Summary of our last meeting:
• Roger Baker presided over the meeting in the absence of Harold Meiderhoff.. Roger was charged by the group to find a president for next year.  There was discussion on the plans to honor our recent departed members.  Discussions also took place as to the final repository for the body of research material left behind by Phil G.  This of course is subject to his family's approval.
  
• Jim Skain gave us a fine presentation on the lives of two Catholic priests who were intimately involved with the Confederacy. Jim began his presentation by summarizing the political and social causes in the 1840s to 1850s which brought about the massive migration of the Irish out of Ireland to America.  On arrival in the land of opportunity, the Irish found that they were the brunt of much bigotry leveled against themselves and their Catholic religion. On the east coast, the rise of the "No Nothing" political movement appeared to voice the rampant anti-Catholic sentiments of the time.  In St. Louis, newly immigrated Germans with a differing religion and also trying to succeed in the New World seemed to be the local source of bigotry.  At the beginning of the Civil War, the Irish were faced with inhibiting effects of a strong centralized US government (something that they had left behind in Ireland) and local religious bigotry.  By the war's end some 275,000 Irish sided with the Union and some 25,000 fought on the side of the Confederacy. Jim's presentation chronicled two lives of two Irish priests caught in the turmoil of the War.
  
  Father John Bannon was educated in St. Louis and acted as Chaplin to various units of the Missouri Brigade. He also fought with this unit and after the Siege at Vicksburg he was summoned by Jefferson Davis to be a special envoy to the Pope to seek papal recognition of the Confederacy and to Ireland to recruit Irish for the Confederacy as well as to dissuade Irish from joining the Union forces. 

Father Abram Ryan also fought on the side of the Confederacy and administered to the Confederate Irish troops.  The loss of his brother in the war profoundly affected his life and the poetry that resulted from this loss and the loss of the War propelled Father Ryan into celebrity status.  Ryan became known as the "Poet Priest of the Confederacy" and for years after the Civil War his poems were recited in both the South and the North. 

Jim believes that both men made such significant contributions to the saga of the Civil War that there should be books written about their lives and contributions.  Today both men are largely forgotten.