Parish Priest: Father Michael McGivney and American Catholicism

by Douglas Brinkley, Julie M. Fenster

Overview

"Father McGivney's vision remains as relevant as ever in the changed circumstances of today's church and society."—Pope John Paul II

Is now the time for an American parish priest to be declared a Catholic saint?

In Father Michael McGivney (1852-1890), born and raised in a Connecticut factory town, the modern era's ideal of the priesthood hit its zenith. The son of Irish immigrants, he was a man to whom "family values" represented more than mere rhetoric. And he left a legacy of hope still celebrated around the world.

In the late 1800s, discrimination against American Catholics was widespread. Many Catholics struggled to find work and ended up in infernolike mills. An injury or the death of the wage earner would leave a family penniless. The grim threat of chronic homelessness and even starvation could fast become realities. Called to action in 1882 by his sympathy for these suffering people, Father McGivney founded the Knights of Columbus, an organization that has helped to save countless families from the indignity of destitution. From its uncertain beginnings, when Father McGivney was the only person willing to work toward its success, it has grown to an international membership of 1.7 million men.

At heart, though, Father McGivney was never anything more than an American parish priest, and nothing less than that, either—beloved by children, trusted by young adults, and regarded as a "positive saint" by the elderly in his New Haven parish.

In an incredible work of academic research, Douglas Brinkley (The Boys of Pointe Du Hoc, Tour of Duty) and Julie M. Fenster (Race of the Century, Ether Day) re-create the life of Father McGivney, a fiercely dynamic yet tenderhearted man. Though he was only thirty-eight when he died, Father McGivney has never been forgotten. He remains a true "people's priest," a genuinely holy man—and perhaps the most beloved parish priest in U.S. history. Moving and inspirational, Parish Priest chronicles the process of canonization that may well make Father McGivney the first American-born parish priest to be declared a saint by the Vatican.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780061749025
Publisher:	HarperCollins Publishers
Publication date:	10/13/2009
Sold by:	HARPERCOLLINS
Format:	eBook
Pages:	264
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Douglas Brinkley is a professor of history at Rice University, CBS News Historian, and a contributing editor at Vanity Fair. The Chicago Tribune has dubbed him "America's new past master." Seven of his books have been selected as New York Times Notable Books of the Year. Cronkite won the Sperber Prize for Best Book in Journalism and was a Washington Post Notable Book of the Year 2012. The Great Deluge won the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award. He lives in Texas with his wife and three children. Brinkley has been awarded honorary doctorates from Trinity College (Connecticut), University of Maine, Hofstra University, and Allegheny College, among many others.

Julie M. Fenster is an award-winning author and historian, specializing in the American story. In 2006 her book Parish Priest, written with coauthor Douglas Brinkley, was a New York Times bestseller for seven weeks. She also wrote Ether Day: The Strange Tale of America's Greatest Medical Discovery and the Haunted Men Who Made It, which won the prestigious Anesthesia Foundation Award for Best Book. Fenster is the author of six other books, including Race of the Century: The Heroic True Story of the 1908 New York to Paris Auto Race and The Case of Abraham Lincoln: A Story of Adultery, Murder, and the Making of a Great President.

Read an Excerpt

Parish Priest LP

Father Michael McGivney and American Catholicism

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By Douglas Brinkley

HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.

Copyright © 2006 Douglas Brinkley
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0060853484

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Chapter One

A Friend of the Family

Not that the state of Connecticut had anything against Catholics in the early 1800s -- but they weren't allowed to purchase land. If the issue was pressed, then special dispensation might be granted, but only through an act of the legislature. All the while, Catholics were expected to join with most of the rest of the populace in paying a tax for the support of the Congregational Church, the state's official religion at the time.¹ Episcopals, Baptists, and Quakers were all exempted, but not Catholics. It was no wonder that Connecticut, with almost 300,000 residents, counted its Catholic population in the dozens. Yet none of that stopped Michael and Bridget Downes from moving there.

Their previous homeland was far worse for Catholics, and little better for Protestants. Ireland in the early nineteenth century was a land of enforced poverty, where few farmers owned their own acreage and the landlords, most of them living in England or on the European continent, choked out all hope of improvement by charging unreasonably high rents. The Times of London, a conservative newspaper that traditionally spared little sympathy for the Irish, sent a correspondent to County Donegal and received a description of a typical rural landscape: "From one end of [the landlord's] estate here to the other nothing is to be found but poverty, misery, wretched cultivation and infinite subdivision of land. There are no gentry, no middle class, all are poor, wretchedly poor. Every shilling the tenants can raise from their half-cultivated land is paid in rent, whilst the people subsist for the most part on potatoes and water."²

Even before the potato blight of 1845 led to the Great Famine, alert Irishmen were facing such facts and the sad impossibility of being Irish. "The conviction that the country held no future existed as early as 1815," William Forbes Adams wrote in his classic history Ireland and Irish Emigration to the New World.³ The Downes family escaped early on, sailing for America with their young son in 1827.⁴ Their specific destination was the state of Connecticut, where a few of their old neighbors had settled already.

For more than a dozen years, Michael Downes, known as Mikey, was a common laborer, probably finding work building canals or railroads, as did most of his countrymen. In 1832, he and Bridget moved to New Haven. By no coincidence, the city's first Roman Catholic congregation was established there the same year, serving about three hundred people. It would be in keeping with the devout Downes family to settle within the embrace of a parish, once that option was available.

In another respect, too, New Haven was ripe territory for people such as the Downeses. Mikey and Bridget were dedicated to reading and education. New Haven, a manufacturing town and an active port, was influenced most of all by Yale University. Founded in 1701 as a rather rigid Puritan institution, Yale would loosen up considerably in the nineteenth century, combining high academic standards with a rebellious spirit. The campus took up one whole side of the flat, grassy Green that formed the hub of New Haven life. Rising tall, like a citadel in fieldstone, Yale took little notice of New Haven's latest family of Irish immigrants. The Downeses were just a working-class couple trailing three young sons, William, Edward, and John, as they walked along the Green and looked up at the great university.

Mikey Downes started work in New Haven as a news hawk, selling one New Haven paper or another on the street. The work suited him and a short time later he was a full-time newsdealer -- said to be the city's very first -- stocking an array of New Haven and New York papers in a corner kiosk.⁵ It was a major accomplishment for him at the time, but he wasn't through. Like most of his countrymen, disenchanted with farming as they had known it in Ireland, he regarded storekeeping as the province of truly unlimited opportunity.

Only about 1 percent of first-generation Irish immigrants managed to fulfill the dream of opening a shop;6 Downes joined their ranks in the early 1840s, when he rented a space at the prime corner of Church and Chapel streets, on the Green looking diagonally across to Yale. Customers could buy papers or, for two cents, go in the back room and read as many of the New York papers as they wanted. Political debates with the proprietor were free of charge.

Mikey and Bridget also owned property -- although by the time they bought a wood-frame house in 1843, the state legislature didn't have to know about it. The law requiring special dispensation for land ownership by Catholics had been lifted ten years before. The days of official antagonism toward Catholics were over. Unofficial anti-Catholic fervor was surging to new peaks, though. To combat the image of immigrant Catholics, especially Irish ones, as disloyal and shiftless, the Downes family was intent on showing that they belonged in America.

In 1845, with the store making the Downes name famous in New Haven, Mikey died suddenly. His second son Edward, only sixteen, took over the family store. With his help, and the encouragement of Bridget, the youngest of the three Downes boys, John, graduated from Yale Medical School in 1854. Immediately popular in his practice, he died of tuberculosis at the age of just twenty-six. The oldest son, William, later graduated from Yale Law School. Extremely successful in his own right, he was pointed out as "New Haven's only Catholic lawyer" until his own early death, also from tuberculosis.

Through the years, the store was left entirely to Edward, who continually expanded his small empire until, in the late 1860s, it was "Edward Downes, Stationer and Newsdealer, at Wholesale and Retail."⁷ From art supplies to comic magazines, he sold anything pertaining to paper goods and watched over one of New Haven's most thriving businesses.

Continues...

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Excerpted from Parish Priest LP by Douglas Brinkley Copyright © 2006 by Douglas Brinkley. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Preface: The Same Manner to All Human Souls     ix
A Friend of the Family     1
An American Child     13
The Priesthood     26
A Start in Seminary     38
In the City of New Haven     52
In Charge     64
A Church Fair     78
Modern Men     94
McGivney's Solution     110
A Bleak Night in Ansonia     125
Inertia in a Hurry     139
Faith in Meriden     150
A Stern Voice     160
Talk of the Town     175
A Priest's Life     190
Epilogue     203
Acknowledgments     209
Notes     213
Selected Bibliography     231
Index     235

Editorial Reviews

This is an articulate and sensitively written biography about Father Michael McGivney, founder of the Knights of Columbus. In a time when the secular press is inundated with horrific accounts of abusive priests, McGivney's biography reflects the ideal standard of the holy parish priest. Fifteen chapters chronicle the astounding 38 years of his life and the legacy he bequeathed to American Catholicism. Born in 1852 to Irish immigrants who faced terrible poverty in an environment of emerging anti-Catholic rhetoric, McGivney eventually established an association of men who inured themselves against desperate situations and simultaneously pledged a fierce allegiance to patriotic ideals. The Knights of Columbus today claim an international membership of 1.7 million men. Parish Priest is thoroughly researched by historians Brinkley (Tour of Duty) and Fenster, who incorporated information from Acts, a comprehensive document used by the Congregation for the Causes of Saints to advance the life of a holy person toward canonization. This first full-length biography of McGivney, which contains eight pages of black-and-white photos, is recommended for all public libraries. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 9/15/05.]-John-Leonard Berg, Univ. of Wisconsin-Platteville Lib. Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

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