The Right Reverend John B. Brondel
Bishop of Helena
John Baptist Brondel was born sixty-two years ago in Bruges, the quaint old Flemish city of which Longfellow sang. The date of his birth was February 23, 1842, and his
parents were Charles Joseph and Isabella Becquet Brondel. His father, who followed the business of chair-manufacturer in his native Bruges, died in 1868; his mother died in 1875. Both father and mother possessed the same intensely religious nature which was so characteristic of their son. Of seven children, five of whom were boys, John Baptist was the sixth child and the fifth boy.
The month of September, 1866, saw Father Brondel's departure for the far-away diocese of Nesqually, to which he had been admitted by the Rt. Rev. Bishop A. M. A.
Blanchet. After a long and tedious journey, by way of England and the Isthmus of Panama, he landed at Fort Vancouver, his bishop's residence, on All Hallow's Eve.
Here he spent the next ten months in the double capacity of teacher at the Holy Angels' College and of assistant at the Cathedral.
He improved his every opportunity at Fort Vancouver to master the Chinook tongue — a jargon of Indian dialects, French, and English, understood by all the
Indians of the Pacific Coast. When accordingly, agreeable to his desires, he was named, on the feast of St. Augustine, 1867, for the mission of Steilacoom, on the
Puget Sound, he was equipped all around for the task that awaited him there with the Indians of three neighboring reservations, and with the white farmers and the lumber mill hands who were quietly but surely invading the country.
In 1870 he built, at the cost of $420, the first church at Olympia, then the capital of the Territory of Washington, as it is now that of the State. Five families formed the Catholic church membership of the town at the time.
BISHOP OF VANCOUVER
Dec. 14, 1879, in what was to be his episcopal church for the next three years, after eleven years of unremitting toil on the Sound, and one year between these spent in Eastern Washington, at Walla Walla and Frenchtown, the modest missionary saw himself called to take the place of his classmate and friend, Bishop Chas. Seghers, as chief pastor of the Vancouver Diocese.
The year after his consecration. Bishop Brondel had the privilege of dedicating to America's first Saint Alaska's first Catholic church, built at Fort Wrangle by Father J. Althoff, the first priest, and for years the only one, in the Polar country.
BISHOP OF HELENA
In 1882 he took to Rome the prayer of the Bishops of the Oregon Province for the erection of Montana into a separate diocese. On April 21, 1883, the bearer of the request was himself appointed administrator of Montana, though he still retained the title of Bishop of Vancouver.
By bull of March 7, 1884, Leo XIII erected the vicariate into a diocese with Helena as the episcopal see. A bull of the same date appointed the subject of our biographical sketch the first Bishop of the new diocese.
From the book, The Right Reverend John B. Brondel, A Memorial