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. 

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.    

The Year of Faith--and a disheartening history

John XXIII, Benedict's

Forgotten Pope?

When Pope Benedict announced a “Year of Faith” to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the Second Vatican Council, he never mentioned in his apostolic letter, Porta Fidei, the pope that called the Council, John XXIII.  Benedict cited his predecessor John Paul II several times and he even referred to Paul VI but he never once acknowledged “Good Pope John.”  That is no mere oversight.  Papal statements don’t make oversights.  It can be seen as nothing other than a clear and deliberate snub of Pope John. 

The late Father Alcuin Coyle, a Franciscan Friar who worked at the Franciscan curia in Rome for many years and had a wonderful nose for Roman Gossip once told me that the Vatican was resisting the beatification of John XXIII despite having over 20 miracles to the credit of his prayers.  Of course, eventually the powers that held sway at the time had to give in and permit the beatification as the clamor of the faithful was too great.  To balance out the ticket the symbol of ultramontane pre-Vatican II Catholicism, Pius IX (pope from 1846 to 1878) was beatified in the same ceremony.  There seems to be little enthusiasm in the Vatican for the movement to push John XXIII on to sainthood.  John remains a very popular figure among rank and file Catholics but is seen by many in the Vatican as a traitor to all they have worked for and believe in because of the way his Council almost overturned their stranglehold on their bureaucratic power.

The Roman bureaucracy had long been building up a monopoly on Church authority.  I am not speaking of the Pope here and of whatever authority is proper to the Petrine Office, but rather of the immense officialdom that oversees the day to day administration of the Church.  Throughout the nineteenth century the Roman Curia expanded its power as modern communications—originally the telegraph, later the telephone, the radio, and television, and in recent decades the internet has facilitated direct and immediate communication between Rome and dioceses scattered around the world.  In the Napoleonic era and then at the Council of Vienna, concordats with the European powers took away the rights of the clergy in most dioceses to elect their bishops and replaced canonical election with papal appointments.  Missionary countries—and at the time that included the United States—were never granted the rights of episcopal election. After Vatican I and the Decree on Infallibility in 1870 the papacy was supreme in its authority over the western Church and the Curia ever increasingly tightened its stranglehold over all decision making.  The papacy of St Pius X was a time of particular centralization with the Machiavellian Cardinal Rafael Merry del Val as Pius’s chief minister.  The final years of Pius XII, particularly the years after his 1954 illness, were another period in which the Curial officials were able to strengthen their own power at the expense of the pope on one hand and local bishops on the other. 

The stranglehold that this bureaucracy held on Church decision making was one of the things that John XXIII was determined to break and his calling the Council brought the bishops of the world together to provide a challenge to the Curia as a Council not only provided the bishops with a voice of their own but had the authority to change structures of Church administration.  This they did—or attempted to do—with the Conciliar Decrees.  Lumen Gentium (The Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, Gaudium et Spes (The Pastoral Constitution on the Church), and Christus Dominus (The Decree on Bishops) effectively redefined the role of the Curia and its relationship to the bishops.  The trouble was, however, that the bishops went home at the end of the Council and the Curia stayed. The bishops had left a wounded animal.  The election of John Paul II marked a policy of return to the status quo before the Council.  The Curia had already begun its program of reconsolidating its power in the final years of Paul VI when the Pope, all but paralyzed by a combination of age and depression resulting from the hostility with which his encyclical Humanae Vitae was received, more and more withdrew from everyday governance of the Church.  Who knows what John Paul I would have done had he lived, but John Paul II aggressively supported a return to centralized power.  Some say that John Paul never understood the idea of collegiality and the role of his brother bishops, but I think he understood it well and rejected it. Shared authority didn’t fit into his somewhat narrow experience of having lived under totalitarian regimes for most of his life and the experience of the Polish Church that required lockstep obedience to the Primate if the Church were to resist the Communist rulers of Poland after World War II.  John Paul may have thought that restoring the Curia to power strengthened the papacy but in fact he could never get the control over the Curia himself.  It had become an agency “under” the pope only in name as various desk-jockeys from mighty Cardinals to lowly monsignori  began issuing decrees and decisions independent of the Pope and of one another—creating a morass of contradictory policies coming from Rome.             

Benedict may have thought that he could alter that—take control of the wild animal and tame it under his leadership but he has been mistaken.  In fact, the whole problem of the papal butler, Paolo Gabriele, stealing papal papers and turning them over to journalists was meant, at least in the butler’s mind, of exposing that the Holy Father is no more than a captive of a cabal of Curialists that are steering the Church in the direction they think it should go.  Well, God bless Pope Benedict but perhaps more than a “year of faith” commemorating the Second Vatican Council we need a John XXIII and a new Council to pick up the pieces and put us back on track. 
Incidentally, today is the 54th anniversary Pope John XXIII's coronation