1841–1860: (By Schisms Rent Asunder: The Church, the Concordat, and the Long Road to Rome): In Rome during March 1841, Pope Gregory XVI told Bishop Rosati, d…

1841–1860: (By Schisms Rent Asunder: The Church, the Concordat, and the Long Road to Rome): In Rome during March 1841, Pope Gregory XVI told Bishop Rosati, dispatched on his nearly successful mission to return the Church to Haiti, that he would not die easy without the consolation of seeing “this poor abandoned country become Christian again” — his boon ungranted, for Gregory died in 1846. The real difficulties obstructing reconciliation between Haiti and Rome were threefold: first, the deeply Jacobin mentality of educated Haitians, whose favorite prelate was not the Pontiff but Abbé Grégoire, the schismatic bishop of 1793 whose Gallicanism had sundered France from Rome; second, the inescapable suspicion that Rome’s approach had to be pursued through a French-speaking and therefore largely French clergy whose Bon-Dieu was the French Bon-Dieu of the blan against whom Boukman had set his face in 1791; and third, the most resistant obstacle of all — a scalawag clergy of profane and godless men from every religious order in Europe, and not a few jails, who had found a good thing in Haiti and feared nothing so much as the day when the Pope’s writ and discipline would again run. Father Eugène Tisserant, a zealous young French mulâtre priest descended from General Bauvais, was commissioned as apostolic prefect in 1843 but was defeated by a cabal of ragtag cassocks, the pervasive network of Freemasons, and a faction of schismatic crypto-Masonic priests called “Templiers.” The central figure in all this intrigue was Abbé Cessens — “Ce démon, Cessens,” as Father Pierre Percin called him — who wangled from Rome a caretaker designation as “Ecclesiastic Superior” and would later anoint Soulouque with Marseilles salad oil. Finally, in 1860, Geffrard sent plenipotentiaries Pierre Faubert and J.-P. Boyer to Rome, where on March 28 a concordat was signed, little different from Bishop Rosati’s draft years earlier, and Msgr. Testard du Cosquer, a former French army chaplain, was consecrated Haiti’s first archbishop, bringing forty priests from the Congregation of the Holy Spirit and a cadre of nuns. What Césaire would call the Church’s civilizing alibi — its claim to bring light to darkness — operated in Haiti with peculiar force, for the concordat simultaneously represented a genuine institutional achievement and a deepening of the epistemological colonization through which European Christianity continued to define the terms of legitimate spiritual practice in the world’s first Black republic.