CHEVERUS, jean Louis Anne Magdeleine Lefebvre de, French bishop and •••••• 1 Cw•I, ;••• • h• Mayenne, France, 28 Jan. 1768; d. Bordeaux, 19 July 1836. He was ordained priest in 1790. Refusing to take the constitutional oath re garding the clergy, he was imprisoned at Paris as contumacious in 1792, but escaped to Eng land. There he engaged in missionary worlc, but in 1796 he came to Boston, Mass., where he was noted for his graceful and winning pulpit eloquence. In an epidemic of yellow fever in the city he ministered bodily and spiritually to the stricken. He studied the language of the Abenaki Indians on the Penobscot and the Passamaquoddy in Maine, visited their settle ments and remained among them at his first visit three months; and every year thereafter he repeated his visit to them, built them a church and procured for them a missionary priest, who thereafter till his 20 years later, devoted himself to their spiritual care. On the occasion of a visit of President John Adams to Boston, the two seats of honor at a public banquet were reserved for the chief magistrate and the priest. Mr. Adams' name
headed the list of names of subscribers to a fund to erect a church for Cheverus' congrega tion. In 1810 Cheverus was consecrated bishop of Boston and entered on the duties of the episcopate with a zeal' and industry that taxed his strength to the utmost, and his phy sicians in 1823 counseled his return to his native land. There the French king, Charles X, named him bishop of Montauban, and, in 1826, bishop of Bordeaux and a peer of France. Here in a visitation of cholera he placarded his episcopal palace as a maison de secours or dis pensary. At the instance of King Louis Philippe the Pope, Pius VII, in 1836 created him a cardinal. The position that Boston now holds in the Catholic Church is due to the earnestness, zeal and skilful administration of Cheverus during his years of labor there. Con sult 'Life,' by Huen-Dubourg (1837).