Edward Fenwick

Edward Dominic Fenwick OP ( born August 19, 1768 in Saint Mary's County, Maryland, † September 26, 1832 in Wooster ( Ohio)) was an American Dominicans, pioneer of the Roman Catholic Church in the United States, from 1822 until his death of the first Bishop of Cincinnati.

Life

Dominican and missionary priests

Edward Fenwick was born into a Catholic family settlers in Maryland. His father, a wealthy colonel, was in the Revolutionary War on the side of the colonies. Edward was sent at age 16 to the Holy Cross College of the English Dominicans in Bornem in the Austrian Netherlands. There he was a seminarian, studied theology and entered the Dominican Order in 1788 and received priestly ordination in 1793. He then received a teaching position at the same college.

1792, the Austrian Netherlands were conquered by French troops in 1795 and annexed. In the course of revolutionary anticlericalism Bornemer the monastery was dissolved and its educational institutions. Fenwick went to the Dominican monastery in Carshalton, Surrey, England. There he won three brothers for the Catholic mission in the United States. In 1804 they crossed the Atlantic. Bishop John Carroll of Baltimore put them the barely -developed area of Kentucky to the heart.

Fenwick and his companions found a suitable farm area near Springfield (Kentucky), where they founded the first Dominican subsidiary in the USA St. Rose of Lima. Already in 1807 established the Superior General Giuseppe Pio Gaddi the new Province of the Order of St. Joseph for the United States under Fenwick's line. This initially returned to Maryland to his paternal inheritance to sell and build from the proceeds of the monastery. In the following years came convent building, church and school. Fenwick traveled further than missionary priests through the Midwest, now with a focus on Ohio.

Bishop of Cincinnati

1821, Pope Pius VII, the diocese Cincinnati for the entire territory of Ohio. For the first bishop he appointed Edward Dominic Fenwick, of, the bishop ordained in the convent church of St. Rosa by the Bishop of Bardstown, Benedict Joseph Flaget PSS on 13 January 1822. The new bishop were initially only six priests to the side; all Dominicans.

1823 Fenwick took a trip to Europe to raise money and equipment for the construction of his diocese. He was two French, one Spanish and win a Swiss priest for his diocesan clergy. The first Prokathedrale was built as a wooden structure. In 1829 there arose the St. Francis Xavier seminary. 1831 ordered the diocese than 22 churches, 24 priests, 13 seminarians and a Catholic weekly newspaper.

In 1832 broke out in the Great Lakes region of a cholera epidemic. At its annual visitation Bishop Fenwick was infected and died in Wooster in a hotel room.