Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [866]
Many in the Knights of Labor now took George’s teachings to heart. Grand Master Powderly, himself of Irish descent and prominent in the Land League, promoted Progress and Poverty vigorously, sponsoring lectures by George around New York and out west. Though not convinced the single tax was the answer to all labor’s problems, Powderly applauded George’s raising of the land issue.
For his part, George was cautious about linking up with the union movement, given his convictions about the harmony of interest between capital and labor. But the Knights’ old republican belief in the essential unity of the producing classes mirrored his own, and the tangible injustices he had witnessed on his travels moved him emotionally, so George joined the ranks of the workingmen.
“CHRIST HIMSELF WAS BUT AN EVICTED PEASANT”
Among George’s new admirers was Father Edward McGlynn, the Soggarth Aroon (Gaelic for “Priest of the People”). McGlynn, a New Yorker born and bred of Irish immigrant parents, had begun his ministry in a Civil War military hospital. He worked his way up from a floating ministry to Irish squatters, assigned him by Archbishop Hughes, to pastorship of the beautifully frescoed St. Stephen’s on East 28th Street, between Lexington and Third avenues, spiritual center of the largest and one of the poorest parishes in the city. McGlynn had long sought to promote the material as well as spiritual needs of his parishioners, and when he read Progress and Poverty, it explained to him why all his efforts on behalf of poor parishioners had come to nought. A magnetic speaker, the enormously popular McGlynn teamed up with George in speaking out against Irish and American landlordism, from secular as well as sacred pulpits. “Christ himself was but an evicted peasant,” McGlynn asserted, fashioning an Irish Catholic counterpart to Protestant workingmen’s veneration of “Jesus the brother carpenter who banned money changers from the temple.”
McGlynn was also a venturesome theologian, and he headed a remarkable group of New York City clerics who were urging democratization on a local hierarchy that was traveling rapidly in the opposite direction.
New York’s Catholic Church was thriving. Over 40 percent of Manhattan’s population (and a somewhat smaller percentage of Brooklyn’s) was now Catholic, and Catholics accounted for perhaps three-quarters of the city’s active churchgoers. With nearly four hundred priests and perhaps two hundred churches and chapels, the archdiocese was unquestionably the largest in the United States. In 1875 the Vatican had recognized New York’s importance, when Pius IX sent a red hat across the Atlantic to John McCloskey, Archbishop Hughes’s successor. And on May 25, 1879, the cardinal, with forty-five archbishops and bishops in attendance, had sung a dedication Mass, before an immense crowd of dignitaries, at the high altar of the finally completed St. Patrick’s Cathedral—now the most imposing ecclesiastical edifice in New York City.
Cardinal McCloskey died in 1885. Power passed to New York’s third archbishop, Michael Corrigan. Corrigan was the son of a Dublin cabinetmaker who had emigrated to Newark in 1829 and become, by the 1850s, a prosperous wholesale grocer, liquor dealer, and real estate investor, one of the wealthiest Catholics in the city. Michael, born in 1839, had grown up in the comfortable world of the emerging Irish middle class. In 1859 Corrigan studied for the priesthood at the new American College in Rome, where his prefect was the strappingly masculine Edward McGlynn, who apparently looked down on the bookish Corrigan, a slight that would be remembered. Ordained in Rome, Corrigan returned to America and rose to become bishop of Newark in 1873, where he stayed until summoned in 1880 by McCloskey to help administer the huge and rapidly growing archdiocese of New York.
In 1885, now himself archbishop, Corrigan found himself pitted against his old nemesis McGlynn, on matters both sacred and secular. Corrigan had moved swiftly to centralize ecclesiastical authority, but McGlynn, like many priests