Jamey, Father Victor, Convent, Louisiana, to Archbishop John Mary Odin, C.M., New Orleans, Louisiana, 1862 February 3

Odin should beg Father Napoleon Joseph Perché not to speak about the abominable question of slavery any more. With his anti-canonical title of the official newspaper of the diocese, he could completely paralyze Odin's trip to France putting him in a bad light and perhaps making him badly received. Twenty times he has repeated this unintelligible nonsense: We conservatives do not recognize in man any other spiritual right than that of attaining the spiritual end by knowing, loving and serving God. That only signifies that the Poles, the Irish, the Neapolitans and other Italians neither can nor should throw off the yoke of oppression because they can attain their end. He wonders where the means are for the Negroes to attain their end. Perché defends Bishop Augustine Verot's discourse, but who cannot see that the second part of it peremptorily refutes the first because the author certainly has no hope of seeing put into practice, in this country, the conditions which he poses for the legitimacy of slavery. Perché repeats to satiety that the Christian religion does not condemn slavery directly no, but indirectly yes. Prudence requires that one should not speak against these institutions and the Church gives an example of this silence, but for one to defend them is not Christian. On his first trip to the city he will give Odin a more complete and solid critique of Verot's sermon. The Propagateur Catholique is much too belligerent and much too concerned with their institutions. He asks Odin to burn this page after he has read it. It is obvious, and consequently useless, to prove that the abolitionists of the North have in view a double crime, the extermination of the whites and blacks of the South. On his last trip to the city, Father Anthony? Jourdan, S.J. made him promise to spend two months with him. As he hopes that the blockade will be raised by April, he asks Odin to send his replacement by the end of February. Father Eleazar Vignonet is very angry with him Vignonet has not addressed any complaints to him, but he has not seen him since three days after the retreat. He told Jamey, in the presence of certain individuals, that he would do all that he could to oblige him to leave. Since then, a number of anonymous notes, written in pencil and of a very bad taste, have been found in the house and around it. It is a scandal that Jamey deplores for Vignonet and for St. Michael's. He makes himself more and more impossible at the Convent of the Religious of the Sacred Heart and unpopular in his parish. If it were possible for Odin to stop at Convent while going to Baton Rouge, he would fill everyone with joy. :: VI-2-f A.L.S. French 4pp. 4to.