Back To The Bishops Who Forgot They Were Apostles

Cardinal Bonzano kneeling before the outdoor

altar at Soldier Field during the 1926 Eucharistic

Congress

Another great prince of the Church was Cardinal George Mundelein, Archbishop of Chicago from 1916 until his death in 1939.  Mundelein was born in a Middle Class family of German parentage in Manhattan in 1872.  He attended Manhattan College before entering Saint Vincent’s Seminary in Latrobe and then going on to the Pontifical Urban College in Rome.  He was ordained to the priesthood in 1895 and named an auxiliary bishop of Brooklyn in 1909. 

Mundelein was named Archbishop of Chicago in December 1915 and installed the following February.  At that time he was the youngest American Archbishop, but also one of the most capable administrators.  Despite the restrictions of war-time economy (World War I) he was able to lay the foundations of economic administration that would permit a tremendous expansion of the Archdiocese even during the years of the great depression which lay ahead.  In 1924 Pius XI named Mundelein to the College of Cardinals—the first American Cardinal west of the Alleghany Mountains.  Returning from Rome with his red hat, Mundelein was given an exceptional civic reception in Chicago.  Arriving by special train from New York, the new Cardinal was greeted by the Mayor and members of the city council who escorted him to his cathedral in a parade with marching bands.  The cardinal’s limousine was emblazoned with his Coat of Arms and escorted by Chicago’s finest walking alongside.  At the Cathedral the Cardinal presided at a service of thanksgiving before proceeding to a reception for five thousand guests. 

Mundelein did everything on this scale and his magnificence made quite an impression on Chicago, but his crowning achievement was the construction of an opulent campus for  his new seminary and as a site for an international gathering of Catholic prelates and laity planned for 1926. 

In 1844 the State of Illinois had chartered a Catholic College at the request of Bishop William J. Quarter.  The school was meant primarily for the education of future clergy but the financial burden proved insupportable and the school closed in 1866.  Mundelein revived it in 1921 and situated it on the campus of a failed experimental educational institution in Area, Il—a village whose name was changed in 1925 to Mundelein in honor of the Cardinal.  Cardinal Mundelein spared no expense in building the campus of his new seminary.  A magnificent chapel—larger than many parish churches and built in a distinctly American Architectural style—was flanked by a huge library to the one side and a matching administration building and faculty residence on the other.  The philosophy wing stretched out the campus to one end, the theology to the other, all in perfect symmetry around the central chapel.  The campus also contains a gymnasium and theatre as well as a golf course.  Running down from the chapel  to an artificial lake are flights of stairs. The lake is the center point of the campus.  Three large piers reach out into the lake, the larger center one directly below the chapel with the two smaller ones flanking it.  The entire campus was designed as the location for the 1926 Eucharistic Congress Mundelein hosted in Chicago. 

Nothing bespeaks Mundelein’s princely tastes like the 1926 Eucharistic Congress.  Mundelein met Cardinal Bonzano, the papal legate, in New York and escorted him and Cardinals O’Donnell of Armagh (Ireland), Hayes of New York, Charost of Rennes, Reig y Casanova of Toledo (Spain), Du Bois of Paris, von Faulhaber of Munich, Piffl of Vienna, and Czernoch of Esztergom (Hungary) back to Chicago.  Each of the Cardinals had his own private Pullman car for himself and his entourage, painted Cardinal red and decorated with his coat of arms.  The train made a grand sweep of the Catholic Northeast—Utica, Syaracuse, Rochester, and Buffalo where it was greeted by throngs of devout Catholics. On the morning of Thursday, June 17^th, The train arrived at Chicago’s Park Row station on Michigan Avenue from which the Cardinals were taken in parade to Soldier Field for a Mass with over a half-million people present. 

Mundelein’s triumph was resented by Cardinal O’Connell of Boston who, though he had to be present, refused a place on the Cardinal’s train and instead came from Boston by steamer across the great lakes.  In full Cardinal’s regalia, he led 500 pilgrims from Boston off the ship to the celebrations. 

The entire Congress was a meant to be—and was—a triumph of Catholicism over the dominant American Democratic Protestant culture. For a week, Chicago was flooded with the scarlets and purples and magentas of Cardinals, bishops, and monsignors in their finery.  The final ceremony, held at Mundelein’s new seminary with a procession around the lake and Solemn Benediction being given to the crowd of one million from the central pier below the seminary chapel was perhaps the most outrageously extravagant piece of liturgical theater in this country’s history—a sort of Catholic precursor to the dramatic Nuremburg rallies of the third Reich.  The cost of the entire event will never be known and certainly today could never be duplicated.  I am not sure what Jesus would have thought of this, but in many ways Mundelein, while over the top by today’s standards, was, in his own time, an effective evangelist.  First of all it must be remembered that he built Chicago’s Catholic Charities, the largest charitable institution in the City of Chicago.  He had a Saint Vincent de Paul association established in every parish.  He built a Catholic School system that provided both immigrant and American children a quality education that afforded them a chance to break out of poverty and into the Middle Class.  He built a network of Catholic hospitals and health-care institutions that ministered to all Chicagoans, regardless of religious affiliation. 

Mundelein was a political liberal and strong supporter of Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal.  He was a good balance to the autocratic Cardinal O’Connell of Boston—with whom he had a rivalry and contest for power that was anything but friendly.  Mundelein took on the infamous Father Coughlin when Coughlin began using his radio pulpit to push anti-semitism.  And Mundelein famously referred to Adolph Hitler as “an Austrian paper-hanger, and not a good one at that.”  To a great extent his princely style enhanced his public presence and enabled  him to wield the sort of power he needed to accomplish the good that he did.  He created a mystique of power around himself that awed Catholic and non-Catholic alike.  It would not work today, indeed today would be a scandal, but we cannot judge people in the past by today’s standards.  In the end, I am a bit nonplussed by George Mundelein.  I find that I can’t respect him for his style, but neither can I judge him for his accomplishments.  He is a curiosity from an age that I am glad has passed but have to acknowledge for the successes of its own day.  

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 cont.

Cardinal O'Connell's mansion in Brighton MA

News accounts say that Archbishop Myers is going to be presented with a petition of 17,000 people—not all from the Newark Archdiocese—to sell his retirement home to which he has been adding a 3,000 square foot addition at the projected final cost of a million dollars.  (The $500,000 construction cost covers neither the architectural fees nor the furnishings and landscaping.)  Personally, I think it is all a tempest in a teapot.  I can’t say that I am disappointed in the Archbishop for providing himself with such a lovely home; when it comes to evangelical values, my expectations of His Grace of Newark—and of most of his fellows on the Episcopal Bench—are low.  There is, as I am pointing out in this series, a long established precedence of the hierarchy fulfilling their role as “princes of the Church” rather than as worthy successors to the Apostles.  Of course Christ had Apostles and Disciples, not princes—but it has never stopped the Church hierarchy from improving on Christ’s original design. 
I debated a bit on including Archbishop Corrigan in this series as his fault was not so much the personal extravagance of  a Myers or a Gregory, as it was overlooking the material needs of his faithful in order to “fit in” with the WASP establishment of Upper-Crust New Yorkers.  I must admit—in full disclosure—that I have always detested Corrigan for his role in the McGlynn case and his opposition to the liberal policies of Gibbons, Ireland and the other Americanists.  So let the reader be aware of my biases and make the necessary corrections in his or her mind. 
While Corrigan lived comfortably in his Fifth-Avenue mini-mansion (mini, that is, compared to the Villard mansion across Park Avenue or the Carnegie, Vanderbilt, Astor, Frick or other Robber Baron establishments), there was a new breed of bishops coming along that would not settle for the comparative modesty of the Cardinal’s House adjoining the Cathedral. 
Now before I get into our next targeted prince-bishop, let me—again in the interest of full disclosure—admit that despite a total lack of interest in sports in general and baseball in particular, I am a New York Yankee fan and the reason that I am so passionately enamored of the Bronx Bombers (a team that I hated in the days of the Brooklyn Dodgers—and yes, I am that old) is not about the Yankees but because I hate the Boston Red Sox.   And the reason that I hate the Red Sox has nothing to do with them personally (individually or collectively), but that I hate everything about Boston.  And the reason that I hate everything about Boston—a city I have been to only three times in my three-score plus years—is that I once had a boss from Boston and he was TLGC (The Lowest of God’s Creatures).   I mean this guy was a lazy, self-indulgent, arrogant, narcissistic, lying, stealing sack of shi*.    (Yes, I am in touch with my feelings.)  And I tend to associate this worthless personality with Bostonians because X was not alone in his sociopathic temperament but shared it with the prelate who was possibly the slimiest American ever to wear a miter.
William Henry O’Connell was actually born in Lowell Massachusetts in 1859 to John and Bridget O’Connell.  His father died while he was still a child and the family had financial distress.  William was not much given to the athletic side of life but excelled at music and was an accomplished pianist.  He went to study under the Sulpicians at St. Charles College in Ellicott City Maryland.  The Sulpicians—and this is important for later on in his story—deemed him unfit for the priesthood and sent him packing.  He continued his studies under the Jesuits at Boston College where he excelled in both the sciences and in philosophy.  Taking up studies again for the priesthood he went to the North American College where he could avoid the Sulpicians who at that time ran the Boston Archdiocesan Seminary. O’Connell was ordained in 1884 in Rome by Lucido Cardinal Parocchi and then returned to Boston.  He was a priest in the Boston Archdiocese only ten years before returning to Rome as the Rector of his Alma Mater, the North American College.  In 1901 he was consecrated in Rome to be Bishop of Portland Maine.
It is very interesting to note the consecrators for this episcopal ordination.  The principal consecrator was Cardinal Satolli who had been the first Apostolic Delegate to the United States.  The co-consecrators were Archbishops Edmund Stonor and Rafael Merry del Val.  Satolli was a natural choice given his American experience.  Stonor, an Englishman from an old recusant family, was chaplain in Rome to various groups.  But it is Merry del Val who gives us the curious link to O’Connell’s rise. 
Rafael Merry del Val was born in 1865 in London where his father, the Marquis Merry del Val, was secretary to the Spanish Embassy.   His blood line was intriguing—with English, Scots, Dutch, and Irish progenitors.  In fact the “Merry” in the Merry del Val name and marquisal title was a legacy of his Irish ancestors who had settled in Seville at a time that many noble Irish had fled their native land as a result of a failed rebellion against the English.  Merry del Val thrived on his English connections and even after the family returned to Spain in 1878 continued much of his education in Britain.  He was a trusted advisor to Leo XIII and a member of the Papal Household.  He was on the 1896 commission that advised Leo to issue the Bull, Apostolicae Curae, declaring Anglican Orders invalid.  He served as one of the Papal delegation to England for the coronation of King Edward VII in 1902.  (The diplomatic relations between the Holy See and the English Crown in the 19^th century are a fascinating topic that I would love to explore at some point.) 
Merry del Val’s influence would rise with the election of Pius X in 1903.  Merry del Val had been secretary of the Conclave that elected Pius and he seems to have played a strong role in the defeat of the expected choice, Cardinal Mariano Rampolla del Tindaro.   Pius, a man who knew he was inexperienced in the matters of world diplomacy, was exceptionally dependent on Merry del Val who as papal Secretary of State was almost a “shadow pope.”  O’Connell hitched his wagon to this rising star.
The friendship between Merry del Val—an aristocrat’s aristocrat—and the vulgar but affected son of Lowell textile factory worker is hard to explain.  They were totally “chalk and cheese” as the Irish say.  Merry del Val was cultured, understated, and while having an iron fist invariably kept it in its velvet glove.  He maneuvered this diplomatically so that you didn’t realize he had stabbed you in the back until you read your obituary in the Times.  O’Connell on the other hand was—despite his skills with the piano—crude, outspoken, openly vicious and retributive.  Merry del Val hid his ambition within the folds of his superb competence.  O’Connell was shameless in seeking advancement and using power with a vengeance to keep others from challenging his position.  What they did have in common was membership in what today is referred to as the Vatican’s “Lavender Mafia.” 
In 1906, at the urging of Merry del Val, O’Connell was designated as coadjutor and successor to Archbishop John Williams of Boston.  Williams had the courtesy of dying just over a year later and so giving O’Connell free rein (or, in this case, reign). 
Henry Morton Robinson wrote the 1950 novel, The Cardinal, with an auxiliary character, Lawrence Cardinal Glennon, being based on William O’Connell.  (In the 1963 film version, Glennon was played by the famous director, John Huston.)  The Glennon character is a bit of a curmudgeon but an honorable man none the less.  That is one of the things that makes The Cardinal pure fiction.
In 1927 O’Connell built for himself a huge (33,000 square feet) four-story Italianate villa on the grounds of Saint John’s Seminary in Brighton, just outside Boston.  This remained the home of his successors until sold, along with an adjoining 28 acres, by Cardinal Sean O’Malley to settle law-suits against the Archdiocese incurred by his predecessor, Cardinal Bernard Law, for clerical sexual abuse issues.    
Unlike Corrigan and his contemporaries, O’Connell was not trying to crack the fortifications of the old WASP social network.  O’Connell saw that the rise of the middle class and the burden of income and estate taxes were leveling the playing field.  He had nothing but contempt for the old Boston Brahmins.  With John  (Honey Fitz) Fitzgerald and James M. Curley as mayors, the Back Bay Irish Catholics now held Boston.  O’Connell proudly crowed: “The Puritan has passed; the Catholic remains. 
Ella B. Eades, a Boston Brahmin who converted to Catholicism and served in Rome as secretary to Cardinal Simeoni, prefect for the Congregation of the Propagation of the Faith and who holds the distinction of perhaps having the most viperish tongue in Vatican history—a honor among honors—hated O’Connell and had this to say about him:
“Monsignor Pomposity…is so invariably rude, ill-bred, and disobliging…I suppose he does not know better, being low-born and common, pitch-forked, suddenly to a position which has turned his head. Like all ill-bred Paddies, I am not, in his eyes, sufficiently rich, or fashionable to be treated with even ordinary courtesy.”
More on this Prince of the Church in the next posting. 

Time for New Directions --Let the Sheep Lead the Shepherds

Bishop Franz Peter Tebartz van Elst

This past week Pope Francis appointed Bishop Manfred Grothe, auxiliary bishop of Paderborn, to replace Franz Peter Tebartz van Elst as Bishop of Limburg.  You may remember that the Holy Father furloughed Tabartz van Elst several months ago after complaints that the bishop was spending forty-three million dollars on refurbishing the Diocesan Center which includes his residence. Among the luxuries the bishop was installing was a 20,000 dollar bathtub and over 600,000 dollars of artwork.  Tebartz-van-Elst is a Benedict XVI appointee and very much of the sort of Bishop that Benedict favored.  Like Benedict he comes from the Middle Class (despite the “van” in his name: in German, “von” would denote nobility.)  And like Benedict he is given to an exquisite (if somewhat baroque) taste in matters of liturgical vesture, ceremonial, and surroundings.  He has been a strong advocate of Benedict’s motu proprio Summorum Pontificium encouraging the use of the pre-conciliar 1962 liturgical rites.   Unfortunately for Bishop Tebartz van-Elst, there has been a new sheriff in town these past twelve months and he has some very different priorities than his predecessor Pope Benedict. 
Tebartz-van-Elst was a bit of an easy target—not simply because he spent such outrageous funds on the renewal of his diocesan center.  Frankly, given the historic nature of the buildings themselves as well as the plan to open a diocesan museum with many historical artifacts available to visitors, much of the expense could be justified—though probably not the 20,000 dollar bathtub, or the 300,000 dollar private chapel.  The problem is that the bishop has a bit of a track record of falsifying financial reports to hide his extravagances. 
This sort of sense of entitlement has long been closely woven into the clerical state and particularly for prelates.  A friend of mine, Father Dominic Monti, is a Franciscan friar.  Father Dominic always tells the story of how people, in their generosity, give the friars a bottle of Macallan 15 year old Scotch, or they send a tray of Italian pastries from Ferrara’s on Grand Street, or a pair of tickets to a Broadway Show (orchestra seats, of course) because “nothing is too good for the friars.”  And, as Dominic points out, the friars come to believe it and won’t drink their Johnny Walker Red anymore or eat Sara Lee or Entemann’s.  And if this is what happens to the green wood, what about the dry?  It is very easy for clergy, both religious and secular, to become used to the finer things in life, and it isn’t easy to go back to the farm after you have seen Paree.
When it comes to bishops and their life styles, the culture of opulence is even stronger.  There was a day when American Bishops like John England of Charleston or Saint John Neumann of Philadelphia had threadbare clothes and worn out soles.  But that day didn’t last.  The Michael Augustine Corrigans and George Mundeleins and William O’Connell’s felt that if the Church in American was to come into its own, its bishops had to live like the barons of business who were America’s new-blood nobility.  Palatial residences were built and chauffer driven cars were the norm.  Rings and pectoral crosses were heavily jeweled.  The protocols of the Roman palaces were observed with a silver tray to hold the prelate’s saturno placed in the foyer as a sign that His Excellency (, Grace, or Eminence) was at home.  The expectation was that the Bishop would live like the mightiest of his neighbors.  Those expectations die hard.  Young clerical wanna-be’s get the hunger for the finer things from early on.  Read the autobiography of Fulton Sheen.  From the time he was a seminarian he never travelled except first class.  He set his heart on being a bishop and prayed for that call every day of his life from when he was a young man.  And when it came to clothes or housing or graciousness of life, he never compromised.  So why are we surprised when men become bishops and will not settle for anything less than the best.
John Joseph Myers, Archbishop of Newark, dined at a rectory some years back before celebrating confirmation there.  The Pastor had received the instructions that “His Grace” drinks a particular gin along with some tonic and lemon.  He will have a filet mignon along with a baked potato and broccoli for dinner.  At dinner, he was showing the clergy his cuff-links and how they matched his episcopal ring.  All three were set with Roman coins from the time of Jesus.  When a young—and tactless—curate said “that had to put you back a penny or two,” His Grace replied “O, an Archbishop never pays for these things.”  Hmmm.  Trinkets don’t go on trees. 
Well, His Grace had no plans of paying for the 3,000 square foot addition to his vacation home either and now all this is blowing up in his face.  Pope Francis has changed the style of life for the Pope  You might think bishops would follow suit.  Unfortunately, to change the men who have embraced that style is a long slow one-by-one procedure and Francis may well not have the time in his pontificate to do it.  Yes, Bishop Tebartz-van-Elst was relieved of his responsibilities as Bishop of Limburg.  And yes, Myers was given a strong hint that he is free to resign when he was given a coadjutor Archbishop last autumn—though Myers seems to be too thick to take the clue.  But there are dozens, no, scores, of bishops who don’t seem a bit tone deaf to Francis’s new tune.  Culture is slow to change, even when the Gospel is so clear in its call to service rather than aggrandizement.  But then, while decay often begins at the top (and Italian proverb says that “the fish rots from the head down,” reform usually begins at grass roots.  Rather than condemn those prelates who think they are still prelates, perhaps we need to look at ourselves and ask ourselves how we can respond the to the gospel call to be a Church of service to those in need rather than be a Church of pomp and circumstance.  It would be great to have shepherds to lead us, but for the interim, the Gospel is more than enough to point out the path. 

Gay Lobby in the Vatican? Ya Think?

Does this make
me look gay?

So Pope Francis says there is a “gay lobby” in the Vatican?  All due respect to the Holy Father, but there has been a gay lobby in the Vatican so long that it might actually qualify as “Apostolic Tradition.”  Peter Damian complained of it in the eleventh century and it was nothing new then.  
And we have had our share of gay popes.  Pope Paul II Barbo (reigned 1464-1471)—the Pope who built the fabulous Palazzo Venezia in Rome—died while being sodomized by a page.  Sixtus IV dellaRovere, (1471-1484) the Pope who built the Sistine Chapel, was openly homosexual during his pontificate and his nephew, Julius II dellaRovere, (1503-`1513) the pope who hired Michelangelo to fresco the Chapel ceiling, was a bisexual who allegedly rewarded one male lover with an archbishopric. Leo X Medici (1513-1521) was also said to be a practicing homosexual.  Julius III Ciocchi del Monte (1550-1555) made his lover,  a beggar youth of fourteen, a boy of great beauty and little intelligence, a Cardinal, and eventually Secretary of State, to the scandal of Church reformers such as Reginald Pole and Giovanni Carafa (later Paul IV).  To be fair, most popes of this period were, or had been before their election, sexually active; these few just preferred the company of gentlemen in their beds to those of the ladies.  There have been some rumors about more recent popes but at this point they are only rumors and not accepted as historically reliable stories. 
Not so for members of the Roman Curia or the Sacred College.  Among the American Cardinals it seems that Cardinal O’Connell of Boston (Archbishop 1907-1944) was blackmailed by his nephew, Monsignor James P. O’Connell, to keep secret a sexual relationship the Cardinal had with a judge.  There are some particularly salacious stories about O’Connell’s Roman Patron, the English/Spanish Cardinal Rafael Merry Del Val who served as Secretary of State (and almost vice-pope) to Pope Saint Pius X.  Upon the election of Pius’ Successor, the prudish Benedict XV, Merry del Val’s was pushed to the margins and his influence never again the same as it had been.  Stories alleging the death of George, Cardinal Mundelein (Archbishop of Chicago 1915-1939) was related to a homosexual love triangle have long circulated but what gives them credibility is that among those who told the gossip was the eminent Catholic Church historian, Monsignor John Tracy Ellis, himself a priest of Mundelein’s Archdiocese of Chicago.  And of course the stories about the homosexual double life of Cardinal Francis Spellman (Archbishop of New York 1939-1967) are widely accepted as factual.  Some stories even have ties between Spellman and the double life of long time FBI director, J.Edgar Hoover.  If the Spellman stories are true, and I think there is sufficient evidence to warrant their credibility, Spellman had to have protectors and allies not only in the Church but in law enforcement.    
As for the current scene in Rome, having lived there off and on over the last twenty-five  years and being a frequent visitor to the city, the gossip about prelates and priests with same-sex orientation abounds at every dinner party, every religious house, every seminary, every coffee bar.  The “Gay Bars” of Rome thrive with clerical customers.  Some prelates make little or no attempt to hide their homosexuality with their handsome young priests or seminarians trailing behind them whether to a Papal Mass at Saint Peter’s or embassy receptions.  Other prelates and priests live in fear of being betrayed or discovered but still have their liaisons with Swiss guards or young monks or petitioners who have come to Rome seeking some favor or dispensation.  Every so often the newspapers report a priest or monsignor being picked up by the police at the Termini (the train station) or the Pincio for soliciting sex and it never seems to be from a woman—though sometimes it is from one of Rome’s famous transvestite prostitutes.
So is there a “gay lobby” at the Vatican.  No doubt.  No surprise.  What this experience should teach the Church is that there is a need to rethink its theology of human sexuality from the foundations up.  Not only the mystery of sin and grace that is revealed to priests hearing confession should call for a re-estimation of sexual moral theology, but the lived experience of the clergy themselves should make them evaluate the true nature of human sexuality, whether “gay” or “straight.”   I am not saying that  that there should be a carte blanche for irresponsible sexual behavior but it does mean that we should know from our own experiences of grace that the magisterium’s current moral definitions are far more narrow than the parameters in which God works.    

Well, Back to Bill O'Connell and His Sad and Sordid Tale

Cardinal O'Connell enthroned
in state in his cathedral--
somewhat reminiscent of
Cardinal Burke's visits to the
"Canons" of Gricigliano

 

I have a tendency that some of my readers have let me know is most disconcerting—I break off in the middle of a topic to switch to an entirely new topic without any promise of returning to the original conversation.  I currently have doubled that in as that I left the “Revisioning God” series to take up “his Pomposity,” Cardinal O’Connell (with implications for Cardinal Burke) only to break off from the sordid story of that nasty prelate to talk of the political overtones in the historical development of the devotion for Christ the King.   And now a number of potential new topics have broken—Benedict’s admonition to the new Cardinals to forgo the temptations of power, the discovery of the presumed remains of Richard III and the question about which rites should be employed for his reinternment,  and a quote of Andrew Carnegie that I think has some interesting potential for understanding the anti-social justice prejudices of the Catholic Right.   But all that in time.  For now, back to our errant Cardinal of Boston—O’Connell that is, not Law.
One of my favorite stories about William O’Connell is that when he was a student studying for the priesthood he was expelled from Saint John’s Seminary by the Sulpician Fathers who ran the seminary and who found the young man “unfit” for the priesthood.  Perhaps they had uncovered his homosexuality that was to play a role in his later undoing—we don’t know the specifics of their reason for his expulsion.  Whatever the crisis, it didn’t derail his determination to become a priest.  In any event after having been expelled from Saint John’s he went on to study in Baltimore and then to the Pontifical North American College in Rome.  Years later when O’Connell returned to Boston as Archbishop, he had his ghoulish revenge on the Sulpicians.  He ordered them to leave the Archdiocese and to “take your dead with you,” requiring the Sulpicians to exhume their deceased confreres from their cemetery and move the bodies to rest elsewhere. 
Now I know Karma is not a Christian belief but sometimes you have to wonder.  O’Connell built a magnificent Italianate villa on the seminary grounds where he and his successors were to live in princely splendor.  His current successor, Cardinal Sean O’Malley, OFM Cap—a man of far more humble tastes as befits a son of Saint Francis—sold the palace to Boston College in order to pay some of the archdiocesan debts incurred in the sex-abuse scandal under his predecessor—and O’Connell’s successor but three, the disreputable Cardinal Bernard Law.  The problem arose of what to do with O’Connell’s remains which were interred in a mausoleum in the palace grounds.  (O’Connell had disdained the idea of being interred in a vault in the Cathedral as is the normal custom with a diocesan ordinary and wished to remain near his much-loved villa.)   Boston College, however, had no desire to have the remains of this prelate on campus.  The O’Connell family, challenged the removal but eventually had to accede and the dust and ashes that were once the mighty prelate have been moved to the adjoining grounds of Saint John’s Seminary. 
In popular lore, the Cardinal was depicted in the 1963 Otto Preminger film The Cardinal as Lawrence Cardinal Glennon by actor/director John Huston who played him as a gruff but benevolent pastoral prelate: such the license to depart from truth that is given to art.    
My favorite description of the Cardinal is that of the waspish Miss Ella B. Edes—an American old maid convert to Catholicism who had amazingly wormed her way into Vatican employment in the days when only men held access to such positions.  Edes was an agent of Archbishop Corrigan of New York, a figure who has always reminded me of Archbishop Lori even as O'Connell reminds me of Cardinal Burke.  I would love to know more about Ms. Edes as she seems to be a fascinating cross between a cobra and a comedienne whose drily venomous humor savaged some of the most prominent American Churchmen of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.  Edes is the one who named O’Connell as “Monsignor Pomposity” and said of him:    
“Monsignor Pomposity…is so invariably rude, ill-bred, and disobliging…I suppose he does not know better, being low-born and common, pitch-forked, suddenly to a position which has turned his head.  Like all ill-bred Paddies, I am not, in his eyes, sufficiently rich, or fashionable to be treated with even ordinary courtesy.”  Well, as they say “hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.”

OK, don't give up hope just yet

Cardinal O'Malley and

You Know Who

Belated Happy Thanksgiving
Sorry for the hiatus.  And this is just a short posting to catch up.  We left off with Cardinal William O'Connell and I am anxious to get back to him.  O'Connell was called "Monsignor Pomposity" by one of his detractors--Vatican commentator Ella B. Edes, and to be honest she was being kind.  Today we are subject to O'Connell redivivus in such prelates as Cardinal Law and Archbishop Lori and especially Cardinal Burke.  Gosh, Burke is scary because he is so much like O'Connell that it is as if O'Connell came out of his tomb and walks the earth again--avoiding direct sunlight of course  But currently occupyng the cathedra once held by O'Connell is one of the few prelates who still is worth listening to, Cardinal Sean O'Malley.  I just found this Your Tube of O'Malley in which he "defends" Church teaching but in a way that is open and dialogic.  It gives us some hope that the American hierarchy isn't being taken over by aliens or zombies.  Anyhow, check it out--not great, but hopeful.   The man may walk the party line but he is reasonable. 

http://boston.cbslocal.com/2012/11/20/keller-large-one-on-one-with-cardinal-sean-omalley/


 

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.