"Dear and Beloved Pastor:—For several years we have been witnesses
of the persecution of which you are the subject, on the part of the
bad priests, your neighbors, and on the part of the unworthy Bishop of
Chicago: but we also have been the witnesses of your sacerdotal virtues—
of your forbearance of their calumnies—and our respect and affection for
your person has but increased at the sight of those trials.
"We know that you are persecuted, not only because you are a Canadian
priest, and that you like us, but also because you do us good in making
a sacrifice of your own private fortune to build school-houses and to feed
our teachers at your own table. We know that the Bishop of Chicago, who
resembles more an angry wolf than a pastor of the church, having destroyed
the prosperous congregation of Chicago by taking away from them their
splendid church, which they had built at the cost of many sacrifices, and
giving it to the Irish population, and having discouraged the worthy population
of Bourbonnais Grove in forcing on them drunken and scandalous
priests, wants to take you away from among us, to please Spink, the greatest
enemy of the French population. They even say that the bishop, carrying
iniquity to its extreme bonds, wanted to interdict you. But as our church
cannot, and is not willing to sanction evil and calumny, we know that all
those interdicts, based on falsehood and spite, are null and void.
"We therefore solicit you not to give way in presence of the perfidious
plots of your enemies, and not to leave us. Stay among us as our pastor
and our father, and we solemnly promise to sustain you in all your hardships
to the end, and to defend you against our enemies. Stay among us,
to instruct us in our duties by your eloquent speeches, and to enlighten us
by your pious examples. Stay among us, to guard us against the perfidious
designs of the Bishop of Chicago, who wants to discourage and destroy our
prosperous colony, as he has already discouraged and destroyed other congregations
of the French Canadians, by leaving them without a pastor, or
by forcing on them unworthy priests."
