When Bishops Forgot They Were Apostles, Resumed

The Mausoleum Chapel that had been the tomb

of Cardinal William O'Connell before his remains

were expelled from what is now Boston College

grounds.

  Well, I guess the Pope Francis is going to “profane” the Holy Thursday Mass again this year by indiscriminately washing the feet of men and those lesser people we call "women" as well.  O well.  “The old order passeth away and giveth place unto the new.”  But we aren’t going to go there, other than giving a shout-out to the Holy Father for letting us know that some rules are just stupid and should be treated as such.  Are you listening, Bishop Morlino?   Probably not.  If bishops listened we wouldn’t be in the mess we are now.  Of course, on the one hand Archbishop Gregory listened; Archbishop Myers apparently has not which brings us back to our topic of Bishops living like princes. 
I left off half-way through the saga of William Cardinal O’Connell.  I had already mentioned his palatial Italian Renaissance villa in Brighton which he built for himself and his successors and which Cardinal O’Malley ironically had to sell off to pay the debts incurred by the malfeasance of his predecessor, Cardinal Law, in handling matters of sexual abuse.    But there is so much more to the O’Connell story that I am not ready to move on. 
When it comes to irony, my favorite O’Connell story is irony’s payback to one of the most mean-spirited acts of cold revenge that I have ever encountered.  Remember that I mentioned in a previous posting about O’Connell that he had been expelled from St. Charles Seminary in Ellicott City MD by the Sulpician Fathers who ran the seminary?  They determined that he was “not fit” for the priesthood—an euphemism that generally meant he was discovered to be sexually inappropriate with other members of the seminary community.   (It could mean other things but as O’Connell’s history will indicate, the usual meaning is the more probable.  O’Connell certainly did not suffer from academic limitations or from health issues, the other reasons often given for dismissal, but not usually under the ambiguous banner of “not fit.” )  In any event O’Connell went on to complete his college work at Boston College and then re-entered studies for the priesthood in the Boston Archdiocese.  He did not study at the Boston seminary of St. John’s—which was run by those picky Sulpicians who had cast him once before into the outer darkness—but went on to the North American College in Rome.  Eventually he ended up as Rector of the North American and then returned to the States first as Bishop of Portland MA and then as Coadjutor Archbishop of Boston.  O’Connell took over the diocese in 1907 and in 1911 had his revenge on the Sulpicians—ordering them out of St. John’s seminary.   What makes the story really great—and gives us an insight into the soul of this Prince of the Church—is that he told the Sulpicians to “get out, and take your dead with you.”  The Sulpicians had to dis-inter their deceased confreres from the seminary cemetery and arrange for their reburial outside the Archdiocese of Boston. 
Now for the irony.  When Cardinal O’Malley sold the Cardinal’s residence to Boston College as part of BC’s campus expansion, there was an issue about a small chapel on the grounds.  Cardinal O’Connell had not wanted to be buried in the Cathedral crypt along with the other Bishops/Archbishops of Boston and constructed a mortuary chapel on his palace grounds.  Boston College announced that they didn’t care to have the Cardinal buried on their newly acquired property and so O’Connell—like the Sulpicians whose mortal rest he had disturbed—was dug up and moved.  His new grave is in the seminary from which he had the Sulps carted away.  Even Cardinals are subject to karma.     Maybe expecially subject to karma.
There is much more to tell of this prince.   O’Connell was to prove a major embarrassment to the Church over the years of his Cardinaliate. His nephew, a priest of the Archdiocese of Boston, was aware of the Cardinals’ homosexual affair with a married judge and used the knowledge to cover his own embezzlement of funds from the Archdiocese to support a secret wife. O’Connell had made the nephew, a Monsignor James O’Connell, chancellor of the Archdiocese, a position which gave him access to diocesan monies. The nephew secretly married a woman in Ohio in 1913. O’Connell’s secret was safe as long as Merry del Val was running the Vatican. Merry del Val fell from power with the death of Pius X in 1914 at the outbreak of World War I.  During the War years there was little communication between the American Church and Italy because of the disruptions of war and the Pope, Benedict XV, was preoccupied in trying to bring about a peace, but O’Connell’s injudicious behavior would come back to haunt him.  In 1922 when confronted about his nephew, O’Connell lied to the newly elected Pius XI—and was caught in the lie—which sealed his fall from influence in Rome.  (Pius was an inveterate foe of Merry del Val and the Spanish Cardinal’s influence came to an end with Pius’ election.)  O’Connell still had great power in the American Church,  however, where he continued to exercise a bullying influence over the other bishops especially after the death of Cardinal Gibbons in 1921. O’Connell found an unholy ally in Cardinal Denis Dougherty of Philadelphia in attempts to suppress the emergence of a national bishop’s conference. There had been the National Catholic War Council, organized in 1917 under the auspices of Cardinal Gibbons, to coordinate an American Catholic response to the social needs created by World War I.  O’Connell and Dougherty wanted this body disbanded as soon as the war was over but fortunately the Gibbons party outmaneuvered them and established the National Catholic Welfare Council to succeed the National Catholic War Council.  Gibbons knew he was an old man and that O’Connell was just itching to step into his place as leader of the American hierarchy—and he knew as well that O’Connell’s agenda and style would be very different from the Americanist and democratic style which he, Gibbons, used in consulting with the other bishops.  O’Connell and Dougherty, in Rome for the conclave that elected Pius XI in 1922, obtained a decree suppressing the NCWC, but with the help of Papal Secretary of State, Cardinal Pietro Gasparri (another Merry del Val opponent), the Executive Committee of the NCWC won a delay on enforcing the decree while they polled the American bishops about their desire to continue with a national conference.  O’Connell protested to Rome that this “plebiscite” was just proof that the American Church had been taken over by “Democracy, Presbyterianism, and Congregationalism.”  (So much for  his claim that “the Puritan had passed.”  Apparently the Puritan [Congregationalist] had simply become a Catholic and the sort of Catholic that O’Connell didn’t want.) 
O’Connell and Dougherty believed their position as Cardinals should have given them authority over the other bishops and rendering any sort of consultative body superfluous.   As I said, however, O’Connell’s stock was low in Rome and he lost the case.  The NCWC continued and its successor nowadays is the United State Conference of Catholic Bishops—still the bête noire of the Catholic wing-nuts. 

When Bishops Forgot They Were Called To Be Apostles

Archbishop Michael Augustine
Corrigan

Cardinal McCloskey built the elegant but not pretentious Cardinal’s residence on the corner of Madison Avenue and 50^th Street in New York.  McCloskey’s successor as Archbishop of New York, Michael Augustine Corrigan never was given the Cardinal’s Hat, but he maintained the princely life-style associated with that dignity.  Corrigan had been born in Newark NJ in 1839, the fifth of nine children of Thomas and Mary Corrigan.  His parents were Irish immigrants, but became comfortable financially through his father’s liquor business.  As his father was gifted in business, Michael was gifted intellectually and when he decided to study for the priesthood in the Diocese of Newark, he was sent to the newly opened North American College in Rome.  The NAC then occupied conventual buildings of the Dominican Priory at Santa Maria Sopra Minerva near the Pantheon.  (You can still see the faded lettering of the North American College over the doorway of the building in the Piazza Sopra Minerva.) Returning to the States with a Pontifical Degree in Theology, Corrigan was assigned to teach at the Newark Diocese’ Seton Hall College.  His contacts were wide and his rise was rapid.  He was named president of the College in 1869 and Bishop of Newark in 1872.  Corrigan succeded James Roosevelt Bayley as Bishop of Newark when Bayley went on to become Archbishop of Baltimore.  Bayley came from a very blue-blood Protestant family and had been ordained to the priesthood in the Episcopal Church.  At age 28 he entered the Catholic Church and two years later was ordained to the Catholic priesthood.  His Roosevelt grandfather disinherited him from his considerable inheritance when he was ordained.  It should also be noted that he was the nephew of Saint Elizabeth Ann Bayley Seton, who herself had converted to Catholicism to the disgust of her family a generation and a half before.  In 1853 Bayley was consecrated the first bishop of Newark. 

Corrigan, the son of an Irish immigrant, had to follow in the footsteps of this aristocratic predecessor and he rose to the occasion.  For many of the Irish immigrants, and Corrigan was no exception, the rise from having pigs in the parlor to lace curtains on the windows was a quick and easy one.  They were not accepted by the old Yankee blue-bloods whose genteel ways they aped, but they held their heads high and flashed their money in a way the Irish call flahoolach.  The Catholic aristocracy, almost entirely Irish, was a closed circle and they rallied around their own.  Corrigan was one of them and their money helped expand parishes, schools, hospitals and other institutions of the rapidly growing immigrant Church. 
Corrigan was installed as Archbishop of New York and moved into McCloskey’s Mansion in 1885.  While Catholics were still not accepted in the “400,” Corrigan was anxious to win the favor of the WASP upper classes and embraced their political and economic philosophy—even though that meant not looking after the temporal interests of  his flock—all but of a few of whom were immigrant laborers of the poorest sort.  When Dr. Edward McGlynn, Pastor of Saint Stephens on East 28^th Street, a priest who was probably the most popular Catholic preacher in the City of New York, endorsed Henry George, the candidate of the United Labor Party and supported by the more radical and socialist elements of New York Politics, for mayor, Corrigan went wild and excommunicated McGlynn.  Despite his excommunication, the sympathy of the Catholic New Yorker-in-the-street went with McGlynn.  The immigrant New York faithful never warmed to their new Archbishop.  Moreover, Corrigan’s economic views put him in conflict with Cardinal James Gibbons of Baltimore, a strong champion of the labor movement.  Gibbons had the Pope’s (Leo XIII) ear and while Corrigan may have defended the interests of the Protestant ascendancy, Gibbon’s influence probably cost Corrigan a Cardinal’s hat. Corrigan died in 1902 of pneumonia and is buried in the crypt of the Archbishop’s of New York in St Patrick’s Cathedral. 
 

Too Severe a Judgment?

Cardinals Gibbons and

O'Connell--not a mutual

admiration society

I had mentioned in the previous blog that among the horses’ asses honored with a miter (and later with a Cardinal’s hat) in the history of the Catholic Church in the United States was William O’Connell who from 1907 until 1944 was Archbishop of Boston.  Some have thought I was too severe on O’Connell and other named prelates in this judgment but I think the history bears out O’Connell’s reputation for one of the most undeserving of men to rise to power in the American Church.  Sean Winter, writing two years ago for the National Catholic Reporter, and comparing the tragedy of O’Connell’s rise to that of the equally fatuous Cardinal Raymond Burke in an essay “Gibbons Cried,” wrote:

It is said that when, in 1911, James Cardinal Gibbons learned that Archbishop William Henry O'Connell was named a cardinal, Gibbons cried. O'Connell was referred to at the time, by a woman who worked at the Vatican, Ella Edes, as "Monsignor Pomposity." He was most known for his efforts to have the U.S. Bishops Conference disbanded and his opposition to laws against child labor.

Cardinal Gibbons was no enthusiast for O’Connell whom he recognized not only as lacking in ability but strident in his antediluvian views on social reform.  Not only did he oppose laws outlawing child labor but he ridiculed the theories of Albert Einstein, suggested that priests refuse communion to women wearing makeup, and decried such singers as Al Jolson for their “crooning” which he considered effeminate.   

O’Connell’s promotion in the American Church was due to his sycophancy towards Cardinal Rafael Merry del Val, the Machiavellian Secretary of State of Pius X.   O’Connell was to prove a major embarrassment to the Church over the years of his Cardinaliate.  His nephew, a priest of the Archdiocese of Boston, was aware of the Cardinals’ homosexual affair with a married judge and used the knowledge to cover his own embezzlement of funds from the Archdiocese to support a secret wife.  O’Connell had made the nephew, a Monsignor James O’Connell, chancellor of the Archdiocese, a position which gave him access to diocesan monies.  The nephew secretly married a woman in Ohio in 1913.  His secret was safe as long as Merry del Val was running the Vatican.  Merry del Val fell from power with the death of Pius X in 1914 at the outbreak of World War I.  In 1922 when confronted about his nephew, O’Connell lied to the newly elected Pius XI—and was caught in the lie—which sealed his fall from influence in Rome but not from power in the American Church where he continued to exercise a bullying influence over the other bishops especially after the death of Cardinal Gibbons in 1921.  O’Connell found an unholy ally in Cardinal Denis Dougherty of Philadelphia in attempts to suppress the emergence of a national bishop’s conference.  O’Connell and Dougherty believing their position as Cardinals should have given them authority over the other bishops and rendering any sort of consultative body superfluous.  O’Connell died in 1944—but there are humorous stories there as well.  Perhaps next time.    

An Old Wound Reopens

I mentioned in the previous post that there is a long tradition in America of two distinct parties within the Catholic Church.  I referred to them as two Churches and so they are in every sense except the strictly canonical.  At the end of the nineteenth century there was a major clash between these two factions as the “Americanist” party headed by Cardinal Gibbons of Baltimore and Archbishop Ireland of St. Paul tried to check the influence of the German Bishops such as Heiss, Katzer and Messmer successively of Milwaukee, Krautbauer of Green Bay, and other German-born prelates who were anxious to preserve the distinct ethnic heritage of German Catholicism.  This Europeanist party was not strictly German by any means as it also included several ultramontane prelates such as Corrigan of New York and a generation later O’Connell of Boston –both of whom were anxious to be more Roman than the Pope.  (You might want to look at entries for March 10,11, 16, 17, 19,20, 21, 22, 23, 25, 27, 28, 29, 30, April 2, 5, 10, 13, May 22, 2011,  January 5,6,7, 12,  and August 14, 2012 for more on this topic of American versus European influence on the American Church.)  

 By the middle of the twentieth century under the leadership of Cardinal Francis Spellman the two traditions had more or less melted into a distinctive American Catholicism that tended to be socially and politically conservative but post-ethnic culturally.  Catholics were mostly working class and so tended to be Democrats (but this was a time when the southern Dixiecrats were keeping the part from tilting too far to the left) and pro-Labor.  While there were still some ethnic parishes that preserved Old World devotions, Polish and Italian for the greater part, most Catholic parishes were pretty homogeneously bland American even as their parishioners had intermarried and lost much of their distinctive ethnic traits. 

Initially most American Catholics adjusted well to the changes of the Second Vatican Council.  There was an enthusiasm for ecumenism and interreligious dialogues and churches (and synagogues) began holding joint services for such occasions as Thanksgiving.  Discussion groups began meeting in home to help Catholics get to know more about their non-Catholic neighbors and non-Catholics to come to understand better our beliefs and practices.     

The Liturgical changes were well accepted at first too.  People didn’t question the bishop or the priest—we were taught not to, but even more, the Liturgy was beginning to make sense to us.  We were no longer the passive by-standers but hearing the scriptures in our own languages and sharing in the prayers—and the initial feeble attempts to sing—pleased most of us.  There was pain sometimes when a statue grandpa had donated was removed from the Church or the sanctuary where we were married was changed around from the way it had been on that special day, but most of us were happy enough to see some life in old Mother Church.  Like a widow “of some years” who was suddenly taking an interest in her appearance again, the Church began looking better and better.  Granted some of the music was pretty awful at first—“here we are, all together, as we sing our song, joyfully….”  Frankly, there was a lot of crap but over time things got better.  And let’s be honest, the choirs hadn’t been doing Palestrina—at least with any success—in those years before the Council. 

I am not sure what happened but somewhere in the mid to late seventies a reaction began and then began to build up steam.  There had always been a handful of people who were very unhappy with the changes of Vatican II.  Some of these had drifted off into the schism of Archbishop Lefebvre—a French Prelate who rejected the Council and its liturgy.  Others had gone to even more radical groups who declared that Popes John XXIII, Paul VI, John Paul I and II had all been false popes because of their “heresies.”  And there were those who just didn’t like the Council and either stopped attending Mass or found churches where the changes were minimal. 

Several movements sprang up calling for a restoration of the pre-conciliar liturgy at least as an option.  Others called for the conciliar liturgy to be revised along more traditional lines.  Pope John Paul gave a limited permission for the pre-conciliar liturgy to be celebrated again and later in his reign extended this permission further.  Pope Benedict has extended it further still.  While only a small minority—less than  5% of active Catholics—have embraced this return to the pre-conciliar liturgy, it has appealed to a disproportionate number of younger clergy.  And to a great extent it has opened up again the split between the Americanist party in the Church and the Europeanist party.  Some parishes have restored the elaborate outdoor processions for such occasions as Corpus Christi or rogation days.  They build churches in the neo-gothic or baroque styles.  Priests wear their soutanes and birettas and lacy cottas have replaced the more sober albs of the liturgical renewal.  Other parishes continue to build churches where that congregation is wrapped around the altar.  Contemporary Church music is sung rather than the Latin chants.  Social action committees and “small faith communities” are more likely to be seen than Legion of Mary praesidia and while groups of parishioners still gather for the rosary after morning Mass, the youth group gathers for Taizé prayer. The priest is “Father Bill” or may just “Bill” to most of his flock. Two churches once again.  But this difference is even more complex than it first appears.    



Origins of Radical Catholicism XXIII: Americanism, fact or fiction?

Was there in fact such a thing as Americanism—a “heresy” within the Church that subverted key Catholic doctrines—or, was “Americanism” something that existed only in the mind of those Roman officials who had read Felix Klein’s book, La Vie du Pére Hecker, and found themselves panicked and angered by the values Klein promoted but attributed to Hecker and other American religious thinkers?

Liberals—the intellectual or political descendents of Ireland, Gibbons, O’Connell, Keane and others—tend to deny the charge and claim that they stand in a tradition going back to Bishop John Carroll and his vision for the Catholic Church in the new American Republic.  They claim that while the American and Americanist worldview differed from that of European churchmen, they were orthodox in matters of doctrine and faithful in matters of ecclesiastical discipline.  Conservatives on the other hand—not only the heirs of Corrigan and the Germans, but the Roman Church of the Latter-Day Saints who in these post-Vatican II day rally around such Apostles and Prophets as Raymond Arroyo, “Father Z.”, Joseph Fessio, the Hitchcocks, et al see their foes as a modern day reincarnation of the old American liberal troublemakers and pray that Timothy Dolan won’t go the way of Joseph Bernadin and Roger Mahoney and channel the shades of Cardinal Gibbons or John Ireland.  So who is right?  Were Gibbons and crowd within our without the pale of orthodoxy?    

In its historical context, there certainly was such a thing as “Americanism” though I hesitate to call it a heresy.  It certainly was perceived as a heresy—and I believe that given its place in time it was correctly perceived as one.  There was an ecumenical espirit that contradicted Catholic doctrine as it was held in the 19^th century, although it would look pretty tame compared to official Church positions in this age of the Assisi Encounters and the post-conciliar popes welcoming religious leaders of every stripe at the Vatican.  The idea of the separation of Church and State—and indeed republicanism itself—was contrary to Catholic political theology of the late nineteenth century.  A third valid point (valid for the time and I think still valid today) is that America (whether Catholic or Protestant) then—and now—and always—has overvalued the active virtues and minimalized the interior or contemplative life.  I think too we did and still do place too much emphasis on individual inspiration rather than submission to the common faith and we permit individual inspiration to outweigh, not traditions, but Tradition.   On the other hand, I don’t think it bad—to the contrary I think it healthy—that America has some views that balance the Roman mentality.  I think the Catholic, i.e. universal, Church needs to draw its insights from the many sources of grace where the Spirit flows and not just from Rome’s tired old reservoir.  I think that perhaps what Rome fears from the American Church is that it does seem in these last few decades that a lot of people in Rome itself and around the Church are gradually succumbing to American ideas and values.  It wasn’t just that Paul VI got rid of the monarchical trappings of cardinal’s costumes with their long trains of scarlet silk (though some are trying to bring them back, most notably the American peacock, Raymond Burke) and it has been ages since some old bag with more money than God has been made a Papal Duchess, but that the Vatican has become a business with pricey gift-shops in the museums and a bank that hums with activity as nuns and abbots line up with librarians and bakers to make their deposits and withdrawals.  (If only someone would teach them about bank-cheques all our lives could be easier.)   Not everything American is good, but Americans are efficient and the Italians are not; I think the Church could stand some efficiency in administration.  The downside is that today’s Vatican is as secular as the Metropolitan Museum of Art or the government of Belgium. Romans, Americans, the French, the Chinese, the Kenyans—we live in a modern world and the powers that be in the Church need to make peace with that fact.  I am not saying that modernization is good or it’s bad, only pointing out that there is a significant paradigm shift and the Church must accommodate itself to it. 

What the late nineteenth-century Americanists wanted the Church to do was—and it was one of the things condemned by Pius IX in his Syllabus of Errors—was to make peace with the world in which it exists and not constantly bemoan the good old days when the world was run to suit the Church—and Churchmen.  That day is over and it won’t be coming back.  The Church needs to look for new models—paradigms of existence—that fit the reality of time and place.  Despite its somewhat whitewashed official histories, the Church was not always a Monarchy of Divine Right.  There even was a time, perhaps several times, when the Church understood it had come to serve the needs of sick, the poor, the disenfranchised—rather than to be served by rich and poor alike.   Maybe that time will come again.  I don’t think Gibbons necessarily saw the Church as a servant to the world, and Ireland, despite his liberal ideas, was as autocratic as any French King—but the Americanists did challenge the model of Church where all power came allegedly from God and then from those who were the Lord’s anointed down.  They pointed out that in addition to the Institution, the Church consisted of the poor and suffering who need the Church’s protection and help.  They refocused the vision—not the narcissistic vision of a Church that gazed in the mirror at its own bedazzling image—but the vision which Jesus outlined when he said he came to bring good news to the poor and to announce a year of God’s favour to all.  The Americans would not be the ones to get his message across to the contemporary world.  At Vatican II it would be the Europeans themselves who declaimed the fascination of the Church with clericalism, juridicism, and triumphalism.  But the Americans played a role in the late nineteenth century that would bear great fruit in the middle of the twentieth.    
The image today is the interior of the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington DC

Origins of Radical Catholicism XIV: The Apostolic Delegation, part 2

Rome was  becoming aware that not only was the United States coming to be a world player but that the American Church was going down its own path due to a remarkable degree of freedom from Roman oversight; and Pope Leo XIII was quite determined to have a Nuncio, or at least an Apostolic Delegate, in the United States.  When Denis O’Connell, rector of the North American College presented Leo with the Peter’s Pence collection in 1891, the pope lamented that the bishops did not want a papal representative in the United States.  Leo attributed this to the bishops being jealous lest any of their power be diminished.  O’Connell said that the pope wasn’t angry about this, just more disappointed or saddened.  He wasn’t to be sad for long, however.  He had a plan and Gibbons knew it.  The only challenge was how to make the pope’s plan work for Gibbons and his liberals rather than against them. 

The American bishops were not the only ones who were opposed to having Nuncio or Apostolic Delegate.  Leo’s own curia was a bit of a wasps’ nest—as Roman Curiae inevitably are.  (Curiae is the plural of curia.  It’s Latin for all you Tridentine wanna-bes.)  Cardinal Simeoni of Propaganda Fide was deadly opposed to it as a Vatican Delegation in Washington would remove the American Church from his jurisdiction (with the financial benefits accrued thereto) and place it directly under the Secretariat of State.  (The fiscal benefits were heavily unofficial and consisted of what we may call “gratuities” that bishops, monsignors, and other petitioners would render to have their matters “expedited.”   While we moderns, especially Americans, naively consider such courtesies by the vulgar term “bribes” they were—and are—standard protocol in many bureaucracies.  After all, Gammarelli’s doesn’t give away those purple socks for nothing, you know.)  In any event, Propaganda Fide didn’t want to lose the American trade which is why Cardinal Rampolla of the Secretariat of State  had told Gibbons not to let on to Propaganda that he and two of the American Archbishops were to come to Rome to discuss the planned Delegation with Rampolla’s office.  Rampolla meant to steal Simeoni’s American clients for his own shop.  In the event it didn’t quit work out that way and even though an American Delegation would be established in 1892, and despite Leo’s word to O’Connell that such a Delegation would remove the United States from control by Propaganda Fide, it would be sixteen more years and another pope before the American Church was freed from Propaganda Fide supervision.  By that time the Catholic Church in America would be even more firmly under the Roman thumb due to changes in the American hierarchy and the links between the Papal Secretary of State—Cardinal Merry del Val and his buddy, “Wild Bill” O’Connell, Cardinal Archbishop of Boston.  But we are getting ahead of ourselves.

As I had written earlier, O’Connell and the liberals were determined that if there had to be a delegation, they wanted to be able in some way to exercise some control over it.  They determined that the best way would be a two-step process of getting the Delegate—who was to be Francesco Satolli—into the United States on one pretext and then, once there to announce him as the new Apostolic Delegate.  This would get the Delegate into the States without anti-Catholic protests over the establishment of a papal foothold in Washington (even though it was not an official embassy to the American Government, but simply a delegation to the Catholic Church in the United States) and it would also get the new Delegate into the United States without Corrigan and the conservative wing of the hierarchy knowing what was afoot.  Moreover, by overseeing the process of establishing the Delegation, Gibbons and the liberals would have the Delegate in their debt, and hopefully in their trust.  It would work—until the liberals, as usual, overplayed their hand.  It worked like this.  Gibbons met with Benjamin Harrison’s Secretary of State, John Foster, and had the Vatican invited to exhibit at the Columbian Exhibition in Chicago in 1892.  (Ever read The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson? Great book!)   The Vatican sent various maps and mosaics along with Satolli as a personal representative of the Pope to the exhibition.  Denis O’Connell would accompany Satolli to New York where Gibbons was to have a railway carriage ready to bring Satolli to Baltimore from where he would travel to Chicago.  After the exhibition’s opening on October 12, 1892, Satolli would go to Washington.  Satolli was not yet appointed as Apostolic Delegate; that would happen only after he was in the United States and presumably after the 1892 presidential election so as not to become a political issue.  The next task for the liberals was how to throw a cream pie in Corrigan’s face so as to embarrass the conservatives as Satolli passed through New York.  today's image is the window of Gammarelli's (aka "Glamourelli's"), haberdasher to popes and prelates (and prelate wanna be's) for three hundred years--sort of the Popes' Norman Hartnell, though rumor has it that Benedict has shifted tailors to a more discreet firm.   

Origins of Radical Catholicism XIII The Apostolic Delegation, part 1

For the first century of its existence the American hierarchy enjoyed a tremendous amount of autonomy with very little oversight from Rome. According to the website of the Archdiocese of Baltimore:

“In its relationship with the Holy See (Archbishop John) Carroll wished a measure of autonomy for the American Church. Although he overcame his initial distrust of the Congregation of the Propaganda, he was not overly generous in the information he supplied the Roman authorities nor overly conscientious in following their directives. At the same time, he instilled in his spiritual children a deep loyalty to the pope as a symbol of unity.”

The bishops and archbishops who followed John Carroll were not much different in jealously guarding their semi-autonomy from Rome. There were a number of reasons for this.   In the first place, the world of the late eighteenth through mid-nineteenth centuries was not a highly communicative world.  Rome was far away—a message to the papal curia would take six to eight weeks to reach Rome and six to eight weeks to return—not to consider the time it would take to shuffle from one curial desk to another.  Six, eight, ten months, a year would not be an unreasonable amount of time for an issue to be dealt with—and then what if there were a need for clarification and the second or even third round of letters.   No, it made much more sense to deal with issues at home and not refer them to the Holy See.  If some question needed to be resolved, a bishop could always consult his metropolitan Archbishop and one Archbishop could confer with two or three others.    Secondly, there were no diplomatic relations between the American Republic and the Holy See that would have stationed a permanent papal representative in the United States.  In the third place, unlike England where the Venerable English College in Rome—often with a “Cardinal Protector of England” in residence—could serve as a conduit of information between the Church in England and the Holy See, the Americans—neither government nor Church—had a permanent presence in Rome until the establishment of the North American College in 1859 and even then neither the Holy See nor the American bishops turned to it for any purposes other than education of clergy.  In 1853 the Nuncio to Brazil, Gaetano Bedini, stopped in Washington on his way to take up his post and he made a report back to Rome suggesting the appointment of a Nuncio to the American Republic, but nothing ever came of it.  I cannot imagine what Bedini was thinking in recommending such a move.  A Nuncio would have required reciprocal diplomatic relations and, as you may remember from the blog on the Know-Nothings, this was a period of rampant anti-Catholicism in which it would have been politically impossible for the United States to consent to diplomatic ties to the Holy See.   In fact, Archbishop Bedini’s visit had stirred anti-Catholic demonstrations protesting his temporary presence.     

In 1879 George Conroy, Bishop of Ardagh in Ireland, visited the States on the occasion of Archbishop (later Cardinal) Gibbon’s of Baltimore receiving the pallium.   Conroy also made a report to the Holy See, suggesting an Apostolic Delegation but only if the Apostolic Delegate were an American.  (A Nuncio is the papal representative to a nation; an Apostolic Delegate is his representative to a Church within a nation with which the Holy See does not have diplomatic relations.)  Conroy picked up on the xenophobia of Americans and realized that a European Archbishop would be seen as a threat to the sovereignty of the American people, Catholic or otherwise.    If an American could not be found who could serve in this role, then Conroy thought only a temporary Delegation—a sort of periodic visitation—should be sent.  In 1886 the Holy See sent Monsignor Paolo Mori to inquire about the possibility of Diplomatic Relations between the Holy See and the American Government.  Such a move would have meant a nunciature; it was not a possibility of course since with the loss of the Papal States there could not have been even a masque of diplomatic relations between governments and it would have meant (at least in popular perception) establishing ties with the Roman Catholic Church, something constitutionally questionable and politically out of the question.   

With Conroy’s visitation it became clear to at least some of the American bishops that the period of benign neglect was at an end and that the Pope’s commissioning an Apostolic Delegate was only a matter of time.  Mori’s mission, though unsuccessful, confirmed it. The liberal party decided to be proactive on this so that the Delegate, once appointed, would be favourable to their point of view.   Gibbons had to go to Rome the same year that Mori visited the States and he sized up the situation.  In 1889 the Holy See sent Francesco Satolli as its representative to the centenary celebrations for the appointment of the first bishop in the United States—John Carroll—in 1789.  Satolli returned to Rome and reported to the Secretary of State, Cardinal Rampolla, that the American bishops (or at least those whom he consulted) were in favour of a Delegation as a means of improving communication with Rome.  Unfortunately it is not known which bishops, other than Gibbons, that Satolli consulted, but it can be surmised from the way things played out, and from the preeminent role of Gibbons in the whole event, that it was the liberal wing.  Cardinal Rampolla wrote Gibbons and asked him to bring perhaps two of the more prudent Archbishops with him to Rome for some consultation. Then Rampolla added a rather curious note advising Gibbons not to tell the Congregation Propaganda Fide about this proposed meeting between the Americans and the Secretariat of State.  Given that Propaganda Fide had oversight of the American Church, Rampolla’s request is most strange.  Hmmm, it seems that they may play politics in Rome as well.  Fancy that.  More to come.    The image today is John Carroll, the first Catholic Bishop in the United States

Origins of Radical Catholicism IX: Factions among the Bishops

       Before we go on, let me clarify the situation in the American hierarchy at this point.  There were essentially three factions among the bishops: the American Liberals, the American Conservatives, and the Germans. 

We have talked a lot about the liberals.  The Dean of the Liberal faction was Cardinal James Gibbons, Archbishop of Baltimore.  The other principle players were John Ireland, Archbishop of Saint Paul Minnesota; Denis O’Connell, Rector of the North American College in Rome (and later Bishop of Richmond); John Lancaster Spalding, Bishop of Peoria; John Joseph Keane, Bishop of Richmond, and John Moore, Bishop of Saint Augustine, FL. 

The American Conservative faction was larger but had less influence.  It was led by Archbishop Corrigan of New York and included Bernard McQuaid, Bishop of Rochester NY; Patrick Feehan, Archbishop of Chicago; Patrick John Ryan, Archbishop of Philadelphia; William Henry Elder, Archbishop of Cincinnati; and William H. Gross, Archbishop of Oregon City, OR.  You might remember Elder—he was the bishop who during the Yankee occupation of Natchez in the American Civil War was imprisoned by the Yankee army for refusing to have prayers said in the churches for the President of the United States.  (See Blog for 2/10/11.)

It is difficult to know where to put Peter Richard Kenrick, Archbishop of Saint Louis.  In some respects he might also be considered in this party but he was pretty much of a non-entity as his stands at Vatican I had alienated Rome.  I suppose actually that Kenrick would have been considered a Liberal and an Americanist at the time of the Council.  He advocated that issues in the American Church not be referred to the Roman Curia but dealt with by the American hierarchy, and this would be a position that men like Gibbons (more subtly than Kenrick) and Ireland (who was never subtle) would espouse. Kenrick also was one of the few bishops at the Council who opposed the definition of Papal Infallibility.  His positions on these issues put him on the enemies list for the Roman Curia and made him a pariah among his fellow American bishops.  In the matter of the Knights of Labor he opposed Gibbons and the defense of Labor Unions.  He probably resented Gibbons for several reasons, not least of which is that Gibbons had succeed his brother, Francis Kenrick, as Archbishop of Baltimore and Gibbons became a Cardinal, an honor never extended to Kenrick’s brother.  The last few years of his episcopacy he had a co-adjutor, John Joseph Kain, to whom he was ardently and publicly opposed.  Finally in 1896 Pope Leo XIII canonically deposed him and he died weeks later. His was a sad story. But back to our main theme.

The third party among the Hierarchy were the German bishops led by Archbishop Katzer of Milwaukee.  (Katzer was actually Austrian born but we are including the German-speaking bishops in this category.) Katzer’s predecessor, Michael Heiss had led the German faction prior to his death in 1890.  Others in this party were Sebastian Messmer (actually Swiss, but German speaking) of Green Bay, Kilian Flasch (d. 1891) and James Schwebach of LaCrosse.  Henry Muehlsiepen, Vicar General of the Archdiocese of Saint Louis was also in this camp—and a leading protagonist of the German cause—and while not a bishop wielded considerable power and influence given the confused state of Kenrick’s episcopacy.  Not all German-born or German-speaking bishops could be counted on to support the more extreme demands of the German party.  Bishops Joseph Rademacher of Nashville and Henry Richter of Grand Rapids distanced themselves from the German agenda.

The German agenda deserves a posting of its own and we will do that soon. 

The Liberal Americanist wing, despite its smaller size, dominated through the 1880’s and into the 1890’s.  Their strength was most likely due to Gibbons personally.  He was the only American Cardinal at the time, but more important (and not unrelated) was the friendship and trust in which Pope Leo XIII held him.  Leo was no liberal—especially in theological and ecclesiological matters—but he was no conservative either and he did make some surprising choices for his Cardinals, John Henry Newman being another liberal whose appointment to the Sacred College astonished (and in the case of Henry Manning , Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster, dismayed) his contemporaries.  Even after the fall of the liberals in 1894 Gibbons remained in Leo’s confidence.  Corrigan, on the other hand, as hard as he worked for Roman favor, never got his galero.     
The image today is Cardinal Gibbons, the leader of the Americanist Party

The Origins of Radical Catholicism VI: The Church and Labor Unions part 2

The late nineteenth century saw the rise of Labor Unions as the working classes in the United States, Canada, Australia, and several European nations developed strategies to protect themselves against the exploitation that was making many of their employers rich.  Indeed American society had a numerically small but very wealthy upper class whose money was being made in industry, transportation, and exploitation of natural resources along with a moderately small middle class of professionals, a “survival class” of rural family farmers, and an immense poor class made of urban industrial workers.  When one sees the great mansions of Newport or the Philadelphia “Mainline” and contrasts them with the urban tenements that blighted so many American cities especially in the Northeast and Great Lakes regions, the discrepancy is truly shocking.  What is even more amazing  is that the urban poor accepted their situation with relative complacency while the rich ensconced themselves in their fashionable churches—mostly Episcopalian and Presbyterian—with nary a pang of conscience.  Christianity of every sort—Catholic and Protestant—simply did not question the existing social structures, and when clergymen did raise questions, as Father McGlynn had, they found themselves in very hot water indeed and from their bishops, not from outside the Church.  Even as the Irish bishops sided with the English landlords against their own poor faithful who were the tenant farmers on the English and Anglo-Irish estates, the majority of American bishops failed in their responsibility to look out for the temporal welfare of the vast majority—probably 80 percent—of their faithful.  Of course the majority of bishops, while coming from working class families—or like Dennis Dougherty who would become Archbishop of Philadelphia in 1918) had himself worked in the coal mines as a boy—were setting themselves up in fine mansions in the better neighborhoods of their See cities.  Labor Unions were seen to be socialist, even communist.  They threatened the rights of property.  The poor were to be the objects of charity not the reason for social reform. 

An exception to these establishment bishops was James Gibbons of Baltimore.  He was an unlikely exception in many ways.  He was every bit as much a prince-bishop as Corrigan was or O’Connell and Dougherty would be.   In fact, unlike a number of mitered pigs’ ears who fancied themselves to be silk purses, his manners were naturally genteel without being affected and he moved comfortably in the best circles.  The few other liberals in the hierarchy were not particularly interested in the issues of labor.  Of course Ireland was in the Midwest where most of his sheep were safely grazing on the farms of Minnesota.  O’Connell was still in Rome directing the seminarians at the North American.  Moore was in Florida—not an industrial area.  But when Archbishop Taschereau of Quebec attacked the Knights of Labor and declared its Catholic members excommunicate, Gibbons—like a mad dog awakened from his sleep by a trespassing cat—went straining at his chains to attack the Quebec prelate and let it be known that Knights of Labor in his diocese were perfectly free to continue as Catholics in good standing. 

Taschereau had no right, of course, to make rules for Catholics beyond his Archdiocese but he did not see himself as exercising a universal jurisdiction.  His ban was based on what he perceived to be the universal magisterium declared by popes and councils through the centuries that had defended the right of private property and condemned any form of socialism that threatened that right. 

Archbishops Taschereau and Gibbons received their red cardinalatial hats in the same 1886 consistory.  In fact they sailed over to Rome on the same ship.  They probably weren’t shipboard dinner partners as the atmosphere between them was rather chilly—or hot, depending on how you see things.  Taschereau’s complaints about Gibbons’ public disagreement led to the Pope’s taking the question to himself. 

Leo’s conclusion could clearly be foreseen--or so it was thought.  Leo was aristocratic and doctrinally quite conservative.  Taschereau was consistent with previous teaching.  It came as quite a shock, therefore when Leo published his encyclical Rerum Novarum in 1891.  Leo did affirm the traditional right to private property and he condemned communism but he said that while the individual had the right to private property the state had the right to regulate it in the interest of the common good.  He also condemned unregulated capitalism.  And, most germane to Gibbon’s argument with Taschereau, he defended the rights of labor to organize.  He viewed the labor of the worker as a commodity that the worker brings to the production even as the owner provides the capital. 

This was a dramatic turn-about in Catholic social thought.  The economic and political establishment could no longer count on the Church’s unrestricted support.  Prelates like Corrigan of New York who had totally opposed the Church’s support of the working class were blindsided—it may be one of the reasons that Corrigan never got a Cardinal’s hat, the last Archbishop of New York to go so bareheaded to his crypt.  I think more important it secured the loyalty of the working class to the Church.  The workers knew that while their bishop and their employer might still enjoy a glass of port togehter on the terrace of one or the other's mansion,  the pope had blessed their struggle for a just wage.  But this wasn’t the end.  Nor is this the end of the thread on the Radicalization of Catholicism. 

The image today is Cardinal Gibbons  

The Origins of Radical Catholicism V: The Church and Labor Unions

Sorry for the break—I needed a few days to catch  up on my day job.  In the meantime, I had several emails asking me to continue with the theme of the radicalization of the American Church.  I had been thinking of returning to that series on the turning back the clock on Vatican II, but I will continue the story of how the Catholic Church in the United States became radicalized.    We finished with Father McGlynn, but not with the rest of the characters.

We will pick up the thread with a layman with some, for this time, radical views—just as radical as McGlynn—and that is Terrence Powderly.  Powderly was the son of Catholic Irish Immigrants who settled in Carbondale PA.  in 1874 he joined a labor union known as the Holy and Noble Order of the Knights of Labor.  The Knights were drawn from a wide variety of professions—not a single occupation—and they had borrowed some key organizational principles and rituals from the Masons.  Post Civil War America was enchanted by medieval images and rituals and the idea of Knights and secret rituals was a drawing card.  Nevertheless, the Knights of Labor began quickly to evolve from a fraternal society towards the more modern concept of a labor union.  With the collapse of the National Labor Union in 1873 many of its members migrated towards the Knights of Labor while others turned to the American Federation of Labor (AF of L).

Powderly joined the Knights of Labor in 1876 and by 1879 was “Grand Master Workman”—the head of the organization.  He remained in this position until 1893. It was a time of growth and victory for the organization.  The membership increased from ten thousand to seven hundred thousand  (some records claim up to a million).  This included 10,000 women and 50,000 African Americans.  Powderly’s vision was not only to protect (or actually to achieve) workers’ rights but  to unite all workers—skilled and unskilled—into a single organization to achieve social and economic reforms that were tilting the balance of power in favor of the big industrialists.   Powderly was advanced for his time, but he did have some chinks in his armor—while open to African American members, his union opposed Chinese immigration as they saw the Chinese migrants undermining the goals of the Knights by providing strike-breakers.

Now the Catholic Church was not in favor of Labor Unions.  European attempts to organize labor tended to have ties to secret organizations condemned by the Church as well as to express socialist ideas not compatible with Catholic doctrine about property.  In the nineteenth century the Catholic Church had a strong record of social and economic conservativism.  You have to remember how badly the Church was burned by the experience of the French Revolution.  Catholicism was very much on the side of the ancien regime.  Even the two popes who had come to Peter’s Chair as liberals (Pius VII and Pius IX) soon lost their enthusiasm for a new social order when they saw how it would undermine the authority (and wealth) of the Church.  The Church—like many people today—put its faith in charity, not justice and believed that the role of those with power and wealth was simply to provide for those who could not care for themselves.  Indeed many people in the nineteenth century felt that wealth was divinely ordained and that the “haves” had at God’s disposal and the poor—again at the disposal of God—had not.  One of my favorite examples of this is an old Anglican hymn, “All Things Bright and Beautiful.”

The rich man in his castle,
The poor man at his gate,
He made them, high or lowly,
And ordered their estate.

This song was written by Mrs. Cecil Frances Alexander, the wife of an Anglican Clergyman (later Bishop and Then Archbishop-Primate) at Markree Castle Sligo while visiting friends, Col and Mrs Edward Joshua Cooper (the seigneur and dame of the castle) in 1848.  It was the middle of the potato famine.  The people inside the Castle (the Alexanders and the Coopers) whose estate God supposedly had been ordered to being rich, were Anglicans.  The Poor at the gate—likewise ordered by divine will into poverty and famine—were Catholics.  For many people,  both then and now, the fellowship of class is stronger than the fellowship of the Gospel.  But I wander.  Perhaps even pontificate.  Back to the story.

As I wrote, the Catholic Church had opposed labor unions.   That is not to say that it endorsed child labor or unjust labor conditions—only that it thought reform should come about through the conversion of hearts rather than political or social organization.  As the Knights of Labor grew and began to spread internationally, Archbishop Taschereau of Quebec condemned the movement and put an excommunication on any Catholic who belonged. 

Our friend Cardinal Gibbons (then only an Archbishop) disagreed) and publically declared: "Archbishop Taschereau's condemnation of the Knights of Labor should not be taken as the sentiment of the church toward that organization.” Gibbons did not claim that Taschereau could not impose a ban Knights in his own Archdiocese, but he insisted Taschereau did not speak for the universal Church.  Taschereau insisted that he did.  In 1886 both men were named to the College of Cardinals and ironically sailed for Rome on the same ship.  Whatever the weather, it had to have been a stormy voyage but it would fall to the pope to decide the issue 

   the image today is Cardinal Taschereau of Quebec (1820-1898) who condemnation of the Knights of Labor led to a reversal of Church policy on labor unions

Origins of Radical Catholicism II: The Father McGlynn story part 2

His involvement with the Land League and its earning him the ire of several bishops was not the end of McGlynn’s problems—to the contrary it was just the beginning.  The plight of the Irish Tenant Farmers and the exploitative rents they were being charged drew McGlynn’s attention to the whole issue of land ownership and the relation of landownership to poverty.  The relationship of land to wealth is much less ambiguous in less developed economies than Modern America, but it was certainly true in the late nineteenth century that those who owned land were rich and those who did not were poor and the more land one owned, the richer he or she was.  Today a person could be worth tens or even hundreds of million dollars and own little or no land—wealth being invested in a wide variety of capital beyond land.  It was not that way in the nineteenth century where there was a more direct tie between capital and property.  McGlynn came to view the separation of rich and poor, the immense chasm between America’s Industrial Revolution rich and Industrial Revolution poor, as a result of the disparity in property (including land) ownership and he found himself drawn to the economic theories of Henry George (1839-1897).  George developed an economic theory that held that while people were entitled to ownership of what they produced, the resources of nature, including land, by right belonged to society as a whole, never to individuals.  George proposed that those who used the land should pay a tax for its use and that tax, a “Single Tax” as it was called, would be the sole basis of taxation would provide for the expenses of government including the various pensions and benefits to provide the less fortunate with what we often refer to today as the “social safety net.” This land tax also would to some degree equal out the distribution of wealth among a wider social base.   While it is incomprehensible today that such a “single tax” might be sufficient to provide financial basis for government, apparently in the late nineteenth century economists seeking an alternative to the extremes of the gross greed of “robber baron” capitalism were convinced that the system would worke.  It certainly did not appeal to the sort of people who held the economic cards in nineteenth century New York—Vanderbilts and Rockefellers and Astors and the like. While only the first volume of Karl Marx’s work, Das Kapital, had yet been published (1867) and the second and third volumes were being posthumously edited by his collaborator at the time that George was proposing his theories, Socialism was already being seen as a threat to the existing social order and George’s ideas were seen as threatening to private property.  Cardinal McCloskey of New York, at the direction of Cardinal Simeoni of the Propaganda Fide in Rome, instructed McGlynn not to discuss his ideas on land ownership in public.   Actually McCloskey softened Simeoni’s order which had been to have McGlynn retract his views on land ownership.  McGlynn may not have been aware of Simeoni’s directives and when McCloskey died in 1885 McGlynn felt the death left him free to take up his advocacy not only for Henry George’s ideas but for George’s candidacy for mayor of New York.  He had agreed to speak at a Rally for George on October 1, 1886 when two days before the rally Archbishop Corrigan, McCloskey’s successor as Archbishop of New York, imposed a ban on him speaking on behalf of George.  McGlynn said that he had to honor his commitment and would then refrain from further public speaking.  For talking at the October 1^st rally Corrigan suspended him from priestly ministry for two weeks.  When a second suspension was placed on him, McGlynn’s parishioners—and many other New York Catholics—rallied behind McGlynn.   He was known to be a champion of the poor whereas Corrigan was seen, not without reason, to be on the side of the rich.  Someday we will have to take a better look at Archbishop Corrigan as he is an extremely key figure in the history of the Church in the United States—more influential for the battles he lost than the ones he won, and who governed his archdiocese with an eye for protection of the Institutional Church rather than a heart for the integrity of the Gospel.  Does this sound familiar today with the way that the abuse scandals have been handled in many dioceses?  In Corrigan’s defense, however, his conviction of the impeccability of the Church did not allow him to see the disparity between protecting the Institution and defending the Gospel.   

In any event, on January 14, 1887 Archbishop Corrigan removed McGlynn from the pastorate for his obdurate disobedience and sent a letter informing the other bishops and archbishops that McGlynn was barred from priestly ministry.  Cardinal Simeoni summoned McGlynn to Rome to formally retract his land theories which Simeoni believed were incompatible with the Church’s doctrine of the right to private property.  (By the way, Christian faith and Private Property is a fascinating topic for a blog.)  Now here is where the intrigue starts—an intrigue that would end up changing the course of the Bark of Peter.  A friend of Father McGlynn was none other than James Gibbons, the Cardinal Archbishop of Baltimore, who happened to be in Rome at this time.  He cabled McGlynn that he should come at once. McGlynn was reluctant to go however and had his canon lawyer, Rev. Dr. Richard Burstell, write Gibbons a letter to be given to Simeoni explaining McGlynn’s position canonically and pleading McGlynn’s health as a reason why he could not come to Rome.  Gibbons, for an unknown reason, chose not to give Cardinal Simeoni the letter but only a verbal report.  Not receiving a written response from McGlynn, Pope Leo XIII gave McGlynn 40 days to appear in Rome or to be excommunicate.  McGlynn, unaware that his letter had never been received by the pope or by Cardinal Simeoni, was aggrieved that he was threatened with excommunication and argued that he had been obedient to legitimate authority all along, claiming that it was Corrigan’s unreasonable demands that had led to his suspension and being summoned to Rome rather than any action on his part.  McGlynn was excommunicate on July 4, 1887.  As one might as well be hung for a sheep as for a Lamb, McGlynn took his excommunication as an absolution from any obedience to the contrary and became a regular speaker on the subject of the Single Land Tax and Henry’s George’s political and economic philosophy.  The years of devoted service to the poor and arguing for economic reforms to relieve their plight left McGlynn with a strong following among the ordinary people—Catholic people—who did not regard his excommunication as anything more than petty vengeance on the part of those who always had taken the side of the rich against them.  McGlynn’s alienation from the Church ended up hurting Corrigan more than it did McGlynn.  But the story isn’t over by any means—next installment: the black sheep and the white shepherd. 

 the image today is Father McGlynn in his prime