Edward Fenwick

Bishop Edward Dominic Fenwick, O.P. (b. August 19, 1768, St. Mary's County (Maryland) - d. September 26, 1832, Wooster, Ohio) was an American Dominican.

Edward Fenwick was born August 19, 1768 on the family plantation on the Patuxent river, in the Colony of Maryland to Colonel Ignatius Fenwick and Sarah Taney. Colonel Fenwick was a military figure of the American Revolution and one of the early Catholic families of Maryland. At that time, Jesuit missionaries ministered to Maryland Catholics. Many families sent their sons abroad to study, and at sixteen years of age, Edward was sent to the Dominican Holy Cross College in Bornheim, near Antwerp, Belgium, where his uncle was a teacher. The school was under the jurisdiction of the English Province of Dominicans.

In 1788 Fenwick joined the Dominican Order and entered the seminary at Bornheim as a theological student, and chose the name, "Dominic". Edward Dominic Fenwick was ordained February 23, 1793 and became a professor at the Dominican College. When Belgium was invaded during the French Revolution, Fenwick was imprisoned, but later released upon proof of his American citizenship. The school re-located to Carshalton, England. Fenwick taught at a Dominican school outside London.

With the assistance of Luke Concanen, assistant to the Master of the Dominican Order, Fr. Fenwick received permission to return to the United States and to establish a Dominican college. He arrived in America in the autumn off 1804, accompanied by Friar Robert Angier. He was received by Bishop John Carroll, who suggested that Fr. Fenwick and the Dominicans who accompanied him should evangelize the vast regions of the United States west of the Appalachian Mountains, including the territories acquired in the 1803 Louisiana Purchase.

In 1805, Fr. Fenwick traversed the entire Mississippi Valley looking for a central location to continue his missionary work. Three other Dominican priests were Samuel Thomas Wilson, a Master of Sacred Theology, Robert Antoninus Angier, a Lectorate in Sacred Theology and Preacher General, and William Raymond Tuite.

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