The Biographical Dictionary of America/Badin, Stephen Theodore

BADIN, Stephen Theodore, missionary, was born in Orleans, France, in 1768. His parents were poor, and at much sacrifice gave him a classical education at the College Montagu in Paris, after which he entered the Sulpitian academy at Tours to be fitted for the priesthood. He immigrated to the United States in 1792, where he was ordained by Bishop Carroll, in the cathedral at Baltimore, Md., in 1793, the first ordination of a Roman Catholic priest in America. He studied English at the college in Georgetown, and was then given a mission in Kentucky, at that time in the diocese of Baltimore, that extended over a territory covering hundreds of miles, which, in the unsettled state of the country he was obliged to traverse on horseback. In 1796 he was proffered the rectorship of St. Genevieve, but it did not suit the good missionary to give up a life of hardship for one of ease while work remained to be done. He had been for three years the only priest in Kentucky, when Bishop Carroll, in 1797, appointed him vicar-general and gave him an assistant, who was taken from him by death in the following year. Other assistants given him either died or withdrew, and in 1803 Father Badin's work was rendered more arduous by the rapid increase of Catholic immigration. In 1805 he published "Principles of Catholics." In 1806 he inaugurated a mission at Louisville, and in 1811 he built the church of St. Louis in that city. In 1812 his Protestant friends were mainly instrumental in providing him with funds to erect the church of St. Peter in Lexington. A difference between himself and Bishop Flaget, in regard to the title of certain church property, in 1808, caused Father Badin to leave Kentucky in 1819. He spent nine years in Europe, and on his return again took up missionary work, this time in Michigan, under Bishop Fenwick, where he labored for more than a year among the new settlers, when he was sent to the Pottawatomie Indians on St. Joseph's river, Indiana, where he spent the years 1830 to 1836 in Christianizing and civilizing these primitive people. The remaining years of his life were spent in Cincinnati, where he lived with Bishop Purcell. Father Badin, during his missionary labors, travelled over one hundred thousand miles on horseback mostly through the wilderness. He wrote "Carmen Sacrum," the "Epicedium," and "Sanctissimæ Trinitatis Laudes et Invocatis," Latin poems in hexameter verse, all of which were translated and published. He died in 1853.