Ambition and Arrogance: Cardinal William O'Connell of Boston and the American Catholic Church (review)

Abstract

Ambition and Arrogance: Cardinal William O'Connell Boston and the American Catholic Church. By Douglas J. Slawson. (San Diego: Cobalt Productions. 2007. Pp. xiv, 232. $17.95 paperback.) This the story, Douglas J. Slawson writes, of a man who forced his way to the top and then attempted to become spokesman the American Catholic (p. x). The story William O'Connell's exploitation Roman connections, ideology, and questionably gained wealth to secure episcopal appointments to Portland and Boston as well as a red hat is a wellknown one, notably from James M. O'Toole's excellent biography, Militant and Triumphant (1992). So too are the scandals that threatened O'Connell's position as Cardinal Archbishop Boston and eventually destroyed his influence in both Rome and America. What is new here is Slawson's mining archival sources, particularly Vatican ones, to delineate a depressingly full picture O'Connell's use money and playing the Roman card to win Vatican support, to show the extent and persistence the effort to remove O'Connell from Boston, and to underscore the connection between the cardinal's struggle for survival and the shaky beginnings the National Catholic Welfare Conference. William O'Connell came age in a period when ultramontanism was in the ascendancy, marked by the establishment national seminaries in Rome, the global outreach Vatican control with the appointment papal nuncios and apostolic delegates, the curtailing national episcopal councils, the promotion Roman-trained or Roman-minded candidates for bishoprics, and the affirmation papal infallibility as the source all spiritual authority. O'Connell early on cast his fortunes to that star. He was proud to be known, he once told a Vatican official, as one who stood for Rome, for Roman views and for Roman sympathies. He was the chief loyalist the Vatican in America and the protector its interests and position. Utilizing his friends in high places in the Vatican, O'Connell was able to get himself appointed coadjutor archbishop Boston in 1906, despite being the choice neither Archbishop Williams nor the New England suffragans, by painting those nominated for the position as proponents Americanism, the condemned ecclesiastical ideology, and himself as one who had been passed over because his Roman loyalty. Once O'Connell succeeded Williams as the Boston ordinary, he began to pursue plans to Romanize his diocese and province, first with the ouster the Americanist-tainted Sulpicians from the archdiocesan seminary, then with a series unsuccessful efforts to install Roman-oriented bishops in New England sees. The Romanization campaign resulted in his alienating most his suffragans, along with many others in the church in the region. In 1914 several O'Connell's bishops in the New England province sought his ouster, on the grounds his misusing diocesan funds (by 1907 it was estimated that he had an income, as archbishop, between $150,000 and $200,000 a year), and for buying off a woman who had accused O'Connell's personal chaplain a breach promise to marry. Events, in the form Pius Xs death and the advent World War II, bought the prelate four years. When even more serious charges arose in 1919 involving O'Connell's sufferance the secret marriages two priests living in the cardinal's household-his chaplain and his chancellor, who happened to be his nephew-a new pope, Benedict XV, ordered O'Connell to remove his nephew as chancellor. …