When bishops were Apostles, cont.

Bishop John England

We looked in our last posting at the first generation of American bishops—John Carroll, Jean-Louis Lefebvre de Cheverus, Luke Concannen, John Connolly, Michael Francis Egan, and Benedict Joseph Flaget.  None of these were men who were impressed by their being bishops but viewed their vocation in terms of the mission of the Church to spread the Good News and serve the poor and the sick.  They set the pattern and most of the American bishops up until the time of the Civil War were similarly men of great apostolic zeal and personal humility.  John Timon of Buffalo, William Quarter of Chicago, Fenwick of Cincinnati, Lamy of Santa Fe, O’Conner of Pittsburgh stand out for their hard work and apostolic zeal.  Many of them—such as O’Conner—did not want to be bishops and tried to get out of it.  None of them were given to the prelatical luxury that so many of today’s bishops find addictive.  But there are two men who really stand out in this period of American Catholic history: John England and John Neumann.   

In 1827 Pope Pius VII divided the States of North and South Carolina and Georgia from the Archdiocese of Baltimore and named an Irish priest from Cork, John England, as its first bishop.  England was a gifted preacher and teacher as well as a budding ecumenicist who was able to harmonize Protestant and Catholic elements in his native Ireland.   England was consecrated bishop in September 1820 and refused to take the required oath of allegiance to the British Crown, declaring that he would seek citizenship in the American Republic as soon as he arrived.  He embraced the American spirit from the beginning.  He wrote a constitution for his diocese and annually held a convention of clergy and laity to advise him in its administration.  He also instituted the first diocesan newspaper in the country.  Charleston was a challenge as the diocese held approximately eleven thousand souls—7500 in South Carolina, 3000 in Georgia, and 500 in North Carolina.  Many of these were Irish immigrants and it was feared that without pastoral care they would slip away from the Church into Protestantism.  (And many in fact did.)  He had few priests with which to cover the widely scattered Catholic communities that comprised his flock.  England was arduous in conducting regular visitations of his diocese, travelling from town to town and preaching wherever he could—in taverns, town halls,  and court houses.  He himself was a remarkable speaker and was often invited by Protestant clergy to preach in their churches.  In 1826 he became the first Catholic clergyman to be invited to address Congress.  Such a missionary life did not lend itself to comfort much less to pomp and England seemed to have that Irish disdain for folderol.   He reached out to the African American population, bringing in the Sisters of Our Lady of Mercy (not to be confused with the Sisters of Mercy) to run schools for both children of the wealthy and African-American girls.  The Ursulines later joined in the ministry of the diocese as well.  In pre-Civil War Carolina, England took a very unpopular stand in the South, opposing nullification.  Every Sunday he preached early Mass to the African American community and preached to them again Sunday Afternoons at Vespers.  Unable to finance the work in this diocese so large in size and small in numbers, Bishop England turned to European sources and the Leopoldinen Stiftung, an Austrian charity established by Archbishop of Vienna Leopold Maximilian Graf (Count) von Firmian in memory of and named after an Austrian Princess, Maria Leopoldina, who had become Empress of Brazil but had died at age 29 in childbirth.  England made a voyage to Europe in search of funds in 1841 and exhausted himself travelling from place to place seeking any help in funds or manpower.  After a very rough return voyage and extensive preaching in both Philadelphia and Baltimore, he returned to Charleston only to collapse and die at the age of 56.    

John Neumann was born in what is now the Czech Republic but was then the Kingdom of Bohemia in the Austrian Empire.  His family were ethnically German, not Czechs.  He came to the United States in 1835 in order to become a priest—there were so many priests in his part of Bohemia that the Bishop would not ordain any more.  Bishop John Dubois of New York ordained him and sent him to work in what is now the area around Buffalo New York where he was an avid circuit riding preacher, going from mission to mission.  In 1840 he entered the Redemptorist Order, at the time an all-German congregation, and professed his vows in 1842.  Neumann was their first vocation in the United States and within six years of his profession was chosen to be their provincial.  He became a naturalized United States citizen in 1848 and four years later Pius IX named him Bishop of Philadelphia.   
The diocese of Philadelphia was growing rapidly as immigrants fled civil unrest in Germany and Italy and famine in Ireland.  Neumann opened a new parish at the rate of one a month.  He also built the first Catholic School system in the United States—growing from one school in the diocese to over 200.  Bishop Neumann, an immigrant himself, was sensitive to the plight of immigrants and opened national parishes where people could hear preaching in their own language and where the children could be educated bilingually.  To aid in his educational program he brought the School Sisters of Notre Dame from Germany as well as organizing a new religious congregation, the Sisters of Saint Francis of Philadelphia.  The Philadelphia congregation in turn founded Franciscan communities in Buffalo and Syracuse.  He also supported the work of the Oblate Sisters of Providence who are a congregation of African American religious Sisters and whose work is among African Americans.
Neumann was noted for his austere personal frugality.  His clothes were inevitable threadbare and when people would give him new clothing—they never gave him money as he would use it for the diocese and not himself—he would pass the clothing on to the priests of his diocese whose needs were even greater than his own.  He wore out the soles of his shoes countless times, but would never buy a new pair.  He died at age 48—collapsing in the street worn and exhausted.   Neumann and England are two more examples of the early American bishops who were driven by mission and not by a personal need for power, recognition, pomp or wealth.   This was the norm in the American Church up through the time of our Civil War—but things were to change and not change for the better. 

The Origins of Radical Catholicism XVIII: American Fuel on a French Fire, part 2

The proverbial spit hit the fan in 1897 when the Abbé Felix Klein published (at the urging of the Count de Chambrol, the leader of France’s néo-chrétien movement) a French translation of an American book, The Life of Father Hecker by Father Walter Elliott of the Congregation of Saint Paul the Apostle, commonly known as the Paulists.  The Paulists are a congregation of priests founded by Issac Thomas Hecker.  Hecker was born and raised Protestant in New York City and he converted to Catholicism at age 25.  He entered the Redemptorist Order—at that time a predominately German society that had established itself in the United States to serve the German immigrant communities and to evangelize Protestants in an effort to convert them to Catholicism.  Among the early American Redemptorists, indeed the superior of the Redemptorists in America when Hecker was ordained, was Czech-born Saint John Neumann.   Neumann is a saint, but Hecker and other American Redemptorists found their congregation’s methods too “old school,” that is European, and so they withdrew (not without some underhanded opposition) and with the permission of the Holy See established a new congregation, The Missionary Society of Saint Paul the Apostle. 

The issues that drove them to establish this new society were several, but two of them are particularly worth noting.  The first is that they had a significantly different approach to Protestantism than the Redemptorists (of the time) and other European Catholics.  Instead of seeing Protestants as being in blind error and heresy, they believed that the various denominations and sects that directly or indirectly dated back to the Reformation had in fact preserved much Catholic Truth and were Catholicism to be presented to Protestant audiences as a fulfilment of what they already believed and treasured many Protestants would become Catholics.  Indeed, the (comparatively) vast numbers of Protestants—Anglican/Episcopalians in particular—who had become Catholics during the Oxford Movement and Romantic Revival of the nineteenth century bore this out. Many of these converts saw themselves recovering their own ancient heritage rather than renouncing heresies.  Unfortunately this positivist approach did not correspond to the Roman view of Reformation history.  An Italian priest, the Canon Salvatore di Bartolo had written The Criterions of Catholic Truth making just this point that Catholicism and Protestantism shared much common tradition and faith.  DiBartolo’s book was condemned by the Holy Office of Roman Inquisition in 1891.   At the time of Hecker and the Paulists, however, Rome was not giving what was happening in America much consideration.  Di Bartolo and his ideas had to be condemned; Hecker and his ideas—well America and its Catholicism were more of a phantasm for the Roman Curia than a nation, a culture, and a Church to be taken seriously. That would soon change however and Rome would sound the fire alarm about American style Catholicism. 

 The second point was, strictly speaking, not a matter of doctrine but of discipline—though with doctrinal overtones (as we shall see).  Hecker and his fellow Paulists did not choose to have their congregation take the traditional vows of religion.   Their society was more interested in its mission than its structure: structure was to serve mission.  But the Church was not prepared for this innovation.  Again, Hecker and his followers were in America and little of what happened in America preoccupied the Roman officials (o for those golden halcyon days  to return!) but should those ideas come to Europe...  Well, then they would have to be stamped out.

Well, those ideas did come to Europe and it rang the Vatican fire-bell for the American Church.    In 1897 a French translation of Elliott’s Life of Father Hecker was published and the French translation proved to be every bit more popular than the original had been in America.  Part of this was the French edition  was, like the upcoming liturgical revisions, not an honest translation.  No translation ever is.  Tradure est tradere.  To translate is to betray.  Klein and his buddies were of the French Liberal tradition that supported the Third French Republic and Republicanism in particular.  They believed that the Church should adapt itself to the modern world and La Vie du Pére Hecker was a medium for their message.  Here we have a rapprochement with Protestantism and the incipient ecumenicalism that implies; we see that religious vows are passé, the mission of the Church demands an activism—the contemplative life and virtues are out of step.  We have Republicanism and the idealization of the Democratic.  And we have Roman officials having apoplectic seizures all over the corridors of the Apostolic Palace.  

Americans are no good at languages.  (Those who speak three languages are tri-lingual; two languages are bi-lingual; one Language, American.)  The Italians, on the other hand, are marvellous at every language but one—English.  Most Italians are polyglots—they might speak Chinese, Arabic, and Swahili, but few ever get English.  (This is in part the problem with this new liturgical translation that is coming out for our use this autumn.  Most of the Roman officials lack the ability to know what a faithful English translation is and confuse literalism for accuracy.  Dio mio!)  The Hecker biography drew no attention until it was published in a language the Curia could read—Klein’s French edition.  But that French edition was not a faithful translation of the English original—it was deliberately skewed to support the bias of the French liberals.  Yet there is nothing like a good fire drill and the Klein translation had everybody from the pope on down the lowliest housemaid-nun running up the scala santa through the Vatican corridors and down the scala regia screaming fuoco! fuoco!  (yes, I know the scala santa is not in the Vatican but over near San Giovanni in Laterano, but let’s just pretend for the sake of the imagery.)   Of course the idea wasn’t to put out a fire but to start one—for burning the Americans at the stake. 
The image today is Father Hecker, founder of the Paulists, the Missionary Society of Saint Paul the Apostle, 
There probably won"t be an entry tommorow.  Lent is a time that i seem to be up to my neck in lectures and workshops--but i will do my best to have an entry for you on Monday    Buona Dominica a tutti.