“I go to my death:” Priests brave illness to serve Louisiana city

In my (mostly) stable and unexciting life as a parish priest, I find myself now and again thinking of the challenges my predecessors faced when this country was much newer. Learning about the story of the Shreveport martyrs brought that topic into sharper relief for me. 

Tropical areas of the western hemisphere have been quite susceptible to the ravages of mosquito-borne diseases like malaria or yellow fever. Stories abound of the problems workers faced while digging the Panama Canal. Yellow fever claimed the life of Blessed Francis Xavier Seelos, a Redemptorist priest in New Orleans, in 1867. Six years later, an epidemic tore through the Louisiana city of Shreveport that would eventually claim some 1,200 lives in all—nearly one-fourth of its population. Among the victims were five heroic Catholic priests whose lives and ordeal Father Mangum and his co-authors detail strikingly in Shreveport Martyrs of 1873. 

The diocese of Natchitoches included the region of northwest Louisiana until the Holy See later carved it up to form the Dioceses of Alexandria and Shreveport. Whereas New Orleans has a rich and lengthier Catholic history, Shreveport was founded much later and had a more heterogeneous demographic makeup. Commerce by ship helped speed the river city’s robust growth in the mid-19th century. Bishop Martin, like many of his American colleagues, was in desperate need of clergy to serve his burgeoning flock. He made several trips to Brittany in his native France to recruit seminarians and priests for ministry to his sheep, which included sizeable Creole and Mexican contingents. Five clerics who answered the call are at the heart of this story. 

The worst of the effects of yellow fever struck Shreveport from August to October of 1873. What is for us a refreshing time of late summer and autumn was a season of prolonged heat, humidity, and ample rains. Poor drainage in Shreveport proper led to copious amounts of standing water—prime breeding grounds for mosquitoes. The first killing frost would be many weeks away. 

A populace searching for any productive remedies from the dreaded illness went to odd extremes. “City officials…place tar barrels in the streets and burned them to release dense clouds of black smoke, a practice thought to rid the atmosphere of poisonous vapors or ‘miasma.’ The fumes indeed helped, somewhat, but by unintentionally repelling mosquitoes.”  

The authors paint a grim and vivid picture, not only of the miseries of the epidemic, but also of the obstacles these priests faced in their ministry. For example, Father Louis Gergaud, founding pastor of the first parish in Monroe, was subjected to mistreatment in the streets from gangs of hoodlums and the anti-Catholic prejudice of many of the Bible-Belt community’s residents. Father Gergaud did not hesitate when the urgent telegram came to him begging his assistance in Shreveport. Before boarding the stagecoach, he sent the following message: “Write to the Bishop and tell him I go to my death; it is my duty and I must go.” 

It humbles me to picture in my mind these five young to middle-aged men serving so boldly and working tirelessly while they had the strength. Toward the end of each one’s life, they were as ill as most of the people whom they visited but gave of themselves as long as they could, celebrating the sacraments and encouraging the suffering to fix their eyes on eternal rewards.  

These five priests of Shreveport, transplants from western France, are not martyrs in the same dramatic sense of early church figures standing before Roman emperors and prefects. However, they laid down their lives all the same, imitating the love of Christ. Their valiant witness has prompted the Bishop of Shreveport to promote their cause for canonization. Dear Shreveport Martyrs, servants of God, pray for us. Amen.