Along with his elder brother and other fellow French Canadian missionaries, Blanchet established the Catholic Church presence in what later became Washington.
On 28 July 1846, while serving as a canon in Montreal, Blanchet was appointed bishop of the new Diocese of Walla Walla in the Oregon Country area of the Pacific Northwest. Francois Blanchet had set up a Catholic church presence there in 1838, serving a bishop of the Diocese of Oregon City.[2] Augustin Blanchet was ordained bishop on 27 September 1846 by Archbishop Ignace Bourget at Saint-Jacques Cathedral in Montreal.
Blanchet left Montreal for Oregon Country on 4 March 1847 and arrived in Walla Walla on 5 September 1847. According to contemporary accounts, he was unhappy to discover that Walla Walla was no more than an trading post. Blanchet immediately ran into conflict with the Oblate order priests in the diocese performing missionary work. They refused Blanchet's efforts to assign them as parish priests.[4] Blanchet also tried to claim an Oblate mission property that the order had received from a Native American tribe.
Described as an inflexible and arrogant leader, Blanchet quickly alienated most of the secular priests in his diocese. Many of these priests attempted to join the Jesuit and Oblate orders to escape his control. In response, Blanchet introduced rules to make these transfers more difficult and to steer seminarians away from the orders.[4]
On 29 November 1847, two Protestantmissionaries and eight other Americans were murdered by some members of the Cayuse tribe in what was later termed the Whitman massacre. The killers mistakenly believed that the missionaries had poisoned 200 tribal members while trying to treat them for measles. Despite attempts by the tribe to defuse the conflict, American settlers raised militias to punish the tribe. Local Protestants accused the Catholic clergy of being in league with the Cayuse. This animosity, along with warfare between the Army and the Cayuse and the failure of the diocese to grow, prompted the Vatican to move Blanchet to a new episcopal see in St. Paul in the Willamette Valley.[2][4]
On 31 May 1850, Pope Pius IX established the Diocese of Nesqually (later spelled "Nisqually"), with its episcopal see in Vancouver, Washington, in what was by then known as the Oregon Territory, and named Blanchet bishop. Three years later, the Vatican dissolved the Diocese of Walla Walla and transferred much of its territory to the new Nesqually diocese.[2]
In 1868, Francis X. Prefontaine, a young priest and fellow Lower Canada native, requested Blanchet's permission to build a church building near Pioneer Square in Seattle to support the city's first Catholic parish, Our Lady of Good Help.[6] Blanchet believed that Seattle was a lost cause, but nevertheless he gave Prefontaine permission to build a church there, on the condition that Prefontaine raised all the money. Prefontaine in 1869 opened Seattle's Catholic church.[7][8]
Retirement and legacy
Pope Leo XIII accepted Blanchet's retirement as bishop of Nesqually on 23 December 1879, at age 82, and named him titular bishop of Ibora. He continued to live in the Nesqually area during his retirement. Augustin Blanchet died in Vancouver, Washington, on 25 February 1887.
Bishop Blanchet High School in Seattle's Green Lake neighborhood is named for Blanchet. In 1955, a priest conducting an exhumation of Blanchet's body to transport to a different burial site declared that it was incorrupt, or preserved by miraculous processes.[9]
