for the Catholic Irish in Newfoundland. Its clergy and leaders were the de facto leaders of the Irish community. With Irish being the language of the majority in the early period, it was often the language of church services. The Catholic Bishop James Louis O'Donel, when requesting a Franciscan missionary for the parishes of St. Mary's and Trepassey, said that such a missionary would need to be fluent in Irish (like O'Donel himself). It also played a part in the greatest early challenge to the Catholic Church, when the Reverend Laurence Coughlan, a Methodist preacher, managed to convert most of the Newfoundland North Shore in the 1760s largely because of his fluency in Irish. Irish Catholic religious orders As the permanent population, and the numbers of young people and children in Newfoundland increased during the early 19th century, public interest in access to education also grew. Bishop Michael Anthony Fleming was aware of this and of the religious opportunities that it presented. He wanted "cradle-to-grave" cultural institutions for Irish Roman Catholics and, in particular, wanted to address the needs and aspirations of working class Catholics. He therefore recruited religious orders of women from Ireland. In March 1833, Bishop Fleming went to Galway, Ireland, where he sought several sisters of the order of the Presentation of the Blessed Virgin Mary to open a school for female children in Newfoundland. In 1839 he also invited the Sisters of Mercy. The work of the two orders was the basis of Catholic and inter-denominational education for the next century and a half. Over the next century parents of all denominations sent children to be educated in their convents. In 1847 Bishop Fleming recruited four brothers of the Third Order of Saint Francis from the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Tuam, Ireland, to teach at the Benevolent Irish Society's school. Building a cathedral The rapid growth of the Irish population in St. John's during the early years of the 19th century that the Catholic chapel had to be repeatedly enlarged. By the mid-1830s the Old Chapel had long outlived its usefulness and Bishop Fleming wanted a more commodious church. He and his successor, Bishop John T. Mullock, supervised the construction. The Basilica of St. John the Baptist was built between 1839-1855 of stone imported from Ireland and was one of the largest Cathedrals in North America at the time of its construction. Rebellion In 1800, a