Requiem Aeternam Dona Ei, Domine II

Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, Roger B. Taney, died on October 12, 1864.  Taney had been appointed to the Court by President Andrew Jackson in 1836 and had sworn into office seven Presidents.  He was the first Catholic to be appointed to the Supreme Court.  Taney, a Marylander, was pro-slavery and had authored the infamous 1857 Dred Scott decision which ruled that Blacks are not citizens of the United States and have no standing in law to sue.  Needless to day, the Justice and President Lincoln did not see eye to eye on the matters of the day.  Taney’s death provided Lincoln with the opportunity to name a new Chief Justice and he chose Salmon P. Chase.  The Republican Senate confirmed Chase the same day he was nominated.  (Curiously enough the Presidential Election of November 8^th 1864 had intervened between Taney’s death and Chase’s nomination.)

Taney’s funeral was on the morning of Saturday, October 15, 1864.  Shortly before 6 AM, the presidential carriage rolled up to the North Door of the White House and President Lincoln, attended by Secretary of State Seward and Postmaster General William Dennison entered the carriage for the short ride across Lafayette Square to the Taney Residence.  There, in the parlor by Taney’s coffin, the President stood respectfully while a priest from Saint Patrick’s parish recited the traditional Latin prayers for the faithfully departed.  Lincoln stayed until Taney’s coffin was closed and carried from the house and placed in the horse-drawn hearse and then the President returned to the White House for his day’s work.  The Civil War was still his chief preoccupation. 

After leaving the President standing in the road, holding his hat in his hands, Taney’s coffin was conveyed to the old Baltimore and Potomac Railroad station near the site of what is today the National Gallery of Art.  A train was provided to take the funeral party to Frederick, Maryland where a Requiem Mass was sung in Saint John the Evangelist Church, Taney’s home parish, and where he was interred in the family plot in the churchyard.  No representatives of the Administration attended the Mass or internment. 

I was somewhat surprised that today’s funeral for Justice Antonin Scalia followed the current liturgical rites. Given the Justice’s own predilection for the pre-conciliar rites as well as his son’s own fondness for the Extraordinary Form I would have expected the Mass to have been a Requiem Mass with Black vestments and at the old “high altar” versus apsidem.  In fact it was a good example of how the Novus Ordo can be celebrated on a formal occasion in a cathedral setting. I did notice, however, that the sign of peace was omitted.  And as for the homily—it was extraordinary; I don’t recall hearing a better one for such an occasion, or for that matter, on any occasion.  It had theological depth and personal touch.  It shows that Father Scalia, like his father, is a man of intellectual probity as well as being superbly articulate.   

Finally, the word going around the Archdiocese of Washington and the Diocese of Arlington is that the Scalia family and Father Paul Scalia in particular, asked President Obama not to attend the Funeral Mass.  There was some apprehension that the scene at Senator Kennedy’s Funeral with Cardinal O’Malley’s effusive greeting of the President, would be repeated with Cardinal Wuerl.  Vice-President Biden and his wife, Dr. Jill Biden, for their part maintained a very discreet presence at the funeral.   The Scalias, like many conservative Catholics, find the President to be a symbol of secularism in modern American Public Life.  Father Scalia made the point in his homily—and a point that I agree with—that not only must we not banish faith from the public square, but we as Christians must bring our faith into that public square.  If it is true that the Scalia family expressed their preference that the President not attend the funeral, they should take responsibility for it rather than let the President be the scapegoat for those have criticized him for not being present.  However, again, history shows us that there is no precedent requiring a President to be at the funeral service of a Supreme Court Justice.

American Catholics in the Civil War

Let’s take a look at the role of Catholics in the American Civil War. In the two decades before the war many of your large Protestant denominations (Baptists, Methodists, and Presbyterians) broke apart into Northern and Southern Churches. The issue, of course, was slavery, an issue that was dividing the country. As the abolitionist movement grew strong in the North and as the South became more and more defensive of its "pecuiliar institution," the unity of these denominations inevitably fractured—and would not be healed for decades. The Episcopal Church fared somewhat better, undergoing a “separation” rather than a division as the dioceses in the Confederacy organized themselves into “The Episcopal Church in the Confederate States of America,” without undergoing any doctrinal or canonical division, retaining the same prayer-book while praying for different presidents and Congresses.. The Episcopal Church in the Confederate States, decidedly more "Low Church" in tradition than the more "High Church" North, had the distinction of a Bishop-General when Leonidas Polk, Bishop of Louisiana traded in his rochet and chimere for Confederate gray and accepted a commission in the Army as a General. Bishop Polk was killed in the battle of Pine Mountain Georgia by a Union shell in 1864. Division was not on the agenda for Lutherans either as most Lutherans, indeed almost all, lived in the Union and were either loyal to it or, especially the Scandinavians, were obliviously indifferent to the conflict which had no direct bearing on their rural farm life in Minnesotta and the Dakotas. (Lutherans were already fractured along ethnic lines—Swedes, Germans, Norwegians, Estonians, Danes, and their divisions were often as bitter as the North-South divisions tearing the country apart.)
For Catholics division or even separation was not a possibility as their common allegiance to the Papacy held them in communion—if not agreement—with one another. The Papacy itself had a rather ambigious record on the issue of slavery until Pope Gregory XVI in 1839 issued the bull Supremo Apostolatus which condemned both the institution of slavery and the slave trade. Not all Catholics rallied to the papal teaching. Catholic officials in the United States, Brazil, and other nations which still legalized slavery were not inclined to preach against slavery, Catholic slave owners—including the clergy—did not sell their slaves, much less emancipate them. (The American Jesuits had been ordered by Rome earlier in the century to get rid of their slaves and they did.) Perhaps one of the more embarrassing responses from a Catholic was that of Roger Taney, Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court (and the only Catholic to serve in that position until the current Chief Justice, John Roberts). Taney was a devout Maryland Catholic. He had freed his own slaves and he “regretted” slavery. Nevertheless, he is responsible for the infamous Dred Scott decision declaring: “It is difficult at this day to realize the state of public opinion in regard to that unfortunate race which prevailed in the civilized and enlightened portions of the world at the time of the Declaration of Independence, and when the Constitution of the United States was framed and adopted; but the public history of every European nation displays it in a manner too plain to be mistaken. They had for more than a century before been regarded as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations, and so far unfit that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” He further declared that Blacks—free or slave—were not and could not be citizens and that Congress had not authority to regulate slavery in the territories. In terms of dissent from Church teaching, Taney’s action would be as if today Justice Roberts or any other Catholic Justice on the court ruled that neither the States separately nor the Federal Government collectively could limit access to abortion. It was a shocking contradiction to the magisterium yet Taney’s dissent from magisterial teaching was in no way punished by Church authorities of his day. This was despite Pope Gregory’s admonition in Supremo Apostolatus: "We further reprobate by our apostolic authority all the above described offences (slavery and the slave trade) as utterly unworthy the Christian name; and by the same authority we rigidly prohibit and interdict all and every individual, whether ecclesiastical or laical, from presuming to defend that commerce in negro servitude under any pretence or borrowed excuse. … or to teach or publish in any manner, publicly or privately, things contrary to the admonitions which we have given in these letters." Pretty clear, huh? By "interdict" Gregory meant of course that any one supporting slavery or the slave trade was to be denied the sacraments and other rites of the Church. It was never enforced against Mr. Justice Taney or any other person--official or citizen--as far as I know, Of course Pope Gregory also had written that race was not to be a barrier to Holy Orders, but no American seminary would accept an Afro-American candidate. It was only in 1886 that Augustus Tolton, the first African American ordinandus, was ordained to the priesthood and that was after being sent to Rome for his educaiton to get around the refusal of the American seminaries to admit him. (There is the case of the Healy brothers whose mixed race lineage allowed them to passé blanc. We will do a blog on them in the future.) Regardless of papal declaraitons, it would not be until the Civil Rights movement in the mid-twentieth century that most Catholic seminaries and religous orders would accept African-Americans and candidates. But Father Tolton is long after the Civil War and we have wandered too far--more to come when we get back to the topic of American Catholics in the Civil War.
The image today is Roger B, Taney, the first Catholic to serve as a justice of the United States Supreme Court and the first Catholic to serve as Chief Justice. He was appointed to the Court as Chief Justice and served from his appointment in 1836 until his death in 1864, He handed down the infamous Dred Scott decision which declared that slaves were property and Blacks, free or slave, could never be citizens.