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. 
 

When Bishops began to forget they were Apostles

The Archbishop's Residence built by Cardinal

McCloskey in the 1880's. 

The Civil War was a watershed in American history in many ways.  While so many on both sides were devastated by loss, and the South in particular was hit with economic ruin, fortunes were made and lost as speculators and government contracts offered opportunity for the canny and the enterprising—and especially the canny—to profit from this national tragedy.  The War—and the social and economic revolution that accompanied it—changed the way Americans thought about wealth.  The Calvinist Boston merchant or the cautious Virginia planter may have been wealthy, but there were bounds to their wealth.  Whether your fortune rested on the tobacco and cotton crops or on the safe return of a China clipper you always had to hedge your bets, but the industrial revolution that followed the War created a new kind of wealth—an obscene sort of wealth—that would create the magnificent Fifth Avenue mansions known as “Millionaire’s Row” as well as the palatial summer residences of Newport in Rhode Island.  The Fricks, the Vanderbilts, the Dukes, the Whitneys, the Roosevelts, the Rockefellers, the Astors, the Goulds, the Morgans and scores of others made fortunes never before seen this side of the Atlantic in steel, oil, banking, shipping, coal, and newsprint.  It was not always done honestly as the Crédit Moblier scandal of 1872 proved.  It was always done on the backs of armies of poorly salaried workers—usually immigrants—whose poverty stood in vast contrast to the exorbitant wealth of their employers.  For the greater part, these “Robber Barons” came from old well-established families that had been in America from before the Revolution and who had the capital with which to generate more capital.  However, you also had a few men like Andrew Carnegie whose incredible talent impelled him from a penniless immigrant to one of the richest men in America. 
At the same time these new fortunes were being made, Americans began looking more and more to Europe for cultural inspiration.  John Adams, or even Francophiles like Jefferson and Franklin, would have been chagrined by the wholesale sell-out of Americana to European effeteness.  Marble House in New Port and the Vanderbilt Petite Chateau in New York—along with dozens of other palaces of the Robber Barrons were built in French or Italianate style.  The Metropolitan Opera was founded in 1880 to bring European artists to America to sing in Italian or German or French.  La crème de la crème of America’s wealthiest families purchased their private boxes in the splendid new opera house.  In 1887 the Protestant Episcopal Diocese of New York undertook to build a magnificent cathedral—larger than any other house of worship this side of the Atlantic—and in the European Gothic style.  Six years later, Prominent Episcopalians influenced Congress to issue a charter for a “National Cathedral” in Washington DC—again, built in the English Gothic style.  Wealthy Episcopalian congregations established choir-schools to provide the choristers for English-style choirs of men and boys.  The scions of the wealthy American families went abroad on their “Grand-tours” to soak in France and Italy and whatever culture they might pick up along the way.  Their grandmamas made their annual trips to Paris to buy their frocks and to Florence and Rome to snap up antiquities for their various chateaus.
It was in this atmosphere that changes took place in the Catholic Church in the United States.  Catholics weren’t part of this cultural metastasis of the Gilded Age of the Robber Barons.  There were wealthy Catholics to be sure—though few (if any) to match the wealth of the Vanderbilts or the Roosevelts and their ilk.)  Often the Catholic nouveaux riches came to their more temperate fortunes through ways no less reprehensible than the Robber Barons, but ways considered vulgar by the Protestant Pharisees.  It was often politics—with its graft and greed—or breweries and distilleries that created Catholic wealth.  Catholics couldn’t crack the securely Protestant (mostly Episcopalian and Presbyterian) “400” and so created a shadow society of their own.  If they weren’t invited to the balls and soirees of American aristocracy, nothing stopped them from acquiring mansions of their own or buying a box at the opera. They carefully studied and then aped the habits of Protestant upper crust.  And bishops like John England or John Neumann with their threadbare clothes and simple lifestyle would make Catholicism a hindrance to the dream of social acceptance in a world with the likes of Episcopal Bishops Henry Codman Potter or Philips Brooks and their impeccably blue blood.
A key step forward was the elevation of John McCloskey to the cardinalate in 1875.  Roman protocol demanded a certain style for a Prince of the Church.  He had to have his own carriage and could not travel in public transportation.  (The maintenance of a carriage was a huge expense as it required the horses and the grooms as well as a driver.)  He was required to have a home sufficient for his servants and staff as well as for such ceremonial as a throne room should the Pope stop by.   (It was unlikely the Pope would drop in on a New York Cardinal, but still he had to be ready and the throne room was there at least until the time of Cardinal Cooke.  It may still be there for all I know as I am not a frequent guest in the house.)  In addition to his clerical staff—secretary, chaplain, etc., a Cardinal was required to have a valet and several “gentlemen”—butler and footmen. Then of course there were cooks, maids, laundress, etc.  In the established Roman palaces or the various arch-episcopal palaces such as Paris or Prague or Venice that usually housed Cardinal arch-bishops, all this was taken for granted.  But McCloskey had to build a residence for himself—which he did—adjoining his Cathedral.  Compared to the Arch-episcopal palace of Vienna or Prague or Krakow, it is a modest cottage, but by New York standards it was, while not grand like the Frick or Whitney or Carnegie homes—quite respectable.  Actually, McCloskey was no grand prelate and given the expectations laid on him, kept things fairly discreet.  But Catholics seeking to crack the Protestant Establishment in Boston or Chicago or Philadelphia saw advantage to their bishops adopting the princely trappings of European prelates.  And the American elite whose only Catholic acquaintance might be their parlor maid or their carriage driver, took note of prelates who lived and dressed in the European princely mode.  They may not have been ready to entertain such a prelate in their homes but it gave the Church a certain amount of social recognition if not respect.  We will see that some of these princely prelates—William O’Connell comes to mind—only proved you can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear, but others such as Gibbons of Baltimore or Wood of Philadelphia or Williams of Boston had discreet and genteel personalities.   Silk purses or sows ears, however, the pattern was set and day of poor bishops was over. 

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

Origins of Radical Catholicism II: The Father McGlynn Story, part I

Jeremiah Cummings was succeeded as pastor of Saint Stephen’s Parish in New York City by his hand-picked assistant pastor, Father Edward McGlynn (1837-1900) who is one of my favorite characters in the history of American Catholicism.  McGlynn was one of ten children of a young widow who had been left—fortunately—in comfortable circumstances by her Irish immigrant husband.  Archbishop John Hughes was a family friend and oversaw the education of the McGlynn children and when Edward expressed a desire to become a priest, he was sent to study in Rome.  McGlynn initially studied at the Urban College of the Propaganda, but when the Pontifical North American College opened in 1858 he transferred there earning doctorates in Theology and Philosophy.  He finished and was ordained a priest in 1860, returning to New York and becoming assistant priest to the progressive Reverend Thomas Farrell at Saint Joseph’s Church in Greenwich  Village.    Farrell was an abolitionist and had a particular concern for the social welfare of African Americans.  Normally a priest with McGlynn’s background would be expected to have a quick rise in the hierarchy and it would not have been unreasonable for McGlynn to foresee a career for himself as a bishop, perhaps even Archbishop of his native New York, but the influence of Farrell set him off on a different track where he became far too radicalized to ever advance in Church politics, even in a dawning era where a liberal party would emerge in the American hierarchy. 

McGlynn viewed pastoral work very widely—not just the narrow sacramental and educational ministries common to priests of the day, but concern for the social welfare of parishioners and non-parishioners as well—and he threw himself into parochial work to the degree that his health broke after only two years. He was given a recuperation period in Europe but he had drawn the attention of Father Cummings who,  asked the Archbishop McGlynn as his associate.  Cummings died and McGlynn succeeded him as pastor.    Under the tutelage of Farrell and Cummings McGlynn had developed some very strong ideas.   There was a circle of New York diocesan priests who were opposed to the “Europeanizing” of the Catholic Church in the United States.  They—like prominent converts Orestes Brownson and Issac Hecker—believed that the American political and social tradition was compatible with Catholicism and did not need to be abandoned for European models that would appear strange, and even dangerous, in the American Republic.  McGlynn was a strong advocate of Public School education and would not build a parochial school at St. Stephen’s.  Instead he became very interested in providing poor children with good vocational training.  Although Saint Stephen’s was a very fashionable Church drawing membership from the at the time small pool of well-to-do Catholics, McGlynn devoted both personal and parochial resources to ministries to the immigrant poor.  It was probably here where he became involved in the Irish Land league.   

The Irish Land League was an organized attempt in Ireland to relieve the Irish peasantry from the burden of the often outrageous rents they had to pay the landlords—mostly British and Irish Protestant Ascendency—for the tenant farms they held.  This league was an eminently respectable organization benefitting the Irish Catholic peasantry but with the leadership coming primarily from the faction of the Anglo-Irish Protestant Ascendency that favored Irish independence.   It effectiveness was a huge threat to the Irish Status-Quo and the Irish bishops, always ready to accommodate their British Masters, opposed it, although much of the on-the-ground organization was provided by the country parish priests.  Incidentally, while the principal targets were the absentee Protestant British landlords, the first landlord to be hit by a rent strike was a wealthy Roman Catholic priest, Canon Burke of Knock (where, I presume coincidentally, the Blessed Virgin and assorted other heavenly types were allegedly appearing just about this time.  They were, by the way, appearing to the peasantry, not the Landlord-priest).  The Land league was strongly supported by Irish immigrant Catholics in the United States, Canada, and Australia and McGlynn became very involved in the cause.  The Cardinal MacCabe of Dublin and the Irish bishops, opposed to the league, communicated to their American counterparts that they should do their part to keep priests and the faithful from adding to the agitation.  To be fair, this was a very complex time in Irish history as not all the movements were dedicated to peaceful objectives and indeee d it was in the midst of this that the English chief secretary for Ireland, Lord Cavendish and the permanent Undersecretary, Thomas Henry Burke, were murdered at the viceroy’s lodge in Phoenix Park.  McGlynn however was not to be stopped in his publicly advocating support for the Irish tenant farmers and as he travelled around the North East speaking on behalf of the Land League he drew the wrath of a number of bishops.  More to come.    
The image today is Saint Stephen's Church (now known as Our Lady of the Scapular and Saint Stephen's) in New York City,