From Waterloo to Indiana: The story of the first priest ordained in the state

By John Shaughnessy

Two details about Father Michael Shawe’s life provide an interesting insight into his personal American story.

He was the first priest to be ordained in Indiana.

Before becoming a priest, he served in the British calvary as an officer, fighting against the French and their leader Napolean during the epic 1815 battle of Waterloo that led to Napolean’s defeat and exile.

Still for Father Christopher Craig, a priest of the archdiocese today, the American journey of Father Shawe also offers something even more intriguing—a glimpse into the way that the Catholic Church began to make an impact in Indiana and the Midwest during the 1800s.

Father Craig shared that perspective in a video that was made during the time he was the pastor of Prince of Peace Parish and the chaplain of Father Michael Shawe Memorial Jr./Sr. High school, both in Madison.

“It was really the Catholic Church in the 1800s that really built the first schools,” Father Craig notes. “Public schools didn’t come in until even after that. It was always [the desire that] the Catholic Church would have schools to educate Catholic children. That was something that was very important to the Church.

“Shawe really brought Catholic education to Madison.”

Father Shawe helped achieve that goal in Madison in the 1830s, under the direction of Bishop Simon Bruté, the first bishop of the then-Diocese of Vincennes. The priest’s path to Madison is a story in itself.

“After his military service, he wanted to enter the priesthood, so he went into education in England but then moved to [a seminary] in France,” Father Craig says.

During Shawe’s studies there, Bishop Bruté recruited him to come to Indiana.

“We were very much a frontier Church,” Father Craig says. “We were considered a mission Church. In the 1830s, we were the missionaries, and many of the priests at that time in England wanted to go to China, but a lot of them were sent to the United States as the Church there was growing.”

At the time, the Diocese of Vincennes comprised the state of Indiana and a significant part of Illinois, Father Craig says.

“Bishop Brute had to recruit priests to come to the diocese, and he went back to France, and he met with Shawe, who was a seminarian at the time,” Father Craig says, noting that the two men had “an instant liking to each other.”

“He brought Shawe to the United States, and he was ordained here. So, he was the first priest ordained by Bishop Bruté, which therefore made him the first priest to be ordained in the state of Indiana.

“He was sent to Madison to find a church here. Madison at the time was a fairly big city. There were a lot of riverboats and growth in the city. And eventually [he] built St. Michael’s Church [now closed]. He got here in July of 1837. And then on December 22 in 1839 was the first Mass at St. Michael’s.”

Father Shawe’s legacy lives on nearly 190 years later in the high school in Madison that bears his name—a tribute to the first priest ordained in Indiana, a man who turned from fighting in a war to helping create a foundation of Catholic faith and education in the then-frontier of Indiana. †

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