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Cardinal James Gibbons

1834–1921

 

Cardinal James Gibbons served fifty-two years as a bishop and thirty-five years as a cardinal of the Catholic Church during a period which saw the emergence of modern America.  He became symbolic of the place won by both the Irish and the Catholic Church in the new, vigorous life of what had becomes almost inevitably the world's most powerful nation.

      James Gibbons was born in Baltimore, Maryland, but at the age of three was taken back to his father's native Ireland.  A decade later Thomas Gibbons died, and in 1853 his widow returned to the United States and settled in New Orleans with her children.  James began his working life in a grocery store, but feeling a call to the priesthood, he entered a college in Maryland and went on to the local seminary.  He was ordained in June 1860.

      At first he worked as a local pastor and as a chaplain to the Civil War soldiers stationed nearby.  Then, in 1865, he was appointed secretary to the archbishop of Baltimore and began his own rise to ecclesiastical eminence.  In the changes after a Plenary Council in 1866, he was made a bishop (with a title in partibus infidelium - that is, a title to an ancient bishopric in one of those lands lost to the church by the advance of Islam, as in North Africa) in 1868, and was placed over the new Vicariate Apostolic of North Carolina.

      At that time the Catholics in North Carolina were few and scattered.  Gibbons attended the Vatican Council (October 1869-July 1870) but returned to find his district suffering in the aftermath of the Civil War under the excesses of carpetbagging rule.  He was appointed to Richmond in 1872 and almost alone carried the heavy burden of a difficult period in the history of the South.

      From his varied experiences, in 1876 he wrote The Faith of Our Fathers, a simple exposition of the Catholic faith which would be of use not only to members of the church but to potential converts.  This became the most successful work of its kind ever published in North America.

      In May 1877 Gibbons was named coadjutor bishop of Baltimore and succeeded to the See in October.  He was now in charge of the leading Catholic See in the United States.  This made him at once one of the leading figures in the American Catholic church, and the world.  As the archbishop of New York was of a retiring personality, Gibbons stood out as the leader of Catholics.

      Gibbons was not an initiator in a cutting-edge fashion, but once a scheme was under way he gave it all his energy.  This was the case with the Third Plenary Council, and the creation of the Catholic University of America.  His successes led to Gibbons being raised to the status of cardinal in 1886.  He also became chancellor of the university and was instrumental in saving it from ruin in 1904 when it fell into grim financial difficulties.

      The last decades of the nineteenth century were ones of great change and great difficulty for America and for the church.  There was a huge increase in emigrants from Europe, many of whom were Catholics from Germany, Poland, and Italy.  These new Americans transformed the nature of not only American society, but the largely Irish nature of the Catholic Church.  Gibbons played a major rule in contriving solutions to the problems of the day.

      America was an industrial democracy and had needs different from the old nations of Europe, with which the officials in Rome were most familiar.  Gibbons counselled against too hasty a condemnation of 'secret societies' and supported the Knights of Labour, preventing that movement from being condemned.  He also prevented the writings of Henry George from being placed on the Index (the Church's list of banned books), though these had been the cause of much dissension in New York, where a priest named Edward McGlynn supported George for mayor.  Catholic workers were central to the growth of America, and Gibbons represented to Rome that the American way had its own protections, and that it would be harmful to the church to act the same as it had in Europe (for instance in Ireland, where many nationalists felt that Rome acted more at the behest of the British government than the Irish bishops.)

      'It is necessary to recognize that, in our age and in our country, obedience cannot be blind,' he remarked, apropos of the church and the unions.  'To lose the heart of the people would be a misfortune for which the friendship of the few rich and powerful would be no compensation.'

      Gibbons worked to create a sense of unity among the various Catholic nationalities, emphasizing that whatever their backgrounds they were all now united as Americans and as Catholics.  Yet he also defended the Catholic Church’s claim to its own parochial school system (as against an imposed state system), and also against European writers who saw the emergence of a new kind of heresy in what they identified as 'Americanism'.

      Gibbons had sprung from Irish roots, but his greatest pride was in being an American.  He admired the American Constitution as the greatest document ever to spring from the pen of man.  A strong American patriot, he drew admiration from many other Americans such as William Howard Taft and Theodore Roosevelt.  Indeed, in 1917 Roosevelt said that 'taking your life as a whole, I think you now occupy the position of being the most respected, venerated, and useful citizen of our country'.

      His emphasis on the benefits of the separation of church and state were very American and not always echoed by European writers, but in America they were important in creating a climate of religious tolerance in which the church could flourish.  The civil government provided the protection in which the civil liberties of all could be exercised.

      Gibbons died in Baltimore in March 1921, after a long and active life.  He had ordained 2, 471 priests and consecrated twenty-three bishops, a record which remained until the end of the Second World War.  These figures alone speak of the extraordinary growth over which he presided, and the vitality which this Irish American brought to the creation of modern America.