“Soon after Father Chiniquy had selected the spot for his new town, 50 families from Canada planted their tents around his. He placed not only the parish but the entire village under the patronage of the ‘good Sainte Anne,’ who was the patron saint of…the Canadian Province of Quebec,” wrote Lois Meier in her 1976 history, “The Saga of St. Anne.” She went on to quote Chiniquy’s account of that first settlement in late 1851:
“We were at the end of November and though the weather was still mild, I felt I had not an hour to lose in order to secure shelters for everyone of those families, before the cold winds and chilly rains spread sickness and death among them….
“When I saw that a sufficient number of houses had been built to shelter everyone of the first immigrants, I called a meeting and suggested that they direct their attention to the necessity of building a 2-story house, the upper part to be used as the schoolhouse for the children on week days and a chapel on Sundays, and the lower part to be my parsonage.”
By the time that the 40-foot by 40-foot log church was completed in April of 1852, the population of the colony had doubled to 100 families.
“Not a month later,” noted the colony’s leader, “we started an addition of forty feet more which was completed six months later….To expand the limits of my first colony, I planted a cross at L’Erable, about fifteen miles southwest of St. Anne, and another at a place we call St. Mary, twelve miles southeast. These settlements were soon filled; for that very spring, more than one thousand new families came from Canada to join us.”
Chiniquy was fulfilling the request, made in late 1850 by the Catholic Bishop of Chicago, James Van De Velde, to create a colony in Illinois populated by the “sturdy sons and pious daughters” of French Canada. In September of 1853, Bishop Van De Velde retired from his position as leader of the large Chicago diocese. While the bishop had maintained a cordial relationship with Father Chiniquy, the same could not be said of his successor, Anthony O’Regan.
Chiniquy and his new bishop soon clashed publicly. “The norms called into question,” wrote anthropologist Caroline B. Brettell in her 2015 study, “Following Father Chiniquy,” “were those governing the ownership and administration of church property, delivering the Mass in French instead of Latin, and providing laypeople with access to the Bible. Chiniquy took on both the sacred and secular authority of the Catholic Church.
“The church, parsonage and school in St. Anne had been constructed on property initially owned by Chiniquy….While the people wanted to hold the property in full and allow their pastor free use…O’Regan, in accordance with the principle of trusteeship (under law, title to all church property is held by the bishop in trust for the people of the diocese), desired Chiniquy to send him titles to all the property. Chiniquy refused.”
Chiniquy’s dispute with Bishop O’Regan was not the only conflict in the St. Anne colony during its early years. In 1855, a land developer from L’Erable, Peter Spink, brought a slander suit against the priest. Spink, who was involved in an ongoing dispute with some of Chiniquy’s colonists, charged that Chiniquy had denounced him from the pulpit. Fearing he could not obtain a fair trial, Spink successfully petitioned to move the case to Urbana.
To handle his defense, Chiniquy hired a Springfield lawyer, Abraham Lincoln, whom a friend described as “the best lawyer and the most honest man we have in Illinois.” The trial began on May 19, 1856, and ended in a hung jury.
A second trial, in October, concluded with an agreement that the two parties would pay their own expenses. The Kankakee Gazette reported, “Mr. Chenique [sic] still holding to his statement that in what he had said he did so with no intention of slandering Mr. Spink, but upon the report of others. Mr. C upon his return was enthusiastically welcomed by his French friends and escorted to St. Ann [sic]by a procession of two hundred.”
Between the two Spink trials, there was a major development in the battle of wills between Father Chiniquy and Bishop O’Regan. On Aug. 19, 1856, after several unsuccessful attempts to obtain a submission to his authority from the St. Anne pastor, the bishop formally suspended Chiniquy’s powers to perform the duties of a priest.
In speeches to his congregation, Chiniquy maintained that he had not actually been suspended, only threatened with suspension. The priest said the bishop wanted to take him away from his people and assign him to a church at Cahokia, Ill., promising to suspend him if he did not comply. However, a letter from O’Regan to the church at Bourbonnais, dated Aug. 30, directed the pastor to announce to parishioners that Chiniquy was defying the order of suspension.
On Sept. 3, 1856, Bishop O’Regan applied the most drastic possible penalty to his rebellious priest: excommunication. The vicar general of the Chicago diocese arrived in St. Anne and read, before a large crowd, a formal sentence of excommunication against Charles Chiniquy. A copy of the document, in French, was nailed to the church door.
Many of Chiniquy’s parishioners rose to his defense. A letter to Bishop O’Regan, signed by 500 members of the community, declared, “Considering Mr. Chiniquy as a good and virtuous priest, worthy of the place he occupies and possessing as yet all his sacerdotal powers, in spite of your null and ridiculous sentence, we have unanimously decided to keep him among us as our pastor.”
In the spring of 1858, Charles Chiniquy firmly declared, “I am no longer a priest of the Roman Catholic Church. I have given up the title and position of priest in that Church.”
Along with hundreds of his followers — an estimated 80 percent of the French-Canadian population of the St. Anne area — he formed a new congregation under the name of the Christian Catholic Church.
“The break was highly emotional,” wrote Lois Meier. “Many families were divided brother against brother, and there followed years of ill-feeling among those with the same name but different religious convictions.”
Seeing a need to ally his congregation with an established Protestant denomination, Chiniquy approached the Chicago Presbytery of the Presbyterian Church. On April 11, 1860, the St. Anne Presbyterian Church was formally established.
Controversy once again visited the community before the year 1860 was over; 140 members of the Presbyterian congregation broke away — reportedly after a disagreement with Chiniquy — and formed the Second Presbyterian Church. Some thirty years later, the two Presbyterian congregations were reunited. In 1893, the present First Presbyterian Church was erected.
St. Anne’s diminished Catholic population, meanwhile, was without a resident priest from 1858 until early 1871, when Father Michael Letellier was appointed pastor. Construction of a stone church on Sixth Avenue at the north edge of town began in 1872, and was completed in 1873.
In the years following the Civil War, Charles Chiniquy (still called “Father” by his congregation) traveled and lectured extensively both in the United States and Europe. He authored four books, including a widely read autobiography, “Fifty Years in the Church of Rome.” He retired from his St. Anne pastorate in 1891, and returned to Canada, settling in Montreal.
The Presbyterian minister and former Catholic priest died in Montreal on Jan. 16, 1899, at the age of 89. He was buried beneath a tall stone monument in Montreal’s Mount Royal Cemetery.
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