William Henry O'Connell

William Henry O'Connell (December 8, 1859 – April 22, 1944) was an American cardinalof the Catholic Church. He served as Archbishop of Boston from 1907 until his death in 1944, and was made a cardinal in 1911.

William O'Connell was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, to John and Bridget (née Farrelly) O'Connell, who were Irish immigrants. The youngest of eleven children, he had six brothers and four sisters. His father worked at a textile mill and died when William was four years old. During his high school career, he excelled at music, particularly the piano and organ.

O'Connell entered St. Charles College in Ellicott City, Maryland, in 1876. At St. Charles, he was a pupil of the noted poet John Banister Tabb. He returned to Massachusetts two years later and entered Boston College, from which he graduated in 1881 with gold medals in philosophy, physics, and chemistry. He then furthered his studies at the Pontifical North American College in Rome.

O'Connell was ordained to the priesthood by Lucido Cardinal Parocchi on June 8, 1884. A pneumonia and bronchial congestion cut short his pursuit of a doctorate in divinity at the Pontifical Urban Athenaeum, forcing him to return to the United States in 1885 without his degree.

He then served as curate of St. Joseph Church in Medford until 1886, when he became curate of St. Joseph Church in the West End of Boston. Returning to Rome, O'Connell was named rector of the North American College in 1895. He was raised to the rank of Domestic Prelate of His Holiness in 1897.

Bishop of Portland in Maine

On February 8, 1901, O'Connell was appointed the third Bishop of Portland, Maine, by Pope Leo XIII. He received his episcopal consecration on the following May 19 from Francesco Cardinal Satolli, with Archbishops Edmund Stonor and Rafael Merry del Val, at the Lateran Basilica. Upon his arrival in Maine, he was given an official reception by Governor John F. Hill. He was presented with a reliquary of the True Cross by Pope Pius X after the latter's election in 1903.

In 1905, in addition to his duties as a diocesan bishop, O'Connell was named papal envoy to Emperor Meiji of Japan; he was also decorated with the Grand Cordon of the Order of the Sacred Treasure. He was made an Assistant at the Pontifical Throne in 1905 as well. He was also viewed as having actively campaigned to become Archbishop of Boston, donating to numerous Vatican causes and publicly expressing his loyalty to the pope.

Archbishop of Boston, and Cardinal

O'Connell was named Coadjutor Archbishop, with right of succession, of Boston, and Titular Archbishop of Constantina on February 21, 1906. As coadjutor, he served as the designated successor of Archbishop John Williams, who was then in declining health. He later succeeded Williams as the second Archbishop of Boston upon the latter's death on August 30, 1907.

On November 27, 1911, O'Connell became Boston's first Archbishop to become Cardinal, and was given the title of Cardinal-Priest of S. Clemente. O'Connell was late to two papal conclaves in a row, in 1914 and 1922, due to having to cross the Atlantic Ocean in the slower transportation of the day. He made a protest to Pope Pius XI, who in response lengthened the time between the death of the Pope and the start of the conclave. O'Connell was finally able to participate in the subsequent 1939 conclave, although by that time air travel was available.

O'Connell favored a highly centralized diocesan organization, encompassing schools, hospitals, and asylums in addition to parishes. O'Connell wielded immense political and social power in Massachusetts, earning him the nickname, "Number One." For instance, he was responsible for defeating a bill to establish a state lottery in 1935, and for defeating a referendum liberalizing state birth control laws in 1942. The only politician who had anywhere near O'Connell's political clout was Governor (and future U.S. President) Calvin Coolidge, but even Coolidge picked his battles carefully, preferring to ignore the Archbishop whenever possible. In the years leading up to the Second World War O'Connell became a powerful force for the neutralists in trying to keep the United States out of World War II, in the pre-Pearl Harbor era.

Having presided over the marriage of Joseph P. Kennedy, Sr., and Rose Fitzgerald in 1914, he asked actress Gloria Swanson to end her affair with Kennedy.

He opposed the Child Labor Amendment and called Hollywood "the scandal of the nation."

He denounced the theories of Albert Einstein as "authentic atheism, even if camouflaged as cosmic pantheism."

He opposed euthanasia, calling suffering "the discipline of humanity."

He told his priests that they might refuse communion to women wearing lipstick.

He also condemned crooning: "No true American man would practice this base art. Of course, they aren't men.... If you will listen closely [to crooners' songs] you will discern the basest appeal to sex emotion in the young."

He did not have an especially warm relationship with his auxiliary bishop Francis Spellman, who later was the Archbishop of New York. O'Connor once said, "Francis epitomizes what happens to a bookkeeper when you teach him how to read."

He was also decidedly non-ecumenical. In 1908, he said, "The Puritan has passed. The Catholic remains."

He was very influential with the growth of the Catholic Church. He was called by politicians "Number One" and enjoyed them frequently requesting his approval on issues. He was called a "battleship in full array."

O'Connell was the first American to be given honorary life membership in the Supreme Council of the Knights of Columbus. He was referred to "as the foremost citizen of the great and noble State of Massachusetts".

Scandal over nephew

O'Connell's nephew James P. O'Connell, who served as chancellor of the archdiocese, had secretly married in 1913. Some of O'Connell's clerical enemies discovered this and reported it to Vatican authorities. The younger O'Connell was removed from office and from his priestly duties in 1920. His marriage lasted until his death in 1948. Little else is known of the relationship between uncle and nephew.

Falsified dates of authorship

In 1915, O'Connell published a collection of letters which, the publication claimed, he wrote between 1876 and 1901.In 1987, James M. O'Toole discovered that O'Connell had written the letters expressly for the 1915 publication. Other scholars who discussed the subject of the letters in 1975 had found the dates on the letters "suspect".

Frances Sweeney

In the early 1940s when Frances Sweeney, editor of the Boston City Reporter, criticized O'Connell for his passivity in the face of rampant antisemitism in Boston, O'Connell summoned Sweeney to his office and threatened her with excommunication.

O'Connell died from pneumonia in Brighton, aged 84. He was buried in the crypt of a small chapel he had built on the grounds of St. John's Seminary. In 2004 the Archdiocese sold the property to Boston College and in 2007 announced plans to relocate his remains to Saint Sebastian's School, which O'Connell founded in 1941. After a protracted lawsuit, O'Connell's relatives, who had opposed any disinterment, agreed that his remains be removed to a courtyard of the Seminary. Reinterment took place on July 20, 2011.

His 36-year-long tenure was the longest in the history of the Archdiocese of Boston. He was the second-to-last surviving cardinal created by Pope Pius X behind Gennaro Granito Pignatelli di Belmonte and is the third-longest serving American cardinal behind James Gibbons and William Wakefield Baum. During O'Connell's tenure as Archbishop of Boston, the number of women in religious life increased from 1567 to 5459; the number of parishes increased from 194 to 322; the number of churches increased from 248 to 375; the number of diocesan priests increased from 488 to 947; the archdiocese was operating 3 Catholic hospitals. According to one historian, "It was under O'Connell's influence too, that the Catholic Church in the Archdiocese of Boston assumed a conceptual solidarity and impressive visibility that it had never seen before and would never see again."

One of O'Connell's grandnephews, Paul G. Kirk, served briefly as U.S. Senator in 2009.

In Henry Morton Robinson's best-selling 1950 historical novel, The Cardinal, the Archbishop of Boston in the exact time frame as O'Connell's term in office is named "Lawrence Cardinal Glennon". Robinson's physical descriptions of Glennon, his massive building program, his arriving late for two papal conclaves and arriving in time for a third, his popular description as "Number One" and many other details of the Glennon character correspond with O'Connell's career and personality. The "Cardinal" of the title, however, is a young priest who serves as Glennon's secretary and himself becomes a cardinal in the course of the novel.

In addition to his published volumes of letters, sermons and addresses, O'Connell's legacy includes a collection of hymns under the title Holy Cross Hymnal published by McLaughlin and Reilly, Boston, in 1915.[1], including:

• Hymn to the Holy Cross
• Hymn to the Holy Name
• Prayer for a Perfect Life