Old Catholic Stuff

The Grand Army of the Republic was America’s premier organization for Civil War veterans. At its peak in 1890, it had 490,000 members and had considerable political clout. This photo from the book Catholic Pages of American History shows the members of GAR’s Notre Dame Post 569, which was founded in 1897 at the University of Notre Dame. What made Post 569 post unique was that it was composed entirely of priests and religious brothers from the Congregation of the Holy Cross. During the Civil War, the Holy Cross Fathers provided more priests as chaplains to the military than any other order or diocese. One of Post 569’s members was William A. Olmsted (1834-1909), the only Civil War general to become a Catholic priest.