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. 
 

The Origins of Radical Catholicism IV-- The McGlynn Story part 4

Well McGlynn was absolved and Corrigan was beside himself with Fury.  What was even more aggravating to him was that Satolli brushed off  his protests saying that he (Corrigan) had never initiated a formal ecclesiastical trial of McGlynn and had abdicated the case to the Holy See, and he (Satolli) was authorized by the Holy See to handle the case so Corrigan had no right to be grieved that his, (Corrigan’s) prerogatives had been brushed aside.  Corrigan’s foes in the hierarchy—Gibbons, Ireland, Moore, and—in Rome—Dennis O’Connell who was Rector of the North American College were elbowing each other in glee at having pulled over this fast one on him, especially as it signified the power of their liberal (American) party over Corrigan’s Europeanist party. 

This might be time for a brief explanatory aside.  I have just said “Europeanist” faction.  A more precise word would be Ultramontane.  The Ultramontane faction was (and I think still is) a faction within the Church that rejects local custom and tradition in favor of the Roman—or what they perceive to be the Roman—custom.  “Perceive to be” is the crucial phrase.  Having lived in Rome a fair chunk of my life and being somewhat fluent in Italian, I have long noticed that sometimes the religious tourists—and in particular the Americans—are often more “Italian” than the Italians.  I always pointed out to my guests that when you see a priest in Rome wearing the soutane in the street nine times out of ten he will be an American; nine times out of the next ten, he is an American visitning
Rome (as opposed to living there).  When you see one wearing the saturno—the low-crowned round clerical hat—you can bet your rent that he is an American tourist (unless, of course, he is the famous “Father Z” who is neither fish nor fowl in terms of being a tourist or a Vatican pezzo grosso .  I do understand that he is fun to be with, however, and a charming dinner guest but we didn’t travel in the same circles during my time in Rome.  But I have strayed.  The Ultramontanes of the 19^th century were almost invariably Oxford Movement Anglicans who had swum the Tiber and were self-conscious of their English (heretical) roots.  Manning was one.  Newman was not.  But more on all that some other time.

Speaking of swimming the Tiber, McGlynn didn’t have to swim it exactly but he did need to cross back onto its sunnier bank.  The excommunication lifted he ultimately had to show up in Rome to be interviewed by the proper authorities to make sure his radical ideas about property had been duly adjusted to be in line with Church Teaching.   (The papal encyclical Rerum Novarum had shifted the ground somewhat in his favor.) He also had to make his personal submission to Pope Leo XIII who, making him out to be something akin to a dancing bear or some such curiosity was most anxious to see him.  McGlynn’s reluctance may have had something to do with unproved allegations of sexual misconduct—perhaps even an illegitimate child.  Historians quibble whether there was a basis for these charges or if it was the Corrigan party trying to discredit McGlynn, but the Roman authorities insisted they weren’t concerned about the allegations one way or the other.  In fact, Corrigan was nervous about how McGlynn’s time in Rome would go; it seems McGlynn had information about the New York Archdiocese that Corrigan was anxious not to have the tables turned on him.  The Archbishop sent his Italian secretary, Father Gherardo Ferrante over for damage control.  But in the event there was no great drama.   Like so many conflicts it ended not with a bang but a whimper.  For his audience with the Pope, McGlynn needed to borrow a cassock.  Father Frederick Rooker, vice-Rector of the North American College loaned him one.  (The Rector, Dennis O’Connell who from the shadows had played some significant role in McGlynn’s vindication and Corrigan’s defeat had fled Rome when McGlynn actually showed up and was visiting Protestant Norway.)  To judge just how petty some people are, Corrigan’s suffragen, Bishop McDonnell of Brooklyn, withdrew his students from the North American in protest over the loaning of a cassock to that rebellious McGlynn.   Well, that ends the saga of the Reverend Doctor Edward McGlynn; but Corrigan, Gibbons, Leo and others hall have further roles to play in the radicalization of the American Church.  But I think we will take a break for a few days and perhaps return to one of our unfinished strains.
The image today is Leo XIII

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,