Of Rainbow Shamrocks and Protestant Parades

Great parade yesterday up Fifth Avenue and past Saint Patrick’s Cathedral.  Cardinal Dolan was the Grand Marshal.  Previous Grand Marshals include Governor Al Smith, (first Catholic to run for President of the United States)1925; Mayor Jimmy Walker (1932); Mayor Robert Wagner (1954); Governor Hugh Carey (1976); Cardinal John J. O’Connor (1996); Maureen O’Hara (1999); and Cardinal Edward Egan (2002).   There was some controversy because for the first time in parade history a LGBT group, Out@NBCUniversal marched under their own banner.   (It would be naïve—at the least—to think this was the first time gays marched in the parade.)   While openly gay participation in the past has been blocked, Grand Marshal Cardinal Dolan made a point of saying that he thought it a wise decision to make the parade more “inclusive” and that he welcomed everyone.  The Krazies, of course, are furious but then anger is their mother’s milk. 

I only watched the first half hour or so of the parade, but one curious factoid I heard implied it (wasn’t actually said) that this parade has always been a Catholic celebration.  The panel of NBC commentators were remarking on the history of the parade which originally was in lower Manhattan.  (In the eighteenth century today’s midtown site of the parade was nothing more than open fields and “truck gardens” that supplied the city with food.)  One of the commentators, admittedly I don’t remember who, remarked that this was because the Old Saint Patrick’s Cathedral was in Greenwich Village.  Two problems.  The Old Saint Pat’s is not in the Village but on Mulberry Street in what would become Little Italy and is now Chinatown.  But the more egregious mistake is that while the parade dates back to 1762, the Cathedral was built only in 1809-1815.  You see, despite the implication—and the common historical misperception—the parade was not originally a Catholic sponsored event.  To the contrary: those who marched in the first parade of 1762 were all Protestants.  And such would have been the case for the first twenty or more years—it was a Protestant event.  In fact it was at least predominately a Protestant event well into the 19^th century.

The first Saint Patrick’s Day parade in New York was comprised of Irish soldiers in the British Army.  Until 1778 Catholics were prohibited from joining the army (and their commissioning as officers was even later).  In fact, while all other churches and religions, even Judaism, were legally tolerated, it was illegal to be a Catholic in New York until the 1777 State Constitution that marked independence from Great Britain. 

The 1737 Boston Saint Patrick’s Day Parade, generally considered the first in the colonies—and thus the oldest American Parade to honor Ireland’s national saint, was also comprised of Irish Protestants who had immigrated to Massachusetts.  Irish nationalism in the 18^th century—and the Saint Patrick Day Parades were celebrations of Irish Identity and Nationalism within the British Empire—was not a Catholic phenomenon but a Protestant one.  The Catholics had been so beaten down by the Penal Laws, and especially so in Ireland after the 1688 victory of William of Orange over the Catholic James II, in the British Empire that they were a political non-entity.  The principal advocates of Irish Nationalism from William Molyneaux to Jonathan Swift to Henry Grattan to Samuel Nielson to Wolfe Tone to Robert Emmet were all Protestants as would later be Charles Stewart Parnell, and literary figures W.B Yeats, Lady Gregory, and Seán O’Casey.  And the artist and indomitable Irish revolutionary, Baroness Markievicz, who advised her female admirers to: “Dress suitably in short skirts and strong boots, leave your jewels in the bank and buy a revolver,” was Protestant until she was in her 50’s when she was received into the Catholic Church. 

 Two of the first four Presidents of Ireland, Douglas Hyde and Erskine Childers were Protestants.  By no means has Irish Nationalism been a exclusively—or even predominately—Catholic phenomenon.

In those pre-Revolutionary (and Protestant) days in America, Saint Patrick’s Day was marked by the Irish in the larger colonial cities such as New York by dinners in the more elegant taverns such as Bolton and Sigel’s, now known as Fraunces Tavern.  For a day such as St. Patrick’s Day they would feast on oysters, lobster, turtle soup, cod, duck, goose, venison, and smoked hams.  Meats would be eaten roasted, or potted, or cooked in pasties—pies and hot-pockets.  Winter vegetables would include turnip, parsnips, carrots, squashes and winter cabbage.   Apples and pears conserved from the previous autumn would be pricey but available and a wide variety of summer fruits would have been put up into jams that might be served as is or used as fillings for pies.  Hard cider was the most common drink, but ales and beers would be common enough as well as rum imported from Jamaica and home-distilled whiskies.  Alcoholic beverages were drunk with no thought of moderation, especially for celebrations like today’s feast.  Desserts would include a variety of pies, sweetmeats (candied fruits), nuts, and boiled puddings such as whitepot, figgy pudding, or plum duff.  There were also such puddings as flummery, syllabub, and blancmange.  Celebrants would sit down to dinner midafternoon and the feast would last into the night or as long as the alcohol held out. 

It was only in the 1820’s that Catholic Irish began to migrate to New York in significant numbers and the floodgates opened with the Great Famine after 1846.  The second half of the nineteenth century and the first three decades of the twentieth were the high-water mark of Catholic Irish immigration.  The “established Irish,” Protestant and Catholic, did not particularly welcome the immigrants who were of much lower social and educational status.  The Catholics were embarrassed by their immigrant co-religionists and the Protestants disowned them completely thinking them to be superstitious savages. But the immigrants were quick to organize themselves in an effort to better themselves by mutual help.  Among their first acts was to organize a separate Saint Patrick’s Day Parade which they had done by 1858.  Immigrant Irish participation in the Northern cause of the American Civil War not only united the Irish among themselves but gave them a certain political clout in New York and other Northern cities.  By the end of the Civil War the New York Parade was firmly under the control of the Ancient Order of Hibernians, an immigrant association formed to fight the prejudices against (Irish) immigrants that had been strong in the decade immediately before the Civil War. From that time on the New York Saint Patrick’s Day Parade has been firmly in the hands of Irish Catholics, yet it has always been a civic parade and not a religious procession.  Never in its history has it been a religious procession and while there was an active policy of excluding groups identified with the LGBT movement these forty years and more since the gay liberation movement has appeared, the exclusion of LGBT marchers or groups certainly can’t be argued on religious grounds.  

Old School

De mortuis nihil nisi bonum (of the dead, [speak] nothing unless it is good) has always been one of my favorite Latin aphorisms but it would put us historians out of business.  It would also permit the ideologues to totally distort the truth about the past, something that a wide variety of the krazy spectrum—from the ‘Tea-Party’ folk in politics to the Latin Massers in the Church—do well enough already with their various rewrites of history, secular and religious.

And today Cardinal Edward Egan, former Archbishop of New York, is laid to rest.  The television is replete with a variety of people ranging from the policeman who stands in front of the Cardinal’s residence on Madison Avenue to a Knight of Malta resplendent in the cowl of his Order saying what a warm and kind man His late Eminence was.  De mortuis nihil nisi bounum is about selective memory.  History needs to be more rounded.

There are good things one could say about the Cardinal. Edward Egan was not a bad man and even if he were, everyone has something good that can be said about them.   His family testified to his love for them and his love for the people of New York.  Love he may have had but he certainly was not one to emote in public or even show affection.   He certainly was there for the people of New York in the aftermath of 9/11 and, while not a warm man, he was dutiful in personally performing the funeral rites of many and visiting many more in hospitals.   

He was a great money man.  And despite all our liberal “disdain” of filthy lucre, the fact is the Church needs money to accomplish its mission.  On the one hand, Cardinal Egan was a great fund-raiser and, on the other, he could tighten a budget in a way that Scott Walker could only envy—and, unfortunately, too often with the same amount of human suffering of which the good Governor is proud of in the great State of Denial, I mean Wisconsin.  Egan was more successful in reaching solvency for the Diocese of Bridgeport when he was bishop there than he was in New York, but New York’s problems were much greater and, on the bottom line, he didn’t do bad for New York from the fiscal perspective.  He was slow to close underpeopled churches which has left headaches for his successor but which somewhat modulated his unpopularity among those parishioners whose churches he kept open. 

He also was a staunch promoter of priestly vocations though the quality of men he attracted to his seminary and the “reforms” he enacted at the seminary in Yonkers (Saint Joseph’s, Dunwoodie) are not universally admired.  One would have to say that the Jury is still out on those questions.  He certainly didn’t anticipate the “Francis Model,” though the worst system will still produce some good priests and the best system some rotten apples.  He also missed Francis’ boat when it came to providing a retirement residence; let’s just say that it wasn’t a downward move when the left the official Archbishop’s residence on Madison Avenue for his new retirement digs. 

He was a staunch defender of the unborn but also a proponent of interpreting canon 915 to exclude those in public life who saw their public duties differently.  He instructed then Mayor Rudolf Giuliani not to receive Holy Communion and was furious when the Mayor received Communion at Pope Benedict’s New York Mass in April 2008, issuing a public rebuke of the Mayor over the matter. 

Both as Bishop of Bridgeport and Archbishop of New York, Egan had somewhat of a checkered history when it came to the issues of reporting clerical sexual abuse.  His position in Bridgeport was that there should be an internal hearing to determine the credibility of the accusation before the individual was reported to the civil authorities lest the priest be the victim of unfounded allegations.  Priests were grateful for this protection from potentially false or ill-motivated claims but it was in violation of the civil law.  In 2002 he gave an apology saying: "If in hindsight we also discover that mistakes may have been made as regards prompt removal of priests and assistance to victims, I am deeply sorry."  However he was later to retract this apology saying “I never should have said that…I don’t think we did anything wrong.”  

In New York the Cardinal lost the confidence of many of his priests and an anonymous letter from the priests was circulated, published, and sent on to Rome saying “During the last six years, the Cardinal’s relations with the Priests of New York have been defined by dishonesty, deception, disinterest and disregard.”  The writers of the letter said they had to remain anonymous, at least as regards the published letter, because of Egan’s “vindictive” nature. 

Cardinal Egan’s episcopacy needs be measured by the fact that like so many of the Bishops appointed during the John Paul years, he was the wrong sort of man to be a bishop.  Like his best friend and soul-mate, John Richard Keating, a fellow Chicagoan and fellow Canon Lawyer, Egan had the heart of a bureaucrat, not a shepherd.  The Church needs bureaucrats; it is—among other things—a bureaucracy.  But it is not at its heart a bureaucracy and it shouldn’t have bureaucrats at its heart—that is, in the ministry and office of Bishop.  This isn’t to say that Edward Egan wasn’t a good man, or even—in his own way and according to his own gifts—a good priest.  He just wasn’t what the Church needs.  Conservative though he was, he was no right-winger.  He had no interest in validating the “Old Rites,” but then he had little or no interest in the “New Rite” either.  The slovenliness of his funeral rites were appropriate to his own liturgical style.  He was a lawyer, a money-man, a person dedicated to making the system run as efficiently as possible.  He did that well and as I wrote above, we need those sort of persons around—on the chancery staff—but not necessarily among the ordained and certainly not with miter and crosier.  John Paul gave us some good bishops but mostly corporation men like Egan.  Benedict gave us brighter men, men who could think, but not necessarily braver men or holier men.  Benedict’s bishops (for the most part), like those of his predecessor, were climbers.  Every so often an O’Malley or a Curlin or a Morneau got snuck in, but over the last thirty-five years for the most part we got our Cordileone and Lori and Finn and Morlino and Dewayne.  It will take some time to clear them out and hopefully we will in the future receive more bishops like Blase Cupich or Christopher Coyne or Robert McElroy.  In the meantime, eternal rest to Edward Egan.  He may not have been the best we could have hoped for, but neither was he the worst.  While I am not an admirer, I did think that singing the Dies Irae as he was carried to his crypt was more than a bit harsh.  He was as good a man as he was able.  God be good to him. God be good to us all.  

An Example To Us All

Did you see this article by J David Goodman in the New York Times?  There was a day when you would say: “DePrimo?  Hmm, Italian, must be Catholic.”  Those days are gone, unfortunately—but I hope this guy is on our team because this is what our faith is about—not Father Mumbo Jumbo Hocus Pocus with his biretta and pious condemnations of all things Obama.  There is no Gospel that is not the Social Gospel—no Message of Christ that is not Good News to the Poor, sight to the blind, release to captives, and freedom to the oppressed/      
On a cold November night in Times Square, Officer Lawrence DePrimo was working a counterterrorism post when he encountered an older, barefooted homeless man. The officer disappeared for a moment, then returned with a new pair of boots, and knelt to help the man put them on.
The act of kindness would have gone unnoticed and mostly forgotten, had it not been for a tourist from Arizona.
Her snapshot— taken with her cellphone on Nov. 14 and posted to the New York Police Department’s official Facebook page  late Tuesday — has made Officer DePrimo an overnight Internet hero.
By Wednesday evening, the post had been viewed 1.6 million times, and had attracted nearly 275,000 “likes” and more than 16,000 comments — a runaway hit for a Police Department that waded warily onto the social media platform this summer with mostly canned photos of gun seizures, award ceremonies and the police commissioner.
Among all of those posts, the blurry image of Officer DePrimo kneeling to help the shoeless man as he sat on 42nd Street stood out. “This is definitely the most viral,” said Barbara Chen, a spokeswoman for the department who helps manage its Facebook page.
Thousands of people commented on Facebook and Reddit, which linked to the post on Wednesday. Most of them praised Officer Deprimo, yet some suspected the photograph had been staged. Many debated whether the officer’s actions were representative of police officers in general, or were just unusually exceptional.
“I still have a grudge against law enforcement everywhere,” wrote one commenter on the police Facebook page. “But my respects to that fine officer.”
I don't have grudges against law enforcement officers--I know there are rotten apples in the barrel, but hey--show me the barrel that doesn't have a few.  But these men and women put their life on the line every day.  I never pass a police car or see an officer that I don't offer a quick prayer for them--but I hope that this officer will someday say a prayer for me 'cause I bet God hears this guy.