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.   

The Origins of Radical Catholicism VIII: The Fight for Catholic Schools, part 3.

I mentioned in the last episode that Cardinal Melchers, the exiled archbishop of Cologne, delated (reported for heresy) Archbishop John Ireland of St. Paul Minnesota to Rome for his endorsement of the Public School system in the United States.  The issue behind Ireland’s speech and Melcher’s denunciation was English-only education and, on a broader scale, the integration of immigrants (in the instance of Melcher’s concern, specifically German immigrants) into American society and culture.  There was more.  Ireland and others in the liberal faction were trying to get John Lancaster Spalding, the bishop of Peoria, appointed to be the Archbishop of Milwaukee.  John Martin Henni, a Swiss had been appointed bishop of the new see in 1844 and promoted to Archbishop when the diocese became the Archdiocese of Milwaukee in 1875.  His successor, Michael Heiss was German.  When Heiss died in 1890 there was a concern on the part of the liberals to make sure the new Archbishop was American born lest the Germans become entrenched there and use it as a powerbase.  Spalding was perfect, or rather appeared perfect as a candidate for the See.  He came from an old Maryland Catholic family that had emigrated to Kentucky at the end of the 18^th century and his uncle Martin John Spalding had been Archbishop of Baltimore from 1864 until his death in 1872.  Spalding would have blocked the German domination of the Church in Wisconsin and supported the English-only education policies of the Republican gubernatorial administration in Wisconsin.   In the event, it did not happen and Milwaukee would be ruled by an Austrian (Frederick Katzer) and then a Swiss-German (Gerard Messmer) Archbishop for the next forty years.  Despite the efforts of Gibbons and Ireland, Catholicism in Milwaukee would be German Catholicism. 

While Melchers and the German Catholic community were mobilized to resistance by Ireland’s speech, Americans in general (and that means Protestants) cheered it.  A Baptist minister described the Catholic Church as follows:

There are two distinct and hostile parties in the Roman Catholic Church in America.  One is led by Archbishop Ireland.  It stands for Americanism and a large independence.  It is sympathetic with modern thought.  It believes the Roman Catholic Church should take its place in all the great moral reforms.  It is small but progressive, vigorous, and brave.

The other party is led by the overwhelming majority of the hierarchy.  It is conservative, out of touch with American or modern ideas.  It is the old medieval European Church transplanted into The Nineteenth Century and this country of freedom, interesting as an antiquity and curiosity, but fast losing its power and consequently growing in bitterness.

Statements like this did not help Ireland’s cause and they certainly did not endear him to the authorities in Rome.  Ella B. Edes, a Brahmin convert to Catholicism who served as a secretary to Cardinal Simeoni of the Propaganda Fide—the Roman Congregation that oversaw the American Church at the time—and spy-agent provocateur for Archbishop Corrigan of New York, remarked that “Ireland is the stuff of which heretics are made.”  Edes had perhaps the most viperfish tongue to ever grace the halls of the Vatican—no small distinction—and Simeoni to whom she reported the back-alley gossip of the American Church was pathologically anti-American.  This is not to say that Edes’ wasn’t witty nor to say that Simeoni’s fears were unfounded.  But distrust of Ireland in Rome undoubtedly had much to do with Spalding’s never rising above Peoria and Ireland’s never getting a red hat. Both men had the talent to go further in their careers than they did, but neither knew his Achilles’ heel and it marked them each for disappointment.

In the immediate fallout, the Schools Question ended up in Rome for a decision and that will be part of the story of the first Apostolic Delegate.      

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