Stephen Theodore Badin, Kentucky's earliest Catholic bard, was born at
Orleans, France, in 1768. Though very poor he received a classical and
theological training in Paris and Tours; and in 1792 he emigrated to
America. In the following year Badin was ordained by Bishop John Carroll
at Baltimore, he being the first Roman Catholic priest ordained in the
United States. He was subsequently appointed to do missionary work in
Kentucky, which was then in the old Baltimore diocese, and he made his
home at Georgetown, Kentucky. During the next few years Badin rode more
than one hundred thousand miles on horseback in order to meet all of his
appointments. He was then the only Catholic priest in Kentucky, though
he did have assistants from time to time. In 1797 Badin was made
vicar-general, and the large Catholic emigrations from Maryland to
Kentucky about this time greatly increased his labors. His _Principles
of Catholics_ (1805) was the first Catholic book published in the West,
and it gave him a larger audience than his voice could well reach. Badin
later organized missions and built churches in Louisville and Lexington,
St. Peter's in Lexington being made possible by the generosity of his
Protestant friends, of whom he had many. Badin and Bishop Benedict
Joseph Flaget, of the Bardstown diocese, had a misunderstanding as to
the settlement of titles to certain church properties which Badin had
acquired before Flaget came to Kentucky, and, rather than to have an
acrimonious argument with the Bishop, he quit Kentucky, in 1819, and
spent the next nine years in European travel. From 1830 to 1836 he
worked among the Pottawatomie Indians in Indiana with marked success.
Father Badin died at Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1853. He was the author of
several Latin poems in hexameters, among them being _Carmen Sacrum_, a
translation of which was published at Frankfort; _Epicedium_, an elegy
upon the death of Col. Joseph Hamilton Daviess at the battle of
Tippecanoe; and _Sanctissimae Trinitatis Laudes et Invocatis_
(Louisville, 1843). His brief in memoriam for Colonel Daviess is his
best known work and, perhaps, his masterpiece.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. _Sketches of Early Catholic Missions in Kentucky_,
by M. J. Spalding (Louisville, 1846); _The Centenary of
Catholicity in Kentucky_, by B. J. Webb (Louisville, 1884).