FIGHTING ED MCGLYNN.

ARCHBISHOP EXCOMMUNICATES PRIEST FOR SUPPORTING SOCIALIST CANDIDATE." No, this isn't a recent headline from the Wanderer, nor does it refer to a Latin American priest from the 1970s. In the last two decades of the nineteenth century, a New York City priest became a cause celebre in both secular and ecclesiastical circles for his outspoken support for a radical candidate for mayor. Not as today, when it is almost inconceivable that an American Catholic priest or bishop would publicly endorse a political candidate, this priest was intimately involved in the hurly-burly of partisan politics.

The priest was Father Edward McGlynn, and this year marks the one-hundredth anniversary of his death. His funeral drew tens of thousands of New Yorkers into the streets of Manhattan to pay their last respects to a man who they believed was fighting the establishment to give them a better life.

Born in New York City of Irish immigrant parents in 1837, McGlynn was raised in Manhattan and ordained in 1860. Two years later he was appointed chaplain of the Civil War military hospital in Central Park, where he ministered to both Catholics and non-Catholics. After the war, he became pastor of Saint Stephen's Church on East 28th Street, where ten thousand people attended Mass each Sunday.

Besides being a pastor, McGlynn was an intellectual. He was an active member of the Accademia, an informal study group of liberal Catholic priests. On political issues, the group supported Radical Reconstruction in the postbellum South, Fenianism in Victorian Ireland, and opposed the temporal power of the pope. On religious issues, members argued for allowing priests to marry and wondered aloud if mandatory "celibacy retarded emotional growth, making priests selfish and lonely." The Accademians also supported using the vernacular in the Mass and rejected state funding for Catholic schools, arguing that a public school is a legitimate environment for the education of Catholic children. They favored the use of general absolution and found that the practice of private confession encouraged scrupulosity. On the issue of papal infallibility, they were inopportunists--that is, they felt it was an inappropriate time to declare the doctrine. Instead, they supported the infallibility of the church as a whole. They were uncomfortable with the 1854 definition of the Immaculate Conception, since it relied on papal infallibility.

Such unconventional opinions attracted the suspicion of church officials, but McGlynn's real troubles followed his support for Henry George, the radical social theorist and hero of the workingman in the 1880s. George advocated a single tax on rents as a panacea for the economic inequalities of the Gilded Age. The two reformers met in 1882 and four years later, when George ran unsuccessfully for mayor of New York City as a third-party candidate, McGlynn delivered the nominating speech, despite warnings not to do so from his superior, Archbishop Michael Corrigan.

Following the election, Corrigan issued a pastoral letter reaffirming church teaching on the inviolability of private property. McGlynn responded through a newspaper interview in which he decried the church's insensitivity to the plight of the poor. Corrigan then suspended McGlynn from his priestly functions for the rest of the year. The conflict between the populist (some would say demagogic) priest and the conservative archbishop escalated to the point that, on July 3, 1887, McGlynn was excommunicated by Pope Leo XIII.

The press gave extensive coverage to the controversy. McGlynn respected the church's authority to circumscribe his priestly ministry, but believed it was his right as an American citizen to speak freely on political issues. He also refused a summons by the pope to come to Rome, and issued a public statement denouncing the attempt of "Bishop, Propaganda, or Pope" to circumscribe his right to free speech.

Rome was embarrassed by the episode. In December 1893, after clarifying his position on private property for the Vatican, McGlynn was restored to the church's good graces. (Much to his chagrin, Corrigan learned about this reconciliation in the morning newspaper.) A reluctant Corrigan appointed McGlynn pastor of Saint Mary's Church in Newburgh (a small city on the Hudson River, sixty miles from Manhattan) where he remained active in social-justice issues until his death. McGlynn never wavered in his support of Henry George and even preached at his funeral in 1897.

When McGlynn died three years later, thousands of loyal followers attended his funeral, including eighteen Protestant ministers and a rabbi. Former President Grover Cleveland telegraphed his condolences. Later that day, McGlynn's body was brought by train from Newburgh to his old parish of Saint Stephen's where an estimated forty-five thousand mourners filed past his bier.

Although history has been kinder to McGlynn than to the church officials who condemned him, possibly the latter were right on one point. When it comes to instructing the faithful about whom to vote for, discretion is the better part of valor.

Anthony D. Andreassi teaches history at Gonzaga College High School in Washington, D.C.