Render Unto Rome_ The Secret Life of Money in the Catholic Church - Jason Berry [30]
In 1901 O’Connell was consecrated a bishop in Rome and sent to Portland, Maine, in 1903 at age forty-four to assume his rank. In that small diocese—57 churches laced through forest land, 100 priests for 97,000 Catholics in a state of 700,000 people—he declared at his installation, “As I am American in patriotism, so am I, and shall ever be, Roman in faith and love of the church.”59 Dutiful and slightly stern, Bishop O’Connell visited churches and monitored the priests and parishes; if any finances seemed amiss he pressed his clergy for clarification. Obsessed about avoiding debt, he was determined to be a reliable contributor to the annual Peter’s Pence, as the world’s far-flung bishops registered their fealty to the Holy Father. Maine’s small diocese averaged $3,000 annually for Peter’s Pence in his five years there. In 1906 O’Connell went to Boston as coadjutor bishop, meaning that he would serve the ailing archbishop as Rome’s designated successor.
With 850,000 Catholics, Boston was a huge career move for O’Connell. Back in Maine, however, the new bishop had an audit done and found a glaring deficit. Money was missing, a good deal of it. Outraged, Bishop Louis Walsh wrote to Archbishop O’Connell seeking restitution. In a terse reply, O’Connell admitted nothing, but sent a check for $25,576.09 to repair the hole. Walsh quietly balanced his books. If the Greek philosopher Heraclitus was correct in arguing that character is fate, what of O’Connell? “He formed the habit of failing to distinguish between himself as an individual and his role as trustee for the larger, ongoing organization that existed apart from him,” writes O’Toole. In that sense of l’église, c’est moi, O’Connell followed in Pio Nono’s footsteps. “The underside of his clear and aggressive public persona was a readiness to act like a law unto himself.”60 In 1911 he was made a cardinal.
Cardinal O’Connell was a commanding figure in the line of early prelates, mostly Irish American bishops who molded the Catholic Church into a potent institution between the Civil War and the baby boom of the 1950s. These were “the building bishops”: John Hughes, Patrick Hayes, and Francis Spellman in New York; Dennis Dougherty in Philadelphia; John Ireland in St. Paul; James McIntyre (a former stockbroker) and Timothy Manning in Los Angeles; Patrick Feehan and George Mundelein in Chicago; Richard Cushing, who succeeded O’Connell in Boston. The list goes on. The bishops who spanned that era built an infrastructure of parishes and schools. Orphanages and hospitals were largely developed by orders of nuns, who also staffed the parish schools; the male religious orders, notably Jesuits, Dominicans, Salesians, Holy Cross fathers, and Christian Brothers, established high schools and colleges. But it was the bishops’ financial and real estate decisions that boosted church wealth, funding ministries and schools, creating an infrastructure that shaped an American Catholic identity. Archbishop Feehan in Chicago built a record 140 parishes in his twenty-two years that culminated in 1902.61
At five foot eight and a rotund 250 pounds, O’Connell plunged into Boston life with a Romanità splendor of the church resurgent. He mingled with Brahmin civic leaders, politicians, visiting dignitaries, and presidents. He gave his views on certain laws, opposing both Prohibition and child labor laws (which he saw as undermining the authority of the family). An adroit fund-raiser, he harnessed the generosity of an Irish society ascending toward middle class. O’Connell traveled the city in a limousine, often with his adored poodles. He built the twenty-five-room Renaissance