastern New Brunswick. He spoke French and routinely corresponded in that language with his Acadian priests, but this did not disguise the fact that the agenda of their leadership was at serious odds with his own. His nemesis on the Acadian front was Father Marcel-François Richard, a fervently nationalist priest, who ranks today as one of the early champions of the Acadian renaissance. Historians are divided in their opinions about Rogers's attitude towards the Acadians and the appropriateness of the positions which he took on issues relating to them. In this respect he is a controversial figure in the history of Catholicism in New Brunswick. Concerning his practical achievements, however, and his many strengths of character and personality, there is no dispute.

By 1899 Rogers had begun to consider retiring, and at his request a co-adjutor bishop, with the right to succession, was appointed, in the person of Father Thomas F. Barry. He delayed stepping down, however, until February 1902, thirteen months before his death occurred at the Hotel Dieu Hospital in Chatham, at nearly seventy-seven years of age.

Sources

[b/d] DCB / Fraser (C); Memories; Rogers papers


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