1873, March 19: (A Cheering Sound of Salvation: Protestantism and the Contest for Haiti’s Soul): On March 19, 1873, Archbishop Guilloux issued a pastoral let…

1873, March 19: (A Cheering Sound of Salvation: Protestantism and the Contest for Haiti’s Soul): On March 19, 1873, Archbishop Guilloux issued a pastoral letter sternly warning the faithful of the pitfalls surrounding them, alluding to the delirious impieties of the French Revolution and the dangerous thoughts of Voltaire before moving swiftly to the present: the Anglo-American sect calling itself Episcopal had in 1867 taken advantage of civil disorders to lay the first stones of a temple in the capital and even distributed a French translation of the Book of Common Prayer, flaunting the pretension of founding a national church to which they gave the incoherent appellation of Catholic and Apostolic Haitian Church. Yet Protestantism was not new in Haiti: Henry Christophe had brought a Church of England missionary to the Royal College as early as 1815, Pétion invited Methodist teachers in 1817 — who described Haiti as a land where Christianity was unknown save through the disguise of Popery — and the Wesleyan mission in Port-au-Prince had flourished since 1818. Father Holly, the Episcopal missionary who eventually became a naturalized Haitian, strenuously advocated raising up a national clergy, a policy never thought of by any other denomination. Holly’s consecration in 1874 created a Haitian Episcopal Church within the oversight of the parent American church, offering the Haitian government — which often found the concordat irksome — an alternative religious establishment whose essentially Catholic liturgy seemed less foreign, whose church-state dogmas derived from the Gallicanism of Grégoire, and whose weaker institutional presence was less threatening than Guilloux’s disciplined Catholic archdiocese. Yet out of 93 Catholic priests receiving government stipends, 91 were French — only two Haitian ordinations had resulted from thirteen years of the concordat — and Bassett observed in 1877 that France had maintained through the Roman Catholic clergy almost exclusive control over the religious affairs of the people, an ecclesiastical colonialism invoking fundamental principles and deeply felt Haitian sensitivities.