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Among the small band of 12 Jesuits who reached the bank of the Mississippi River opposite
St. Louis on May 31, 1823 was Peter J. Verhaegen. Not yet even ordained to the
priesthood, the young Belgian could hardly have imaged, as he gazed in awe at the
yellow-brown flood before him, that his own labors on the Missouri frontier would
establish his preeminence among pioneer Midwestern Jesuits. He was fated to place
the Vice-Province of Missouri on a firm foundation in support of its many endeavors,
plant the seeds of missionary activity among the Indians of the Northwest, and guide a
future great university through its first few precarious years of existence. He
could not know it then, but Verhaegen was a man of destiny.
Only the second Jesuit priest ordained in Missouri, Verhaegen was given the task of
shepherd to the struggling parish in St. Charles. He raised its first substantial
church, replacing the decaying log structure with a sturdy and even imposing stone
edifice. Not contemptuous of manual labor, the young priest lent his own brawn
to the construction of his new church, and was not above begging for funds to complete
it on his infrequent trips to St. Louis. St. Charles Borromeo was finished in 1828,
and Verhaegen immediately received a promotion to president of the fledgling St. Louis
College, soon to become Saint Louis University.
First president of the University, which received its charter under his aegis in 1832,
Verhaegen has remained the youngest president in its history. The Diamond Jubilee
volume of the school credits Verhaegen with chief responsibility for planning the original
college building and implementing the plan of studies, as well as being "the mainspring
of all its important works and movements, leaving on the institution his impress, which
was long afterwards plainly discernible." It was Verhaegen, too, who was the
driving force behind the establishment of the first medical school at Saint Louis
University, which threw open its doors for its first lectures in the fall of 1842.
In 1836 Verhaegen was appointed head of the Missouri Vice-Province, a post he occupied
for seven years. During this time he moved the base of Jesuit operations from
Florissant to Saint Louis University, chose his dear friend Father Pierre Jean De Smet
in answer to a petition for a priest addressed to him by a delegation of Native Americans,
and continued to serve as president of the University's Board of Trustees.
Verhaegen's rise continued with a three-year stint as Maryland provincial and a term as
the first president of St. Joseph's College in Bardstown, Kentucky. His life and
work came full circle when he returned to Missouri as pastor at St. Charles Borromeo in
1851. He died in St. Charles, one of his favorite haunts, in 1868.
Verhaegen was a big man, six feet tall and solidly built. Outgoing and universally
popular, he adapted quickly to his new life in America. His English was exceptional
and his good humor infectious, as can be seem from some of the patriotic ditties he penned
in honor of his new homeland. His portraits give us a homely but eminently kind and
patient face. A contemporary eulogized Verhaegen upon his death: He "was
a man of superior mind, of profound knowledge and of a most genial manner. He was the
friend of all who knew him, was cheerful and had a kind word for all who came near
him." Today he is sometimes accounted the greatest president that Saint Louis
University enjoyed during the nineteenth century, and generally acknowledged as the man to
whom the work of the Midwestern Jesuits "owes its permanence and its lasting
achievements."
The year 2000 marks the bicentennial of the birth of this man of destiny. The
exhibit mounted in his honor in the University Archives is only one of several events
planned by the University administration to recall the character and labors of one of
the founding fathers of the Jesuit presence in the West.
Christine F. Harper
September 2000
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