Religion: For Father Richard

Of U. S. cities which occasionally celebrate the memories of their pioneers, not many dedicate a day every year to a clergyman, and only one can devote ceremonies to a Roman Catholic priest who was a Congressman. To Detroit, last week brought Gabriel Richard Day, the lyoth anniversary of the birth of a Catholic who helped build the city. Under the chairmanship of Catholic Archbishop Edward Mooney, Michigan’s Catholic Governor Frank Murphy and Dr. Joseph Anderson Vance of Detroit’s First Presbyterian Church, the day was celebrated with high mass, a parade, a banquet, a speech by onetime Governor Chase Salmon Osborn, author of a biography of Father Richard, and a wreath-laying at a statue of the priest which stands before Detroit’s city hall.

Gabriel Richard, a priest of the teaching Sulpician Order, left his native France during the revolution, was sent to Illinois as a missionary, finally settled in Detroit in 1798. Arriving two years after the U. S. had annexed the Michigan territory, Father Richard was a leader of the village of less than 1,000 a year before its first merchant arrived. The priest brought Michigan its first piano, its first organ (whose pipes Indians stole, returned when they suspected the Great Spirit was angry), its first printing press on which he got out the territory’s first newspaper, the Michigan Essay and Impartial Observer. When Detroit burned to the ground in 1805, Father Richard’s St. Anne’s Church was gone and he set up in a tent, later building a new church and six schools beside. With a Presbyterian named Rev. John Monteith he founded in 1817 what is now the University of Michigan, the Presbyterian becoming president and holding seven professorships, the Catholic vice president with six professorships. In 1823 Father Richard was elected to the 18th Congress of the U. S. as third delegate from the Michigan territory. Four years later, recommended to the Vatican for the second time as a candidate for a bishopric, he was appointed, but the papal bull of appointment was not signed because U. S. prelates reported that Father Richard had once served a jail term. Before the Vatican discovered that the jailing had been for an unpaid judgment for slander, won by a man whom Father Richard had excommunicated for deserting his wife and remarrying another, Father Richard died in a cholera epidemic of 1832. He left a library of 3,000 volumes, then probably the Midwest’s largest, and a number of letters for which his current biographers have hunted in vain.