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. 
 

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