Sunday Morning Scene: Churches of the West: Narcissa Whitman and Eliza Spalding at the 1836 Redezvous

Churches of the West: Narcissa Whitman and Eliza Spalding at the 1836 Re...:

Narcissa Whitman and Eliza Spalding at the 1836 Rendezvous

This entry more likely belongs at our Today In Wyoming's History blog, as it isn't so much of a church item (well maybe it is) as a history item.  Note how particularly early this Oregon Trail event was, 1836.  Well before the big flood of travelers starting going over the trail in the late 1840s.

September 25, 1918. The Passing of Archbishop John Ireland

Archibishop John Ireland in his later years.

On this day in 1918, a towering figure in North American religion died, Catholic Archbishop John Ireland.  He had just turned 80 years of age.

The Irish born prelate is universally regarded as having been born and possessed of a great intellect.  It's been said of him, when he was right, he was very right, and conversely, as is the case with towering intellects, when he was wrong, he was very wrong.

Ireland was born in County Kilkenny in 1838 and came to the United States at age 10 with his family. This put him in the midst of the horrible Irish potatoe famine and the accompanying waive of immigration into the U.S., Canada and Australia that accompanied it, with his family, like so many others, choosing the United States for their second home.  This meant that he arrived in the country at the depths of Irish despair and the height of prejudice against the Irish in the United States, whom were regarded as an "alien race" at the time.  But it also meant, even though hew would have grown up in the "Catholic Ghetto" era, that he came to the country sufficiently young to effectively grow up as an American.  These various factors would define his views in profound ways throughout his life.

Ireland was sent to France by the French born Bishop Joseph Cretin at age 14, at which time he'd only been in the United States for a mere ten years.  He was ordained in 1861 at age 23 and became a chaplain to the Fifth Minnesota at that time, during the American Civil War.  He served in that role until 1863 when poor health forced his resignation.  Following that he became a pastor at Saint Paul's Cathedral in Minnesota, Cathedrals having pastors who serve as the Cathedral's priest, a role quite different than that of the Bishop of course.  He became a coadjuter Bishop at St. Paul's in 1875, at the fairly young age of 37.  He became the Bishop Ordinary in 1884 and an Archbishop in 1888.

As a bishop he was a towering figure and a uniquely original one in many ways.  He would become a central figure in American Catholicism as a result, and take positions that some would regard as contradictory but which, at their best, showed his independence in thought.

As an Irish ex-patriot he was deeply concerned about the fate of the Irish in America and encouraged direct colonization of areas in the West and Midwest, taking the view that settling the Irish in rural areas took them out of the vice of the crowded Eastern slums in which many found themselves.  Several towns in the Midwest were directly founded by Ireland for this purpose and his concern over what was occurring in Eastern ghettos was not misplaced.

Perhaps almost paradoxically, however, Ireland was an extremely strong proponent of Americanization of American Catholics and he actively worked to prevent the formation of "national",  i.e., ethnic, churches.  His view left a heavy imprint on the Catholic Church in the United States and this may in some ways be his lasting legacy, although what he was working for had not been fully achieved at the time of his death in 1918.  He did not want Irish Catholics or German Catholics to be that, but rather wanted them to be American Catholics.  He urged and foresaw an American society in which Catholics were fully part of it, a dream never fully realized but perhaps principally realized (and maybe even in some ways over realized) after World War Two when American Catholics did in fact fully enter the American mainstream.  Ireland feared that if this did not happen Catholics in the United States would remain marginalized and the faith would loose adherents to Protestant denominations that were in fact mainstream.  His fears were well placed and his efforts would ultimately be successful to a large degree, indeed to such a large degree that some Catholics holding romantic views of the Catholic Ghetto of old essentially lament them even if they do not themselves recall Archbishop Ireland.

As part of this, he was a strong supporter of education but paradoxically, especially for a man who had benefited from a Catholic education himself, he supported state support of Catholic schools in some instances and even supported the municipal takeover of distressed Catholic schools even when it resulted in those schools retaining Priests and Nuns but found them unable to teach religion.  This was a phenomenal position to take at the time and it would be very unlikely to receive much Catholic support today.  Indeed, he had to travel to the Vatican to explain it at the time.  Ireland, additionally, was such a proponent of Americanization of Catholics i the United States that he opposed the use of foreign languages to instruct students, something that was common in immigrant Catholic schools at the time.

Perhaps as part and parcel of this, and perhaps reflecting his Civil War service, he was a Republican and friends with several Republican Presidents.  He was an outspoken proponent of the rights of blacks at a time when that was not a fully popular view by any means.

Conversely, these same doctrines made him a dedicated opponent of "national" or ethnic churches to such an extent that he's also remembered today for inexcusably alienating Ruthenian Catholic followers of Alexis Toth.  Toth, an immigrant Ruthian (Eastern Rite) priest received a cold shoulder from Ireland upon making a courtesy visit to him upon first arriving in his diocese. As an Eastern Priest with his own Bishop, he was not subject to Ireland's jurisdiction, but Ireland was open in his opposition to the Eastern Rite having a place in the United States and took the view, rather bluntly, that Eastern Rite Catholics should switch to the Latin Rite, which he was working to make non ethnic.  This view is completely contrary to the view of the Church today and at the time it lead to Toth, who is regarded now as an Orthodox saint, going into schism and taking his followers and taking a large number of them into the Russian Orthodox Church, to which additional adherents would later follow.  Ireland is sometimes jokingly called the father of the Orthodox Church in America as a result.

Ireland was a towering figure and more successful than not.  His impact on the Catholic Church in the United States was very large, and because of its nature, lasting.  Ironically, his impact upon the Orthodox in American proved to be very large as well, but for a different reason, and perhaps in some ways both churches owe their modern nature to Ireland.

Movies In History: The Birth of a Nation

No, not the horrible D. W. Griffith one from 1915, but the one that came out in 2016.  Indeed, its sort of the antithesis to that earlier film.

This film toured nationally, of course, and I thought about seeing it while it was here but didn't end up doing so.  It didn't seem to get a lot of press and I wasn't sure what exactly it was about.  I happened to catch it recently on television.

This is a cinematic treatment of the story of Nat Turner's slave rebellion.  I'll confess that I'm not terribly familiar with that event, which is often inaccurately cited to be the most successful example of a slave rebellion in North America (there was actually at least one more successful in every sense during the Colonial Era).  As I'm not hugely familiar with the Turner story, I'm left a bit out to sea in regards to the accuracy of this depiction, but it seems to have done a good job of it from what I can learn.

Turner, as the movie depicts, was a highly religious slave in Virginia.  He had a natural speaking ability and started to operate as a Christian minister within his slave community.  He was sufficiently good at this that he began to be used in that capacity in the area and preached to other slave communities with the license and encouragement of the slave owning class. At some point the exposure to the fate of his fellow slaves began to weigh on him heavily and he began, by his own accounts, to have visions that urged him, he claimed, to lead his fellows in rebellion against their master.  Over time, he organized such a rebellion.

The rebellion was noteworthy in a variety of ways, and not only for its success.  Convinced of the evil nature of the slave owning class, the brief uprising did not spare women and children and taking place mostly over a single night it concentrated, by design, on the use of blunt and edged weapons that would kill but not make much noise.  It was, therefore, sort of uniquely grisly.

It was, of course, also a failure and rapidly put down.  The  number of rebel slaves and whites from the slave owning class who were killed in the uprising, keeping in mind post uprising executions, were freakishly similar,both being about 55-56 in number.  Reprisal murders by local whites however took an additional 120 black lives.  As is often noted, long term the rebellion became and enduring memory in the South and it may have caused the oppressive nature of slavery, already pretty horrific, to become worse, although the extent to which that can really be determined seems questionable to me.  Other factors may have played a role in that other than the rebellion, but no doubt it was an ongoing white memory that formed part of the basis for the slave owning class' view of the world.

All in all, this film seems to do a very good job. It appears correct in material details.  The very strong religious character of Nat Turner himself is correctly portrayed.  The rebellion scenes appear to exaggerate somewhat, but then they'd likely have to in order to make an effective movie portrayal.  All in all, it's well worth seening.