Early American Catholics Passed On The Faith Without Seeing Priests For Years!!

TI swear what a bunch of spoiled Catholics we are in the 21 st Century.

I love this post at McNamara's Blog. See “They Went a Long Time without Seeing a Priest”

It talks about one community in New Jersey but it is a story that could be repeated in many other places in the history of the United States.

I like this part:
Then they went for more than thirty years without any priest. By the 1820’s, some traveling Irish priests were celebrating Mass in local homes on a regular basis. It was the people who kept the faith alive in the interim. Father Joseph Flynn, who wrote a history of New Jersey Catholicism in the late 1800’s, interviewed some of these early Catholics. Among them was a Mrs. Littlel, who recalled that her father’s job was to check the credentials of visiting priests “so as to secure the faithful few from impostors.” She remembered “Old Mrs. Seehulster,” who was

A remarkable woman—a regular missionary; every Sunday she would gather the Catholics in Dominick Merrion’s house, say the rosary, distribute holy water, and teach the children catechism.

She also recalled the first she saw Mass celebrated in Macopin:

Many of the young Catholics who had never seen mass celebrated, and Protestants who viewed the whole thing as witchcraft, crowded and hustled the old folks who were kneeling around the priest. The altar was a chest—we had no bureaus in those days.