Requiem Aeternam Dona Ei, Domine II

Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, Roger B. Taney, died on October 12, 1864.  Taney had been appointed to the Court by President Andrew Jackson in 1836 and had sworn into office seven Presidents.  He was the first Catholic to be appointed to the Supreme Court.  Taney, a Marylander, was pro-slavery and had authored the infamous 1857 Dred Scott decision which ruled that Blacks are not citizens of the United States and have no standing in law to sue.  Needless to day, the Justice and President Lincoln did not see eye to eye on the matters of the day.  Taney’s death provided Lincoln with the opportunity to name a new Chief Justice and he chose Salmon P. Chase.  The Republican Senate confirmed Chase the same day he was nominated.  (Curiously enough the Presidential Election of November 8^th 1864 had intervened between Taney’s death and Chase’s nomination.)

Taney’s funeral was on the morning of Saturday, October 15, 1864.  Shortly before 6 AM, the presidential carriage rolled up to the North Door of the White House and President Lincoln, attended by Secretary of State Seward and Postmaster General William Dennison entered the carriage for the short ride across Lafayette Square to the Taney Residence.  There, in the parlor by Taney’s coffin, the President stood respectfully while a priest from Saint Patrick’s parish recited the traditional Latin prayers for the faithfully departed.  Lincoln stayed until Taney’s coffin was closed and carried from the house and placed in the horse-drawn hearse and then the President returned to the White House for his day’s work.  The Civil War was still his chief preoccupation. 

After leaving the President standing in the road, holding his hat in his hands, Taney’s coffin was conveyed to the old Baltimore and Potomac Railroad station near the site of what is today the National Gallery of Art.  A train was provided to take the funeral party to Frederick, Maryland where a Requiem Mass was sung in Saint John the Evangelist Church, Taney’s home parish, and where he was interred in the family plot in the churchyard.  No representatives of the Administration attended the Mass or internment. 

I was somewhat surprised that today’s funeral for Justice Antonin Scalia followed the current liturgical rites. Given the Justice’s own predilection for the pre-conciliar rites as well as his son’s own fondness for the Extraordinary Form I would have expected the Mass to have been a Requiem Mass with Black vestments and at the old “high altar” versus apsidem.  In fact it was a good example of how the Novus Ordo can be celebrated on a formal occasion in a cathedral setting. I did notice, however, that the sign of peace was omitted.  And as for the homily—it was extraordinary; I don’t recall hearing a better one for such an occasion, or for that matter, on any occasion.  It had theological depth and personal touch.  It shows that Father Scalia, like his father, is a man of intellectual probity as well as being superbly articulate.   

Finally, the word going around the Archdiocese of Washington and the Diocese of Arlington is that the Scalia family and Father Paul Scalia in particular, asked President Obama not to attend the Funeral Mass.  There was some apprehension that the scene at Senator Kennedy’s Funeral with Cardinal O’Malley’s effusive greeting of the President, would be repeated with Cardinal Wuerl.  Vice-President Biden and his wife, Dr. Jill Biden, for their part maintained a very discreet presence at the funeral.   The Scalias, like many conservative Catholics, find the President to be a symbol of secularism in modern American Public Life.  Father Scalia made the point in his homily—and a point that I agree with—that not only must we not banish faith from the public square, but we as Christians must bring our faith into that public square.  If it is true that the Scalia family expressed their preference that the President not attend the funeral, they should take responsibility for it rather than let the President be the scapegoat for those have criticized him for not being present.  However, again, history shows us that there is no precedent requiring a President to be at the funeral service of a Supreme Court Justice.

Catholics in the American Civil War: the North

While many Protestant denominations, Methodists, Baptists, and Presbyterians among them, broke apart over the issue of slavery or their respective regional alliances, common allegiance to Rome kept the Catholic Church united during the American Civil War. Nevertheless, while the Catholic Church remained intact, it certainly was not of one mind over the political issues of the day. As in the Protestant denominations, the Bishops—and presumably their clergy and laity—found their strongest allegiance to their particular region.

In the Union, the strongest Catholic voice supporting the Union was New York Archbishop John Hughes. Hughes was a close friend of and regular correspondent with Lincoln’s Secretary of State, William Seward. While Seward was an Episcopalian, his prominence in New York politics—he had been Governor (1839-1842) and served New York in the United States Senate (1849-1861) led to contact with and then friendship with Hughes. In the Seward Home in Auburn NY, among the dignitaries whose portraits grace the hall and main stairway is Archbishop Hughes. One of the challenges facing the Union was raising troops—and keeping them—and the New York Irish were a valuable resource to the Union Army. Hughes played a leading role in the recruitment of Irish troops to the national cause. Lincoln invited Hughes to meet with him and his cabinet in October 1861—he wanted to offer Hughes an official position as Jefferson Davis was offering one to Bishop Lynch of Charleston. Hughes declined the office but agreed to visit Europe to explain the Union cause to the Pope and to the French Emperor, Napoleon III. Hughes hoped—in vain—to forestall a papal recognition of the Confederacy, but he had more success with the French Imperial Court which was also considering, along with Great Britain, in giving formal recognition to the Confederate government. Such diplomatic recognition would have given the Confederacy an internationally recognized legitimacy which the Union wanted, indeed needed, to prevent.
Another danger to the Union was a possibility that Britain would not only recognize the Confederacy but send troops to help the South defend itself against the North. Hughes was an inveterate Irishman, native to Ireland, and no friend of the British. He used his contacts in Ireland to make sure that the British understood that the Irish who had fought for the British crown in the Crimea and in India, would not fight against the United States. Moreover, Hughes recruited several Irish officers fighting in the papal armies—John Coppinger, Myles Keogh, Daniel Keily, and Joseph O’Keeffe—to come and fight in the Union Army. Coppinger would eventually attain the rank of General while Keogh would die with Custer at the Little Big Horn.
In the summer of 1863 New York was racked by draft riots. Four hundred and forty-three people were arrested, one hundred twenty eight were injured, and more than fifty were killed protesting the new draft laws designed to replenish the Union Armies as the war dragged on. These riots were the biggest demonstration of civil strife to date in the United States. Over a hundred buildings were burned to the ground and several hundred more were severely damaged. Much of the rioting was from the Irish immigrant community who had come here looking for work not for a war in which they, as recent immigrants, felt no compelling interest.
Hughes was already terminally ill (he would die the following January) but he called a rally at Old Saint Patrick’s Cathedral where he declared “no blood of innocent martyrs, shed by Irish Catholics, has ever stained the soil of Ireland.” I am not quite sure how that was relevant to the issue, but it sufficed to quiet the populace and suppress the riots.
Other Yankee bishops did not achieve the national acclaim that Hughes did for their support of the war but the hierarchy in New England and the Mid-Atlantic States was solidly behind the Union cause. Bishop John Bernard Fitzpatrick of Boston made a trip to Europe during the war, ostensibly to Belgium for his health but seemingly also making political contacts on behalf of the Union Cause. The Border States were another issue. Archbishop Martin John Spalding of Louisville was a Confederate sympathizer and published a pro-Confederacy article in L’Osservatore Romano, the official press of the Holy See. The Archishops of Baltimore, Francis Patrick Kenrick, and Saint Louis, Peter Richard Kenrick, were brothers and they both headed dioceses where the Union cause was very unpopular and consequently they remained very non-committal about the political conflicts of the day which, under the circumstances, gave the appearance of being pro-Confederacy. This was probably not fair. Peter Richrd Kenrick—when the war was over—was an ardent supporter of the radical reconstruction severity designed to punish the former Confederate States.
The Bishops of Ohio and Indiana were not very enthusiastic about the war either. Ohio, and even more Indiana, were heavily rural states and while they were free states, the farmers in the southern part of Ohio and Indiana felt more in common with the rural south than the industrial north. Strong prejudice among the rural farmers against people of African descent did not serve to stir pro-Union loyalty either. Despite Archbishop Purcell’s support of the Union cause, the assembled bishops at a Provincial synod in Cincinatti in May 1861, a month after the war began, issued the following evasive statement.
It is not for us to enquire into the causes which have led to the present unhappy condition of affairs. This enquiry belongs more appropriately to those who are directly concerned in managing the affairs of the Republic. The spirit of the Catholic Church is eminently conservative, and while her ministers rightfully feel a deep and abiding interest in all that concerns the welfare of the country, they do not think it their province to enter into the political arena. They leave to the ministers of the human sects to discuss from their pulpits and in their ecclesiastical assemblies the exciting questions which lie at the basis of most of our present and prospective difficulties. Thus, while many of the sects have divided into hostile parties on an exciting political issue, the Catholic Church has carefully preserved her unity of spirit in the bond of peace, literally knowing no North, no South, no East, no West. Wherever Christ is to be preached and sinners to be saved, there she is found with ministrations of truth and mercy. She leaves the exciting question referred to previously where the inspired Apostle of the Gentiles left it, contenting herself, like him, with inculcating on all classes and grades of society the faithful discharge of the duties belonging to their respective states of life, knowing that they will all have to render a strict account to God for the deeds done in the flesh, that this life is short and transitory, and that eternity never ends. Beyond this point her ministers do not consider it their province to go, knowing well that they are the ministers of God, who is not a God of dissension, but of peace and love.
Had this wise and considerate line of conduct been generally followed throughout the country, we are convinced that much of the embittered feeling which now unfortunately exists, would have been obviated, and that brotherly love, the genuine offspring of true Christianity, instead of the fratricidal hatred which is opposed to its essential genius and spirit, would now bless our country, and bind together all our fellow-citizens in one harmonious brotherhood. May God, in his abounding mercy, grant that the sectarianism which divides and sows dissensions, may gradually yield to the Catholic spirit which breathes unity and love!
If it were not for a few jibes at their Protestant neighbors, this would seem an irenic statement but it is not consistent with the Catholic Church's support for American military policy in other wars--from the Revolution down to today's conflict in Afghanistan. Its failure to support the Union cause, despite the pious--indeed smarmy--words, was read as an endorsement of secession and its lack of patriotic commitment would never have come from John Hughes.

The Know-Nothings and Anti-Catholicism

We mentioned in previous posts that the Whig party was the anti-immigrant/anti-Catholic party. The Whigs were the liberal party and the heirs of the Enlightenment democratic heritage that valued reason about Tradition—a position that would put them into opposition with Catholicism, especially the European variety of Catholicism that had been closely tied to monarchism and absolutism in opposition to democracy. The “old-school” American Catholics of the Archbishop John Carroll variety had long ago, at the time of the American Revolution, accommodated themselves quite comfortably to the democratic ideals of the new nation, but the “new school” Catholics emigrating from Europe and brining European ideas with them were more reserved not only about American political structures but about American society in general and the American Church in particular. We start to see here in the 1830’s a fork in the path of the American Church, a fork which will allow two Catholic Churches to develop side by side with each other, a Church which will usually be broad enough to accommodate both branches in its communion but at two periods—in the final decades of the nineteenth and early decades of the twentieth and again at the final decades of the twentieth and the opening decade of the twenty-first centuries will find that communion stretched close to its point of fracture. But that is the topic for a future series of blogs. We want to stay on the topic of anti-Catholicism.
The Whig distrust of Catholics and immigrants drove the waves of Catholic immigrants into the Democratic party. At the same time, the Whig inability to achieve its political goal of preserving the ascendency of WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) political and economic power led the decline of the party. As the Whigs lost power, it was natural for another party to rise in its place to preserve the same set of ideals in opposition to the Jacksonian Democrats. Two parties would fill that vacuum. The first would fail, the second would endure.
Eventually the Republican party would emerge to balance the Democrats, but the time was not yet ripe for the Republicans. As the Whigs faded, their banner was taken up by a short-lived political alliance (it becomes a party in the 1850's) called the “Know-Nothings,” Originally not a national party but a loose-knit alliance of various local groups, in many respects like today’s Tea Party, the Know-Nothings began in New York State in 1843 as the American Republican Party. Within two years it had spread to other states and became a national organization known as the Native American Party. Ten years later it changed its name to the American party. It was only when it took on this name that it evolved from what might be called a movement into a formal political party. Its genius and its success was in organizing on the local and grass-roots level. It tended to do well in local elections, and to some extent in state elections, but was never effective in electing a President—though it did try.
Before we go further, an incident in Europe fueled the anti-Catholicism in America. In 1848 there was a revolution against the Papal Government in Central Italy—the Papal States. American Catholics often forget that for centuries the Popes had not only been spiritual leaders but also ruled a nation in central Italy. Italy, as we know it, only became a nation in 1870 when the King of Savoy, his Prime Minister Cavour, and his great General, Garibaldi, overthrew a variety of Kings, princes, Grand Dukes, and Dukes, uniting their various independent principalities into a single nation. One of the Kings overthrown and deprived of his temporal crown was the Pope—but this is some 22 years later. In 1848 a group of Italian Nationalists, drove the Pope—the newly elected Pius IX—from Rome where he fled to Gaeta outside Naples and prepared for a possible flight from Italy. (The British—strange friends (Well, not so strange when you know your history)—had a warship waiting to take him to refuge/exile should he so need. He didn’t need, as it turned out.) With the help of French troops, the rebellion was squashed and the Pope was restored. Pius had been a political liberal to this point favoring Democratic reforms. When he saw what Democratic Reforms led to—well, he wasn’t to sure about Democracy any more. The Americans saw the crushing of the Roman Revolution of 1848 as a blow to Democratic government. It reinforced their stereotype of Catholicism as monarchist and absolutist. And it made the American Nativist Party very successful. Rumor flew that the Pope planned an invasion of America to destroy our freedom even as he had destroyed the liberties of the Roman people. Today it sounds pretty silly that a papal army with the intent to invade would attack America (remember the old Peter Sellers' movie, The Mouse That Roared?) but in the 19th century many believed it. As late as the election of John Kennedy in 1960 many were convinced that the Pope had designs on this country.
The Know-Nothing Party platform was
• Severe limits on immigration, especially from Catholic countries
• Balancing what immigration there was in favor of English, Welch, Scots, and Protestant Irish
• Restricting political office to native-born Americans
• Mandating a wait of 21 years before an immigrant could gain citizenship
• Restricting public school teachers to Protestants
• Mandating daily Bible readings in public schools
• Restricting the sale of liquor
The Know-Nothings—and by the way they were called that, because when questioned about their political organization they would answer, like Sergeant Shultz “I know nothing.” Of course they didn’t have Shultz’s accent; they didn’t like Germans, or Irish, or anybody except those of British extraction. There was a secrecy to their organization and how these various local groups coordinated their efforts which actually led to their being particularly effective. In the spring of 1854 they won elections in Boston, Salem and other New England towns. That autumn they swept the state elections. (Gone was the moderation of Mayor Lyman and Edward Cutter and the Charlestown Selectmen of 1834) In Philadelphia their candidate, Robert Conrad, promised to crack-down on crime, close Saloons on Sundays, and appoint only native-born Americans to city posts. In Washington DC the Know-Nothing candidates won in a landslide. They were unsuccessful in New York—with its large immigrant population—but won a credible 26% of the vote in a four-way election. They did manage to elect both the Mayor of San Francisco and the Governor of California.
The following year they carried Chicago and the Know-Nothing Mayor, Levi Boone, barred all immigrants from city jobs, The success of the Know- Nothings led them to coalesce into a national party in 1854 as the American Party. One of the voices raised against the Know-Nothings was Abraham Lincoln who said—and given the political atmpsphere in Illinois said courageously-- As a nation, we began by declaring that “all men are created equal.” We now practically read it “all men are created equal, except negroes.” When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read “all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and Catholics” When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretence of loving liberty—to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy.
Lincoln was no particular friend of Catholicism—few politicians could afford to be at this period—but he was committed to democracy and the ideals of the Republic and he saw how the Know-Nothings threatened to undermine the basic values on which this nation was founded

I'm not sure where the image today comes from; i found it in my photo file but it is not one of my pictures. (I am pretty handy with Photoshop, but not that fancy)