The French-born John Mary Irenaeus St. Cyr was the first priest assigned to the town of Chicago. Responding to a petition signed by thirty-six early Chicago residents, the Bishop of the diocese in St. Louis appointed St. Cyr in the spring of 1833.

The petition:
We, the Catholics of Chicago, Cook Co., Ill., lay before you the necessity there exists to have a pastor in this new and flourishing city. There are here several families of French descent, born and brought up in the Roman Catholic faith and others quite willing to aid us in supporting a pastor, who ought to be sent here before other sects obtain the upper hand, which very likely they will try to do. We have heard several persons say were there a priest here they would join our religion in preference to any other. We count almost one hundred Catholics in this town. We will not cease to pray until you have taken our important request into consideration.
April 16, 1833

(quote above, from A.T. Andreas' History of Chicago, Vol. 1, p. 289; portraits, right, and below, from A History of the Catholic Church within the Limits of the United States.)

In 1836, the German-born Bernard Schaeffer joined St. Cyr as the second Catholic priest. St. Cyr left the following year, leaving Schaeffer to minister to Chicago's Catholics until he died in the summer of that same year.

Speaking of O'Regan on page 128 in The Catholic Church in Chicago, Garraghan writes: for the shabby cottage in which Bishop Quarter and Van de Velde had lodged, he substituted an episcopal residence of a style commensurate with the dignity of a great Catholic diocese. Built of marble and brick on property at the northwest corner of Michigan Avenue and Madison Street, it was finished in 1856 and was reputed in its day one of the most handsome residences in the city.

Bishop O'Regan's tenure is tainted with accusations by French-speaking Catholics that he treated their parishes unfairly. As part of a January 27, 1857, editorial in the Chicago Daily Tribune, the writer exclaims,
There are at least 15,000 French Catholics in Chicago and Kankakee, or, at least, Catholics who speak the French language. These people are more liberal in their sentiments toward Protestants, and less submissive to priestly dictation than any other class of Catholics. For possessing this spirit of religious independence, they are persecuted by the Irish Bishop with a malevolence that is shocking and insufferable. These French Catholics have made their appeal to the great American Public, for justice and sympathy.

See the Cardinal Accusations section, on the left, for the story by the Rev. Charles Chiniquy, a French Canadian assigned to a parish in Kankakee, Illinois. Chiniquy's accusations escalate to include O'Regan selling the sands on the Lake Michigan shore at the east edge of the Catholic Cemetery. Chiniquy claimed the sand contained skeletal remains from the burial ground.

In 1857, Bishop O'Regan went to Rome to apply for release of his Chicago appointment. Upon his resignation, O'Regan was made a Bishop in London, England, where he died nine years later at the age of fifty-seven.

The last few years of Duggan's appointment were important in the history of the movement of the cemetery grounds. Because the Catholic cemetery was privately held, there are no records representing its history in the City's files. By 1872, the new Bishop Foley was speaking of laying out streets and selling the burial grounds.

There was no official Catholic Bishop in Chicago during the year following Bishop Duggan's removal to an insane asylum. In 1870, the Rt. Rev. Thomas Foley became the first American-born Chicago Bishop. By this time, the City Cemetery grounds were transitioning to become Lincoln Park. An original plan of Lincoln Park included the construction of a drive made of lakefill to connect the park with what would become Michigan Avenue. The City needed to acquire the easement rights to lakefront lands occupied by the Catholic cemetery. See more about this transaction, and the laying out of the grounds into residential streets in the Selling The Land section.

After the Chicago Fire in 1871, Bishop Foley had the difficult task of overseeing the rebuilding of destroyed churches and other Catholic institutions, including the burial grounds on the lakeshore. The Chicago Fire accounts of people fleeing the fire by jumping into open graves in the Catholic and City cemeteries attest to the ongoing exhumations to the newer cemeteries outside the city limits. After the Fire, the ravaged landscapes of both cemeteries expedited their process of transformation into grounds for other uses.

Bishop Foley died in Chicago in 1879.