William Henry O'Connell

William Henry Cardinal O'Connell (December 8, 1859 – April 22, 1944) was Archbishop of the Roman Catholic Church who became the first leader of the Archdiocese of Boston to be named a Cardinal of the Catholic Church. One of 11 children born to Irish emigrants, O'Connell was an 1881 graduate of the Jesuit Boston College. O'Connell was moved to join the priesthood in 1882 after hearing a sermon by His Excellency John Joseph Williams, then Archbishop of Boston. Because he showed above average scholastic aptitude, O'Connell was sent to Rome to study at the Pontifical North American College. After serving in various pastoral roles as a priest, O'Connell was eventually appointed the Bishop of Portland, Maine on April 22, 1901. He was ordained to the episcopate on May 19, 1901. Due to Archbishop Williams's declining health, Rome appointed O'Connell as coadjutor of the Boston Archdiocese on February 21, 1906. O'Connell succeeded Williams on August 30, 1907. On November 27, 1911, O'Connell became Boston's first Archbishop to become Cardinal, and was given the title of Cardinal-Priest of S. Clemente. O'Connell managed to be late to two papal conclaves in a row, in 1914 and 1922, due to having to cross the Atlantic Ocean in the slower transportation of the day. He made a protest to Pope Pius XI, who in response lengthened the time between the death of the Pope and the start of the conclave. O'Connell was able to participate in the subsequent 1939 conclave. O'Connell favored a highly centralized diocesan organization, encompassing schools, hospitals, and asylums in addition to parishes. O'Connell had a great deal of political clout in the state. The only politician who had anywhere near O'Connell's political clout in the state was the Governor (and future U.S. President), Calvin Coolidge; and even Coolidge picked his battles carefully, preferring to ignore the Archbishop whenever possible. In the years leading up to the Second World War O'Connell became a powerful force for the neutralists in trying to keep the United States out of World War II, in the pre-Pearl Harbor era. He was also decidedly non-oecumenical. "In 1908 during ceremonies commemorating the 100th anniversary of the establishment of a Roman Catholic diocese in the Puritans' Boston, Archbishop William Henry O'Connell ... set the the tone for the fast-growing church's next phase [by stating] "[t]he Puritan has passed. The Catholic remains" ([1]). See the below partial excerpt from Militant and Triumphant: William Henry O'Connell and the Catholic Church in Boston, 1895-1944:

From 1907 to 1944, William Henry O'Connell was Archbishop of Boston. This was the period when the American Catholic Church, so to speak, came of age. Churches, schools, convents, and hospitals were being built, quite literally, by the dozen. Thousands of children were enrolled in parochial schools, where they were taught by nuns and brothers. Priests were ordained each year by the dozen, and seminaries were built to accommodate the growing number of vocations. Some have called this the golden age of American Catholicism.

Nowhere was this more seemingly true than in Boston under O'Connell's leadership. Political leaders referred to him as "Number One", and sought his approval before taking action on a particular issue. And O'Connell loved every minute of it. One contemporary described him as a "battleship in full array."

His tenure as archbishop was marred by a scandal involving his nephew, who was also a priest. This nephew was made a chancellor of the archdiocese at a young age, but it was later discovered that the nephew had secretly married and was living a second life with his wife in New York. In 1915, O'Connell fabricated autobiographical material, an attempt which was successful until 1987. James M. O'Toole discovered that O'Connell's volume of published letters,^[1] which O'Connell claimed to have written in the time period indicated by the volume's title, were, in fact, written over a short period and expressly for the purpose of publication. ^[2] William Henry Cardinal O'Connell died on April 22, 1944, aged 84. He was the second-last surviving cardinal of Pope St. Pius X behind Gennaro Granito Pignatelli di Belmonte, and is at present the second-longest serving American cardinal behind James Gibbons. If William Wakefield Baum remains alive on October 25 2008, he will relegate O'Connell to third place.

Links

• "The Puritan has passed" speech

References

1. ^ William O'Connell. The letters of His Eminence William Cardinal O’Connell, Archbishop of Boston : vol. 1. From college days 1876 to Bishop of Portland 1901. (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Riverside Press, 1915.)
2. ^ James M. O’Toole. Militant and triumphant : William Henry O’Connell and Boston Catholicism, 1859-1944 (Thesis (Ph. D.), Boston College, 1987.)

Sources

• O'Connor, Thomas H. (1998). Boston Catholics. Northeastern University Press. (ISBN 1-55553-359-0). 
• Catholic Hierarchy. Retrieved on October 2, 2005.