Render Unto Rome_ The Secret Life of Money in the Catholic Church - Jason Berry [116]
Founded in 1796 on Lake Erie near the mouth of the Cuyahoga River, the port town grew into a city as railroads expanded the navigational arteries to carry coal, crops, and timber. From a core of 1830s Irish settlers, the church had a growing German community in 1846 when the pastor Peter McLaughlin got involved with a choir girl and “proved himself a cad,” notes a diocesan history, “declaring the woman had seduced him!”3 The new priest, Maurice Howard, set tongues wagging over the housekeeper, a young female cousin. Protesting his innocence, Father Howard wrote: “Thank God, I am succeeding with my people here … there is neither card-playing, dancing, party or frolic.”4 Cleveland diocese, founded in 1847, spun off from the Cincinnati archdiocese.
Shipyards and iron plants burgeoned after the Civil War. John D. Rockefeller’s oil refinery controlled 90 percent of U.S. refining capacity in the 1890s. His mansion was one of many on fabled Euclid Avenue.5 Working families in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries came from south central Europe, and there were pockets of black people. Settlements in the Haymarket district followed “village chains” in southern Italy, clustering families and folkways in urban enclaves. St. Anthony of Padua church, built in 1887, held yearly celebrations of patron saints of villages with bands, fireworks, and cuisine. The parish had ten thousand Italian residents in 1900, the year that the First Catholic Slovak Union was founded.6 Serbs, Croats, and Poles enriched the urban mosaic; tribal loyalties formed around the parish. “Even a street merchant, whose jaded mare was dragging a wagon through the muddy street, cried his wares in Czech,” recalled a blacksmith of his 1889 arrival. “And it truly did look like a Czech village … Children, chickens, ducks, dogs and cats ran about, and there was not a blade of grass to be seen.”7
Jews came from Russia and central Europe. By 1930 African Americans numbered 71,890, or 8 percent of the 900,429 population.
Cleveland’s ethnic churches served as cultural sanctuaries for people rooted in Old World ways. “Saint Stanislaus Church cost its Polish congregation $150,000 to build in 1889—when the average wage at the Newburgh Rolling Mill, which employed many of the members, was $7.25 per week,” writes historian Michael J. McTighe. Three years later the pastor resigned, leaving a debt exceeding $90,000, which the parish and new pastor paid down.8
Conflicts flared in early-nineteenth-century America over parish control by lay trustees and the bishop’s power. In a number of larger dioceses the bishop was a “corporation sole,” a legal term that means the bishop literally owns all church property. Bishops gathered control of parishes as presumably benevolent rulers. An 1888 Ohio Supreme Court decision, Mannix v. Purcell, considered the sale of parish property to satisfy a bishop’s debts.
A panic in the 1880’s having made depositors fearful, the Bishop of Cincinnati, John Purcell, created a “bank” for Catholic depositors. Somehow, he and his brother ran the bank into three million dollars of debt, and the creditors took an assignment from Bishop Purcell of “all Diocesan property.”
The creditors of the Bishop sought a ruling from the Ohio Supreme Court that they could sell the property of the parishes within the diocese of Cincinnati to satisfy the debt, as they were “Diocesan property.” The Court ruled that such property was only held in trust by the Bishop for the benefit of the congregation of worshippers … and consistently named the congregation of persons worshipping and supporting the individual churches as the beneficiaries of the individual trusts in which the churches were held.9
As Mannix saved the Cincinnati churches from liquidation to cover a bishop’s bad debts, Cleveland’s ethnic churches fell into the old European pattern of hierarchical property, albeit in an era when a bishop