The Bureau of Catholic Indian Missions was a Roman Catholic institution created in 1874 by J. Roosevelt Bayley, Archbishop of Baltimore, for the protection and promotion of Catholic mission interests among Native Americans in the United States.
History
In 1872, the Catholic bishops of Oregon and Washington Territory sent Father Jean-Baptiste Brouillet to Washington as their representative to settle claims against the United States. However, the effort grew quickly to represent all U.S. Catholic dioceses with claims related to past mission work among Native Americans. Late in the following year, Archbishop Bayley appointed General Charles Ewing as Catholic Commissioner of Indian Missions to represent the dioceses, which was an appointment Brouillet and the Northwest bishops had requested nine years earlier.
Prominent among the Catholic claims were the allotment of only seven Indian reservations under the Peace Policy of President Ulysses S. Grant. Based on the past work by Catholic missionaries among those tribes, the Catholic dioceses had expected allotments to 38 of the 73 reservations. Beginning in 1869, Grant had crafted a policy of close church-state collaboration through the Board of Indian Commissioners as a means to maintain peace with the tribes and to fight the corruption in government that was rampant within the Office of Indian Affairs. In force to 1881, the policy's implementation gave Catholic missionaries exclusive religious domain to the reservations allotted to the Catholic Church, but also denied Native American Catholics on other reservations their freedom of religion to attend local Catholic churches and schools.
While addressing the Catholic mission concerns with the government, the new Office of Catholic Commissioner also built its support within the Catholic Church. It solicited aid from the bishops and laity through various appeals and through allied fundraising organizations, such as the Catholic Indian Missionary Association. The weak initial responses prompted James McMaster, editor of the New York Freeman's Journal and Catholic Register, to call for the Office’s closure, which in 1879, led to its reorganizing and renaming as the Bureau of Catholic Indian Missions. Meanwhile, in June that year, the Sacred Congregation of the Propaganda of the Holy See approved of the Catholic Bureau, and in 1884, the Third Plenary Council of Baltimore confirmed it and added a board of directors composed of bishops. The council also created a Lenten collection for Native American and African American missions under a Commission for the Catholic Missions among the Colored People and the Indians with responsibilities to support the missions and the Catholic Bureau.
While the Peace Policy remained in force, the government collaborated with Christian organizations to provide schools for Native Americans. As needed, the Commissioner of Indian Affairs approved annual contracts with religious organizations, which provided school personnel and buildings, while the government provided financial support for the tuition and boarding expenses. Under this system, the Catholic Bureau successfully expanded the number of Catholic schools for Native Americans from three with $7,000 in government contracts in 1873 to 38 with $395,000 in contracts 20 years later. This alarmed the Indian Rights Association and its supporters, who saw the Catholic native schools as part of the overall growth of U.S. Catholic schools and a threat to the culture of the United States and the principle of the separation of church and state. Consequently, they supported a national school system plan for Native American children put forth in 1889 by Thomas Jefferson Morgan, which he began to implement the following year when he took office as Commissioner of Indian Affairs. Morgan’s plan did not allow for the creation of new contracts with religiously-affiliated schools and it called for the gradual phasing out of the existing ones. Committed to saving the contract-dependent Catholic schools, Catholic Bureau director Father Joseph Stephan achieved some success in bypassing the Office of Indian Affairs and securing direct appropriations from the United States Congress. However, he encountered substantial opposition, which he believed was orchestrated by Morgan. Relations between them deteriorated, and in July 1891, Morgan severed all relations with the Catholic Bureau, which continued until Morgan left office two years later. Nonetheless, Morgan’s school plan remained and Congress phased out most contracts with religious schools from 1896 to 1900, which caused a number of the Catholic schools to close.