1804–1847: (Rum and Schism: The Church in Ruins and the Rise of the Evangelical Zoo): The Catholic Church’s low estate in Haiti was one of dilapidation that …

1804–1847: (Rum and Schism: The Church in Ruins and the Rise of the Evangelical Zoo): The Catholic Church’s low estate in Haiti was one of dilapidation that could not be laid at the door of Pétion or Boyer alone, for the Church in Saint-Domingue had never amounted to much — casually established among adventurers, run-down aristocrats, transported convicts, and debauched planters, the Church had never been properly organized or manned, and after 1804 what survived was rent by faction and schism. Though the constitutions of 1806 and 1816 specifically re-established Catholicism as the religion of Haiti, hardly any of the original French priests were left: in Henry’s kingdom, despite the Almanach Royal recording dioceses and seminaries, there were but three ordained priests including Msgr. Brelle, the instant archbishop. Boyer sincerely wanted a respectable, re-established Church, but the sticking point was who would control it — the state or the Vatican — and in the adamant Gallican, Jacobin tradition the constitution gave Boyer power to name a bishop who would ordain a priesthood, while the Holy See had not the slightest intention of creating a bishopric by rubber-stamping some nominee of Boyer and Inginac. By 1840, the Haitian priesthood had become what the authors called an “evangelical zoo”: the curé of Port-au-Prince, Father Cazalta, had been unfrocked at home for shooting his father with a horse pistol, his crony Negroni at Mirebalais had been swept out of France for high living, and Father Suzini at Dondon was a fugitive from the galleys at Marseilles. John Candler, visiting in 1840, reported that the chief object of the ecclesiastics in Haiti was to secure gold and silver as quickly as they could, baptizing not only children for gain but also houses, boats, and doorposts.