Free A Wilderness So Immense by Jon Kukla Page A

Spain reviving his appointment as Louisiana’s commissary of the Holy Office (the official name of the infamous Inquisition) and directing Father Sedella to suppress and confiscate subversive literature in the colony. The Capuchins had begun as a fervent reform movement within the Franciscan order, and their man in New Orleans was ready to embrace his inquisitorial authority with “exact fidelity and zeal.” 3

    Deported by Governor Miró in
1790
after he attempted to bring the Inquisition into Louisiana, the Spanish Capuchin Francisco Antonio Ildefonso de Sedella returned to New Orleans and was elected pastor of St. Louis Cathedral on March 14, 1804. Although he was popular with many New Orleanians, Pére Antoine clashed with religious authorities appointed by the new American bishop, Charles Carroll of Baltimore, and caused a schism in the Louisiana Church. Sedella outlived most of his rivals, however, and was widely mourned after his death on January 22, 1829.
(Courtesy Louisiana State Museum)
    Father Sedella promised Miró the “utmost secrecy and precaution” in his pursuit of New Orleanians who were sure to possess writings condemned by the Church. By 1790 Church censors had compiled a lengthy list of authors and titles they regarded as dangerous. The
Index Librorum Prohibitorum
had been updated two dozen times since its first publication in 1559, and its definition of immoral and heretical works was sweeping. Theology presented the usual suspects, including liberal Catholics such as Abelard and Erasmus and Protestants from Calvin to Zwingli, but Father Sedella’s new credentials also empowered him to expunge the European Enlightenment from the bookshelves of Louisiana. The
Index
condemned the political writings of Montesquieu, Voltaire, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau along with Michel de Montaigne’s
Essays,
Denis Diderot’s
Encyclopedia,
and the philosophical works of Rene Descartes. Prominent English authors were seen as equally sinister. The puritan poet John Milton’s
State Papers
were prohibited along with John Locke’s
Essay Concerning Human Understanding,
the satire and journalism of Jonathan Swift and Daniel Defoe, Edward Gibbon’s
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,
and everything from the materialist pen of Thomas Hobbes. Until the moment that Pére Antoine entered Governor Miró’s office in April 1790, however, the Inquisition had not ventured onto the North American mainland, preferring to apprehend errant residents of Louisiana only when they traveled to Mexico, Cuba, or Spain. The zealous Capuchin was eager to set things right in the colony, and he advised the governor that his mission would require “recourse at any hour of the night to the Corps de Garde from which I may draw the necessary troops to … carry on my operations.” 4
    Before Miró could finish reading the documents Father Sedella had given him, the monk had rushed from the governor’s office as quickly as he had arrived. The next day, ablaze with the urgency of his holy assignment, the Capuchin grew impatient as the hours passed without word from Governor Miró. At six o’clock, from his spartan room near the Place d’Armes, Father Sedella sent Governor Miró a formal order complaining that the success of his assignment for the Inquisition was imperiled by Miró’s “tardy measures.” He demanded that Miró “inform me withoutfurther delay what steps you intend to take so that I may proceed promptly to accomplish my task.” 5
    That night the newly appointed representative of the Inquisition was roused from his bed by heavy knocking. As yet unaware of the parallel between his midnight visitors and Carlos Ill’s midnight expulsion of the Jesuits from Spain for their complicity in an assassination plot and growing support of the Inquisition in 1767, the Capuchin monk greeted Governor Miró’s officer and the platoon of royal grenadiers who stood at his door.
    “My friends, I thank you and his Excellency for the readiness