1595 The Life of John Lancaster Spalding First Bishop of Peoria, 1840-1916, by David Francis Sweeney, O.F.M. (read 11 Nov 1980) The subject of this biography was born at Lebanon, Ky., on June 2, 1840, studied at Louvain, was ordained on 19 Dec 1863 by the Cardinal Archbishop of Malines, Belgium, at his Cathedral, was consecrated first bishop of Peoria on May 1, 1877, in old St Patrick's Cathedral in New York, with Cardinal McCloskey as consecrator and Bishop Foley of Chicago and Bishop Gibbons of Baltimore as co-consecrators. His life was bound up with all the interesting trials of the American Church in the subsequent years so familiar to me from my reading of The Great Crisis in American Catholic History, 1895-1900, by Thomas T. McAvoy on 30 Sept 1961, the biography of Cardinal Gibbons on 18 Oct 1961, the biography of Archbishop Ireland 27 Oct 1961, and McAvoy's A History of the Catholic Church in the United States on 17 June 1975. This volume had not yet been published in 1961 or I would have read it then. It is adequately written though it tends to be a little spare--and not overly revealing. Bishop Spalding was stricken on Jan 6, 1905, and resigned as Bishop of Peoria in 1908. He died Aug 25, 1916. A very worthwhile book, and one must agree Bishop Spalding did a lot of good. ( )