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GIBBONS, JAMES CARDINAL 1834-1921

ROMAN CATHOLIC CARDINAL AND ARCHBISHOP OF BALTIMORE

Elder Statesman

As the archbishop of Baltimore, the oldest Roman Catholic see in the United States, as well as the only U.S. cardinal between 1886 and 1911, James Cardinal Gibbons enjoyed the status of the unofficial leader of American Catholicism in the early part of the twentieth century. Although he had passed the prime of his life before the 1910s—he was seventy-five when the decade began—little could be accomplished by Catholic organizations except under his auspices. Gibbons also possessed another talent that was even more important than his leadership skill. His tact and diplomacy won him the respect and affection not only of Catholic officials in Rome but also of his Protestant peers and public officials in America. By the time he orchestrated the organization of the National Catholic War Council in 1917, he was universally recognized as American Catholicism's elder statesman.

A Calling

James Gibbons was born in 1834 in the city that would forever be associated with his name. The son of Irish immigrants who had come to Baltimore just a few years previously, Gibbons would not really discover the city until he was twenty. When he was three, his family returned to a farm in Ireland where young James was raised and educated until he was thirteen. After the death of his father in 1847, the Gibbons family returned to the United States and settled in New Orleans, where Gibbons worked as a grocery clerk during his teen years. Although he had been a good student and had impressed the owner of the grocery store with his intelligence, there had yet to be any indication of the man who would grow to be a force not only in the Catholic Church but on the political and social scene as well. It was in 1854, at the age of nineteen, that James Gibbons received his calling, a call that took him back to Baltimore and ultimately to the highest place he could reach in Catholic America. In January 1854 at St. Joseph's Church in New Orleans, Gibbons heard a sermon by Rev. Clarence Walworth. Gibbons decided then to become a priest and decided to pursue the calling in the city of his birth.

Priest

Gibbons enrolled at St. Charles College in Baltimore in the autumn of 1855. He was an outstanding student and upon graduation entered St. Mary's Seminary in Baltimore. Seven years after the sermon by Wool-worth, Gibbons was ordained a priest on 30 June 1861. He rose through the church hierarchy at a remarkable rate. In July 1861 Gibbons became an assistant pastor at St. Patrick's in Baltimore. Only six weeks later he was given a full pastorate at St. Bridget's in Canton, Maryland. The Civil War had recently begun, and among Gibbons's duties was ministering to both Union soldiers and Confederate prisoners of war at nearby Fort McHenry. He showed early on the energy that would characterize his work throughout his life. In 1865 Gibbons was asked to become secretary to the archbishop of Baltimore, Martin Spalding. He so impressed the archbishop and others at the Second Plenary Council in 1866 that he was again quickly promoted. The same year, at the age of thirty-two and only five years beyond his ordination, Gibbons was nominated as bishop of the new Vicariate-Apostolic of North Carolina. His days as a parish priest were over. The church had larger plans for him.

Bishop

In 1868 Gibbons became the youngest Roman Catholic bishop in the world when he was consecrated bishop of Adramyttum. Few Catholics lived in North Carolina at the time, and Gibbons traveled widely, serving those who were settled there while doing mission work in the territory. He converted many, built new churches, and preached in Protestant churches as a guest and in civic buildings when no churches were available. His energy and zeal paid off personally when he was called to Rome in 1870 for the Ecumenical Council of the Vatican. He was the youngest of more than seven hundred delegates, but there he made the acquaintances that would forge his future by meeting Henry Cardinal Manning of England and Gioacchino Cardinal Pecci, who would eventually become Pope Leo XIII. Upon his return to the United States, Gibbons was named bishop of Richmond when that bishopric was vacated in 1872. He served there for five years before returning to Baltimore as archbishop. In 1876, while serving in Richmond, Gibbons wrote his first and most famous book, The Faith of Our Fathers, published in 1877. Hailed as the finest available explanation and defense of Roman Catholic practices, the book became an immediate success, selling more than two million copies during the next forty years. Gibbons's work in predominantly Protestant regions had led him to understand the source of opposition to his faith and to write a defense of the most commonly misunderstood aspects of it. The same year it appeared, Gibbons was called to Baltimore as coadjutor with right to succession to Archbishop Bayley. Bayley died within weeks of Gibbons's arrival, and Gibbons resettled in Baltimore, where he remained for forty-three years. At the time of Bayley's death, Gibbons was forty-three years old.

Archbishop

As archbishop of the oldest Catholic see in the United States, in the vicinity of the nation's capital, and for a faith whose followers had been pouring into the country at a rate that had alarmed much of the Protestant population, Gibbons became a man of great influence and tremendous stature not only in America but in the worldwide Roman Catholic hierarchy as well. He knew personally every president between Andrew Johnson and Woodrow Wilson. He was instrumental in promoting the celebration of the Thanksgiving holiday. In 1880 he visited Rome and met with Pope Leo XIII, with whom he would work for years to further establish Catholicism in the United States. During his years as archbishop he more than tripled the number of churches in his diocese. He built parochial schools and colleges and helped create the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. He became an important figure in support of the nascent labor organization the Knights of Labor, which many Catholic leaders had condemned as a secret society. He supported workers' rights and Archbishop John Ireland's controversial educational experiments in Minnesota in the 1880s. He became a strong advocate of Americanizing the church, a strategy intended to meet the dual pressures of anti-Catholic prejudice among Protestant Americans and the determination of different Catholic ethnic groups to preserve their own languages and customs. In 1903 he became the first American to take part in a papal election, supporting Cardinal Sorto, who became Pope Pius X. He published Our Christian Heritage (1889), The Ambassador of Christ (1896), and Discourses and Sermons (1908). In 1886, after the death of John Cardinal McCloskey in 1885, Gibbons traveled to Rome to become the second American cardinal.

Cardinal for a New Century

James Cardinal Gibbons was perhaps the most important and influential American Catholic, as well as an important public figure, through World War I and to his death in 1921. Just prior to the war Theodore Roosevelt told him, "Taking your life as a whole, I think you now occupy the position of being the most respected, and venerated, and useful citizen of our country." The cardinal was eighty years old when the war started but immediately began working at home in preparation for U.S. involvement. While the drums beat for a declaration of war after the sinking of the Lusitania, Gibbons remained a cool, neutral figure. But by 1917 he supported the war and pushed for Catholics to enlist. The issues of ethnicity and assimilation continued to plague the church, especially as the war engendered a new wave of nativism. Gibbons saw in the war effort an opportunity for American Catholics to prove their patriotic loyalty. Although it was John Burke, a New York priest and the editor of Catholic World, who chaired the National Catholic War Council, Gibbons had been instrumental in the council's organization, and he led the committee that oversaw its transformation into the National Catholic Welfare Council in 1919. In addition, during the war he served as the church's official spokesman in all matters of policy. He issued statements supporting the American Red Cross, the U.S. Food Administration, the Liberty Loan, the United War Work Campaign, and the Committee on Public Information. When Pope Benedict XV declared 29 June 1918 a day of prayer for Catholics worldwide, Gibbons took advantage of the opportunity to invite American Catholics to pray for victory in what he now clearly saw as a just war. "If we fight like heroes and pray like saints soon will America overcome mere force by greater force, and conquer lust of power by the nobler power of sacrifice and faith." In 1916 he published his Retrospect of Fifty Years. James Cardinal Gibbons died in 1921 at the age of eighty-six. An estimated two hundred thousand people viewed his body when it lay in state in Baltimore's cathedral.