Shaping American Catholicism: Maryland and New York, 1805-1915

by Robert Emmett Curran

Overview

Distinguished historian Robert Emmett Curran presents an informed and balanced study of the American Catholic Church's experience in its two most important regions in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Spanning the years 1805 to 1915, Curran highlights the rivalry and tension between the northeast and southeast, specifically New York and Maryland, in assuming leadership of the church in America and the Society of Jesus.

Slavery, polity, religious culture, education, the intellectual life, and social justice—all were integral to the American Church's formation and development, and each is explored in this book. The essays provide a unique vantage point to the American Catholic experience by their focus on two communities that played such an incomparable role in shaping the character of the church in America. Though Baltimore was half the size of New York in population, until the 1900s it held a significant edge in the number of churches, priests, and religious orders serving the needs of its own immigrant community. By 1900 the place that Maryland had occupied as the premier see of the Church in America was won by New York in actuality if not in title.

Based on exemplary archival research and scholarship, the book offers an engaging history of the northward shift in power and influence in the nineteenth century.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Robert Emmett Curran is professor emeritus of history at Georgetown University. He is the author of several books including John Dooley's Civil War, Georgetown University: A History, and American Jesuit Spirituality: The Maryland Tradition.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780813219677
Publisher:	The Catholic University of America Press
Publication date:	05/23/2012
Pages:	320
Product dimensions:	6.20(w) x 9.20(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Robert Emmett Curran is professor emeritus of history at Georgetown University. He is the author of several books including John Dooley’s Civil War, Georgetown University: A History, and American Jesuit Spirituality: The Maryland Tradition.

Read an Excerpt

Shaping American Catholicism

Maryland and New York, 1805–1915

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By Robert Emmett Curran

The Catholic University of America Press

Copyright © 2012 The Catholic University of America Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8132-1967-7

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Chapter One

Ambrose Maréchal, the Jesuits, and the Demise of Ecclesial Republicanism in Maryland, 1818–1838

This opening essay has the longest history of all the chapters in this volume. It originated as a research paper in a graduate history course I took in the early 1960s at Shrub Oak Seminary in Westchester, New York. The professor of the course, Francis X. Curran, S.J., had suggested the topic of the long-running dispute between the Archbishop of Baltimore, Ambrose Maréchal, and the Jesuits of the Maryland Mission of the Society of Jesus over the ownership of the vast property that the Jesuits held in the archdiocese. Father Curran had also introduced me to the source that was the richest repository of the materials documenting the controversy: the Roman Archives of the Society of Jesus. Curran had acquired a microfilm copy of the portion of the archives dealing with the Maryland Mission (later Maryland Province) of the Society, from the mission's origin in the seventeenth century to the 1890s. My subsequent research, mostly in the Maryland Mission's records within the Roman Archives, yielded a lengthy paper (in excess of 100 pages) that Curran assured me he could get into publication, most likely in Historical Records and Studies, a journal that frequently published master's theses or extended papers on American Catholic history. I accordingly submitted the manuscript to provincial officials for review by its appointed censors, as was the practice in the Society at that time. The response of the provincial censor was that the essay had historical merit but that its publication might stir up old grievances that were better left unstirred. So I simply filed it away among other unpublished manuscripts.

More than four decades later I happened by chance to learn that Chris Kauffman was in need of essays for an issue of the U.S. Catholic Historian on early American Catholic history that was to come out in the spring of 2008. I indicated that I could provide something about the Maréchal-Jesuit controversy. Being told that any piece would be needed within a week or ten days gave me momentary pause, but I agreed to deliver by the promised date. A week later I was able to make good on my promise. What had come forth from the original graduate paper was an essay that was one-third its former size and had been radically recast to reflect the larger issues at play in the dispute. The passage of four decades had given me a more mature prospectus that could situate the conflict within a much broader context. In the end I was grateful that the essay had not appeared in its original form, even if I still rejected the censor's reason for keeping it out of print.

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The Corporation of the Roman Catholic Clergymen of Maryland

The letter from the Archbishop of Baltimore to the trustees of the Corporation of the Roman Catholic Clergymen of Maryland began innocently enough. "If Almighty God had listened to my prayers and granted me the grace of spending my days in the humble state of life I embraced from my youth," Ambrose Maréchal assured them, "I should never have troubled you with this letter." What followed touched off a conflict between the prelate and the Society of Jesus that would last more than a decade, reach into the highest quarters of ecclesiastical and secular government in Italy and the United States, and, in the process, emasculate the republican institution—the corporation—that lay at the heart of the dispute. The archbishop went on to inform them that, since he found himself "by a disposition of Divine Providence" to be the Archbishop of Baltimore, "charged with the administration of a vast diocese" that necessitated "considerable expenses" that he did not have the means to meet, he was consequently seeking the renewal of the $1,200 annual stipend that the corporation had granted to his predecessors for nearly the past twenty years.

The Corporation of the Roman Catholic Clergymen of Maryland had been established in 1792 to secure the extensive property held by individuals for the Society of Jesus, now suppressed by the papacy since 1773. Throughout the Colonial period, except for a handful of Franciscans in the late seventeenth century, the Jesuits had been the ministerial church in British America. Since there was originally no state support for religion under the rule of the Calverts, the Jesuits had to support themselves as everyone else did—through working plantations. Over the course of its first century in Maryland, the Society acquired land in various ways: through the headright system that Lord Baltimore established to award property to those who brought persons into the colony, through purchase, and through donations, such as the one of the huge plantation of White Marsh that John Carroll's uncle made to the Society in 1729. Because Maryland law forbade ecclesiastical entities from holding property, all the Jesuit lands were held by individual Jesuits or laymen in trust for the Society. When Pope Clement XIV suppressed the Society of Jesus in 1773, Rome instructed bishops throughout the Catholic world to take possession of all the property that had belonged to the Society. Since there was no bishop in British America south of Quebec, the "Jesuit" property in Maryland remained in the hands of former Jesuits or lay friends. Still there was fear that Rome, through its Congregation of the Propagation of the Faith, under whose jurisdiction mission countries, such as the United States (after 1776), fell, would take some action to seize the property. This was part of a larger concern that, with the Society no longer in existence, the lands would fall into the wrong hands or that the new state would confiscate them.

The securing of the estates was a principal reason for John Carroll's leadership in establishing, in 1783, the Select Body of the Clergy, organized into three districts encompassing Maryland and Pennsylvania, each of which would send two representatives to the appointed meetings of the group. The Select Body was the embodiment of Carroll's plan whereby all the priests in America would organize themselves as a republican body that would choose representatives to adopt "some system of administration" to provide a foundation for the support of the present clergy and for "the good of Religion." The main function of the Select Body was the management of the estates that were to be the principal means of providing that support. Inherent in the rationale of the Select Body of the Clergy, out of which the corporation grew, was the affirmation of a clear-cut separation of spiritual and temporal realms of the Church in Carroll's republican philosophy. Linked to this was Carroll's belief in the fundamental right to property that was intrinsic to citizenship in a republic, since possession of property was the surest safeguard of an independent citizenry. Accordingly the Select Body (and later the corporation) had complete control over the administration of the properties of the Church; no one, not the bishop nor Rome itself, could override that authority. It was a republican division of spiritual and temporal power that reflected the emerging American tradition (in the 1780s) of the separation of church and state. Nine years later, to secure legal protection of the property, the Select Body secured an act from the Maryland legislature that incorporated the property and established a civil corporation, the Corporation of the Roman Catholic Clergymen, as its legal holder.

In a sense, the entire republican polity that Carroll created in the Select Body and the Corporation of the Roman Catholic Clergymen was a provisional one; the groups acted, as it were, as agents or trustees for the suppressed Society of Jesus. At the meeting in 1783 in which they formed the Select Body, the attending clergy resolved to do all in their power to "promote and effect an absolute and entire restoration to the Society of Jesus ... of all property belonging to it." Should the Jesuits be restored (as many ex-Jesuits fully expected), Carroll and the others assumed that the Select Body of the Clergy would dissolve itself and control of the corporation fall to the provincial superior of the Jesuits. Indeed in 1805, when Rome granted ex-Jesuits in Maryland permission to join with the remnant of the Society of Jesus that had survived in Russia, although the Select Body continued to exist and added members over the next two decades—including Jesuits and non-Jesuits, both native-born and naturalized—it ceased meeting at established times to act as a deliberate body. A decade later, when Pope Pius VII approved the universal restoration of the Society, Carroll indicated that he soon expected the superior to take control of the corporation, according to the rules prescribed by the Jesuit Constitutions. That did not happen, and the trustees continued to act as autonomous agents of the property that the corporation held.

Archbishop Maréchal's Claim

From its beginning the Select Body had granted an annual stipend to Carroll, who in 1784 was named by Rome as superior of the American Mission and five years later as bishop. This was apparently initially given to Carroll, not as the Roman-appointed leader, but as the de facto superior of Jesuits who found their society now suppressed. Indeed the Select Body in the same year that Rome appointed Carroll superior specifically declared that it had no obligation to use the revenue of the estates to support any bishop as such.

Archbishop Maréchal, in his appeal to the corporation in 1818, contended that his right to a stipend had three foundations: the numerous declarations of Archbishop Carroll that the annuity he enjoyed should extend to his successors; the agreement that Carroll and Robert Molyneux, the first Jesuit superior, after the Society's partial restoration in 1805, had signed, in which Molyneux had pledged that the stipend that Carroll annually received was a perpetual one, to extend to his successors; and the very act of incorporation of the Roman Catholic Clergymen of Maryland that expressly stated that the property should be used for the maintenance of the ministers of the "Roman Catholic Religion in Maryland," the chief of whom, he reminded them, was himself. Within the month the trustees responded that, alive to "the embarrassment which the suspension of the yearly allowance formerly paid to your venerable Predecessors was likely to occasion," particularly in light of the financial straits the prelate was experiencing with the construction of the cathedral, they were appropriating for the next three years an annual sum of $560 for his use. By the end of that period, they expected that his financial condition would be such that he would no longer need their assistance. The reduced sum of the stipend and its limitation to three years clearly showed that the trustees rejected the archbishop's claim that he had any right to the yearly support. His predecessors had received the stipend as former Jesuits and as members of the Select Body; Maréchal could claim neither status. When the corporation in 1820 donated the property of St. Peter's Church to the archbishop, the trustees felt they had satisfied any obligation they had toward aiding the prelate in meeting his expenses.

The archbishop did not agree. Once more, in April 1820, he appealed to the corporation for the granting, on a perpetual basis, of the full stipend that he was entitled to receive as the successor of John Carroll and Leonard Neale. The trustees' response to Maréchal made clear what they had only implied two years earlier: that there were no grounds for such a claim, and for them to admit one would do violence to the duty they had as trustees to administer the properties for the Society of Jesus. The archbishop proceeded to take the step he had threatened to take when he made his first appeal to the trustees in 1818: to take his case to the Congregation of Propaganda Fide. In August 1820 he wrote the cardinal prefect of the congregation that the trustees of the corporation were unjustly denying him the stipend that his predecessors had enjoyed. The property that the corporation controlled, the prelate contended, had been intended for the use of the Church in America in general, not for the Society of Jesus alone. The Carroll-Molyneux agreement to make the stipend perpetual and inalienable was an implicit recognition of this reality. He was not asking for charity, he explained, only for what was his strict due. In particular he was asking the congregation, in order to satisfy his just claim, to assert its authority to convey to the archbishop one of the Jesuit plantations, that of White Marsh, just east of Washington. If there was any doubt about the intended use of the properties the Society had come by during the Colonial period, there was absolutely none about this particular tract. The historical record made it clear, he asserted, that the donor had intended the property for the general use of the Church, not of the Society of Jesus. The archbishop had every confidence that the civil courts in Maryland would support his case and force the Jesuits to honor the practice of an annual stipend that they had begun with Maréchal's predecessors. But he had brought the matter to Rome, to avoid scandal and to secure justice from within, as it were.

Little action resulted from this petition aside from its being passed on by Propaganda to the superior general of the Society of Jesus in Rome. The archbishop's agent in Rome, Robert Gradwell, the rector of the English College, whom Maréchal had engaged to represent him against the lay trustees in Virginia and South Carolina who had taken their grievances to Rome, did pursue the matter with officials of the congregation, arguing that the recalcitrant action of the corporation was but a clerical variant of lay trusteeism. When Gradwell received no more satisfaction from Propaganda than Maréchal had received about his petition to that body, the archbishop decided in the fall of 1821 to make his ad limina visit to Rome, to defend his interests in person, including those vis a vis the Society of Jesus in his archdiocese.

Luigi Fortis and the Corporation

Meanwhile the superior general of the Society, Luigi Fortis, had been doing his own research on the history of the property and the stipend. He found no foundation for the archbishop's claim of jurisdiction over the corporation's property, he informed the prelate in a January 1822 letter. The Act of the Maryland legislature that Maréchal cited as one of his chief grounds seemed to the general to have no relevance to the matter, since it made no mention of any right of the bishop to the property involved. The Carroll-Molyneux agreement, he went on, had no canonical validity, since no local superior could grant such a perpetual stipend without the explicit approval of the superior general. If the archbishop did have proof that the Jesuit lands were intended for the general welfare of the Church in Maryland, he needed to produce it.

In February 1822 the superior general offered a compromise under which he would tax the Maryland Mission to provide a stipend for the archbishop, if Maréchal would attest that he had no strict right to it. The archbishop refused to waive the right he was convinced he had. Instead, pleading for relief for his impoverished state, which the hard times of the early twenties were worsening, he continued to press his case with Propaganda and renewed his threat to resign if help did not soon come through Rome. In June Fortis informed Propaganda that, given Maréchal's refusal, any possibility of the Jesuits and the archbishop settling the conflict on their own seemed hopeless. If the congregation found that the archbishop's claims were valid, the pope himself would need to order the Maryland Jesuits to turn over their property. When the congregation subsequently decided in favor of the archbishop, Pius VII issued a brief, Ad Futuram Rei Memoriam, in late July 1822 in which he pronounced that his predecessor, Pius VI, had put all of the properties under the "administration" of John Carroll in the bull that made him Bishop of Baltimore in 1789 and thus ordered the superior general of the Jesuits to command his subjects in Maryland to surrender by the end of the year the plantation of White Marsh to John Carroll's successor in order to provide him with the financial support he needed.

Despite the superior general's disagreement with the pope's decision, he forwarded the brief (through Archbishop Maréchal, who was returning home to Baltimore) to the mission superior, Charles Neale, with the explicit command that he "in virtue of holy obedience [carry out] everything which is contained in the Apostolic Brief ... without delay or excuse." When Neale finally received the brief from the archbishop in November, he and his fellow trustees of the corporation (his brother, Francis, Benedict Fenwick, and Joseph Carbery) were not about to obey blindly. In a forty-four page reply to Fortis, Neale protested that "the Archbishop of Baltimore is not entitled, in strict justice (whatever his pretensions may be) to one inch of landed or other property now held for the Corporation of Clergy, for the Society in Maryland." In going into minute detail about the society's acquisition of property throughout the Colonial and early republic periods, Neale gave particular attention to the circumstances by which they came to possess White Marsh. James Carroll, he pointed out, had made no stipulation as to how the land was to be used. The fact that two relatives of Carroll were Jesuits argued that his intention had been to give the land for the use of the society to which they belonged, not for the use of the Church in general. A major contention of Neale's was that Propaganda had lacked the basic information to make a valid decision. He referred only briefly to the civil nature of the corporation. As trustees of the corporation, they would be violating the oath they had taken to fulfill their duties if they handed over any of its property to the archbishop.

(Continues...)

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Table of Contents

Abbreviations vii

Introduction 1

Part 1 The Chesapeake

1 Ambrose Maréchal, the Jesuits, and the Demise of Ecclesial Republicanism in Maryland, 1818-1838 13

2 "Splendid Poverty": Jesuit Slaveholding in Maryland, 1805-1838 30

3 From Saints to Secessionists: Reading the Past as Prologue 52

4 "The Finger of God Is Here": The Advent of the Miraculous in the Nineteenth-Century American Catholic Community 69

5 Rome, the American Church, and Slavery 92

6 The First American Jesuit Province and the Shifting Center of Catholicism 111

Part 2 New York

7 Prelude to "Americanism": The New York Accadèmia and Clerical Radicalism in the Late Nineteenth Century 159

8 The McGlynn Affair and the Shaping of the New Conservatism in American Catholicism, 1886-1899 181

9 "Listen to Our Voice… Walk in the Ancient Paths": The Episcopacy and the Road to Universal Parochial Education 201

10 The Church in the Public Square: Archbishop Corrigan and the Crusade against Roman-Sanctioned Liberalism in the 1890s 221

Part 3 Social Justice and the Intellectual Life

11 Confronting "The Social Question": American Catholic Thought and the Socio-Economic Order in the Nineteenth Century 245

12 Vying to Be the Intellectual Center: Catholic Higher Education in New York and Washington, 1884-1914 269

Bibliography 285

Index 297

Editorial Reviews

"Shaping American Catholicism is the work of a master historian of Catholicism in the United States and deserves to be widely read."—William L. Portier, Univ Dayton, Revue d'Histoire Ecclesiastique

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