The Life and Times of Bishop Louis-Amadeus Rappe by John F. Lyons

Abstract

The Life and Times of Bishop Louis-Amadeus Rappe. By John E Lyons. (The Au thor, 3175 West 165th Street, Cleveland, Ohio 44111. 1997. Pp. xii, 285. $29.95.) The Reverend John E Lyons has published this life and times biography of Louis-Amadeus Rappe, first bishop of Cleveland (1847-1870), appropriately enough during the celebration of the bicentennial of the founding of the city of Cleveland in 1796 and the sesquicentennial of the establishment of the Diocese of Cleveland in 1847. The histories of both are closely intertwined. European immigrant Catholics flocking to the jobs available in such rapidly industrializing cities as Toledo and Cleveland simultaneously fueled the explosive growth of the region and the Catholic Church itself. Recruited by Bishop John Baptist Purcell of Cincinnati, Father Rappe journeyed from France in 1840 to become a successful missionary on the northwest Ohio frontier, preaching both religion and temperance. With grave misgivings, Rappe accepted Purcell's offer to become the bishop of the new Cleveland diocese, serving until he resigned in 1870, beset by charges of mismanagement and sexual misconduct. He then went to Vermont, where he was again what he always wished to be, a missionary and temperance advocate, until his death in 1877. Lyons dedicates his study to the late Reverend William A. Jurgens, H.E.D., whose extensive research and writing form a major part of the volume. Lyons relies almost exclusively on diocesan archives in Cleveland, Baltimore, Norwood (Cincinnati), and Burlington (Vermont) and on archival material at the University of Notre Dame and at the Propaganda Fide in Rome. There are fewer than a dozen references to the secondary literature, little of it current and much of it cited improperly. Since there is no bibliography (or index, for that matter), the interested reader will have difficulty locating a particular secondary source. Either ignoring or unaware of the significant scholarship on both the Rappe administration in particular and the American Catholic Church as a whole, Lyons fails to place the events and personalities about whom he feels so deeply in any effective historical or analytical context. He has thus written not an evenhanded life and times biography of Rappe but, rather, a legal brief in which he pictures the bishop as a saintly man destroyed by lying, evil-minded enemies, both lay and cleric. For Lyons, disagreements over such issues as nationality parishes, placement of priests, or the language to be used in services and taught in parochial schools are not legitimate differences of opinion over important issues but selfish, imagined grievances which produced conspiracies, led by plotters (at first Germans but later and especially the Irish led by Father Eugene M. …