CCHA Historical Studies, 71
(2005), 60-78
Departures of
the Forgotten Bishop:
Thomas Francis
Brennan (1855-1916) of Dallas and St. John’s
John Edward FITZGERALD
In Catholic historical circles, there is little conventional
wisdom about Thomas Francis Brennan. Somewhat known in America, he is virtually
unknown to Canadians; in the historiographies of Catholicism in both countries
he barely receives so much as a footnote. And even in the Archdiocese of St.
John’s, Newfoundland, most Catholics who pride themselves on their historical
knowledge are unable to identify much about him, save that he was the first
Bishop of Dallas, Texas, who briefly came to St. John’s before disappearing.
Who was this disappearing bishop? Why were his tenures in the United States and
Newfoundland so short? No extensive
study yet has been done on Brennan, so this article is intended as a
preliminary examination of his career, rather than the last word.[1]
It identifies issues for further research on the character of Catholicism in
Dallas and St. John’s, and concludes with brief remarks on the approach taken
by Rome in dealing with embarrassing clerics.
Thomas Francis Brennan was born on 10 October 1855 at Bally
Cullen, between Cloneen and Mullinahone, in County Tipperary, Ireland.[2]
According to Brennan, he was “born on the banks of the sweet and smiling Annar
[River] above which old Slievenamon lifts his haughty brow.”[3]
Like many people in Tipperary, his parents James and Margaret (Dunne) Brennan
likely would have admired Thomas Francis Meagher, the hero of the Young Ireland
rebellion of 1848, who later became a Union General in the U.S. Civil War,
famous for his part in the Battle of Bull Run, and later, Acting Governor of
Montana. That the young Brennan was
named after such a revolutionary, secular, and popular figure would seem to
indicate the importance to his parents of Irish nationalist politics and the
great potential in America for the Irish. When Brennan was eight years old, he
and his family emmigrated from Ireland to Cameron County, Pennsylvania. His
father was a classics teacher, and his parents placed a high premium on
education.[4]
For Irish immigrants, the family would have been unlike most Irish coming to
America, who would have been working class and barely literate. Thomas attended
public schools in McKean County and Scranton, Pennsylvania, and as a teenager
he attended St. Bonaventure’s Seminary run by the Franciscan Fathers in
Allegheny, New York. He proved to be an excellent student. In the fall of 1873
at age 18, he studied classics and philosophy for a short time under the
Sulpicians at a seminary near Rouen, France before undertaking four and a half
years of studies in theology with Jesuit tutors at the University of Innsbruck,
from which he graduated with a doctor’s degree.[5] On 4 July 1880 he was ordained to the
priesthood for the diocese of Erie, Pennsylvania, by the prince-bishop of
Brixen in the Austrian Tyrol, John de Leiss.[6]
Brennan spent at least part of 1881 studying Canon Law in Rome,[7]
before returning to the United States for eight years of parish work, including
appointments by Bishop Tobias Mullen of Erie to St. Michael’s Parish in
Greenville and soon after, St. Catherine’s Parish in Dubois, Pennsylvania.
Brennan’s first full pastoral assignment was at St. Mary’s
parish in Frenchville, Clearfield County, where he remained until he was
appointed pastor of St. James parish, Driftwood. Here he took part in the
itinerant mission circuit, building churches at mission outposts in Sterling
Run and Galeton. According to the Diocese of Erie’s historian, Robert Barcio,
Brennan’s missions were “widely separated, the most distant being at Germania
one hundred seventy five miles by rail in Potter County.”[8]
Gifted with youth and linguistic ability, Brennan must have been seen by Bishop
Mullen as a potentially ideal priest, even though his formidable education and
European experience - compared with other priests in his diocese - must have made him something of a social
misfit with his fellow clergy. Politically, Mullen had remained scrupulously
aloof from the ideological debates surrounding Americanism and the need for
immigrants to culturally assimilate, debates which divided the American church
in the 1880s.[9]
Brennan had a full spectrum of ethnicities and cultures in his congregation,
and for the time being he fit the bill admirably as a pastor.
Thomas Francis Brennan (1855-1916), First
Bishop of Dallas, Texas (1891-1893), Coadjutor Bishop of St. John’s,
Newfoundland (1893)
However, the life of a country pastor ministering to ethnic
groups in rural Pennsylvania was not to be Brennan’s lot. In the late 1880s he
returned to Europe and made a grand tour of Germany, Constantinople, Spain, and
Africa.[10]
On 11 January 1888 Brennan was elevated to the monsignorate and made a papal
chamberlain, a signal honour, and Bishop Mullen sent the new monsignor to Rome
to represent the Diocese of Erie at the sacerdotal jubilee celebrations for
Pope Leo XIII. In the Eternal City, Brennan greatly impressed his fellow
Irishman, Bishop Thomas Heslin of Natchez, Mississippi, who remarked that he
“speaks German as fluently as English, French like an educated Parisian, and
Italian as correctly as English; as a linguist he has few superiors.”[11]
Two years later, Heslin nominated Brennan to be the first bishop of the newly
created Diocese of Dallas, Texas, which had just been created in the
ecclesiastical province of New Orleans from the division of the Diocese of
Galveston. Brennan was not on the first terna
or list of three possible candidates submitted to Rome by the consultors of the
Diocese of Galveston, but he was on a second one submitted by the bishops of
the New Orleans province, and though no one at the Vatican or among the
cardinals and curial officials in its congregation responsible for the Church’s
missionary territories - Propaganda Fide - knew him well, on paper his
linguistic accomplishments placed him head and shoulders over fellow
candidates.[12]
Brennan was appointed Bishop of Dallas on 22 December 1890.[13]
He was just thirty-five years old when Bishop Mullen consecrated him at St.
Peter’s Cathedral in Erie on 5 April 1891.[14]
Despite his lack of maturity in years, in many ways, Rome saw Brennan as the
ideal candidate. Having rejected a terna
of local names generated in Texas, Rome saw in Brennan a learned churchman, an
outsider removed from any of the local squabbles, and especially, a man whose
youth and vigour would allow him to endure the strain of constant travel in a
rural diocese of 108,000 square miles. His contemporary Fr. Joseph Lynch
described him as: “Barely 36 years of age, possessed of a handsome physique,
having a dynamic personality, a brilliant conversationalist, a most eloquent
orator, and an accomplished linguist, he easily succeeded in captivating the
public wherever he went.”[15]
Arriving in the town of Dallas on the mud flats of the Trinity
River on 24 April 1891,[16]
Brennan found himself in the wild, wild west. Sacred Heart Church at the corner
of Bryan and Ervay streets in Dallas was supposed to be his cathedral, but it
was in a shambles and needed substantial repairs. While Dallas had still been a
part of the Diocese of Galveston, the parish priest, Father Joseph Blum,
thought repairs to be too costly, so he took out a mortgage and purchased a new
piece of property for $30,000 at the corner of Ross and Pearl Streets,
intending to pay for it by the sale of the land at Bryan and Ervay. But
financial instability in world markets undermined these plans. In 1890, Baring
Brothers Bank had collapsed, as a result of overexposure to Argentine debt, and
instability reverberated through the world’s economies. Blum’s land did not
sell, and Brennan arrived in Dallas looking for a new cathedral (he was
installed on 8 May 1891 in St. Patrick’s Church). The new bishop faced a huge
mortgage on the cathedral lands, plus a mortgage of $2500 on St. Joseph’s
Orphanage in the Oak Cliff neighborhood of Dallas, which was deemed unsuitable
for this purpose as it remained unfurnished.
It also faced foreclosure. In reply to an address of welcome to his new
diocese on 12 September 1891, Brennan remarked:
I am but a man as yourselves
and you must bear with me in my failings, knowing that I have your best good at
heart. A priest may be removed, but a bishop is wedded to his church and must
abide with it until death. You have spoken of me as a young man; if you want to
keep me perpetually young, you will help in all our financial difficulties....[17]
In hindsight, Brennan’s remarks seem to
prefigure his own deepening financial difficulties, which eventually would come
to cause serious problems for the new bishop.
Among ordinary rank-and-file Catholics, Brennan enjoyed a fine
reputation, and it was remarked that “No place was too far away for him to
visit, no straggling village to insignificant for him to notice, no audience
too poor or illiterate for him to address.”[18]
The contemporary public press also gushed forth compliments. The Denison Herald called him “one of
America’s foremost divines in every branch of human knowledge,” and the Memphis Catholic Journal described him
as “one of the most scholarly and zealous prelates in America.”[19]
Brennan was conscientious about his pastoral work. Traveling throughout his
diocese of 20,000 Catholics, of whom 9,000 were Indians, Brennan and his seventeen
priests worked with various communities of women religious, such as the Sisters
of St. Mary of Namur in Denison and Sherman, the Sisters of the Holy Cross at
Marshall, the Sisters of St. Agnes at Texarkana, the Sisters of Divine
Providence at Clarksville, and in Dallas itself, the Ursuline Sisters.[20]
He began ordaining priests, opening churches and schools, preaching in the
various languages of his congregations, and implementing the Forty Hours’
Devotions.[21] He
was also solicitous, for his time and territory, towards Black Americans,
remarking to the Dallas Morning News
on the day of his arrival “… we would, after a while, have a school in Dallas
for colored children...I will get up a good school for the colored people as
soon as we get through with other matters.”[22]
It did not take long, however, for Brennan to run afoul of his
clergy and religious, among whom there was discontent with the new bishop from
the start. From the outset, Brennan’s challenges were more than financial. He
diligently cultivated a good reputation among the literate in his diocese,
establishing the newspaper The Texas
Catholic. But this elicited more criticism than praise, particularly from
one priest who reported that “it seems to have no other purpose but the praise
of the Bishop and the Vicar General in turn, and has become an object of
ridicule.”[23]
Brennan made statements which clearly were secular rhetorical forays into
American politics and nationalism. In an 1891 letter to the Catholic Truth
Society (CTS) of St. Paul, Minnesota, Brennan wrote: “‘The truth will make you
free’ addresses itself with particular force to every Catholic heart in this
liberty blessed land of America...Catholic truth has secured for America in
four hundred years a greater and more solid advancement than the old world has
in fourteen centuries achieved.” In reply, the CTS extolled Brennan’s letter as
rivaling “in zeal and enthusiasm the address of our own Archbishop [John]
Ireland.”[24] In a
public address on 26 November 1891, Brennan warned his listeners about Canada’s
dangerous Britishness: “We have on the north of us a dependency of Great
Britain which can have no future until it severs the bonds uniting it to a
government far across the seas, alien if not hostile to the idea of popular
sovereignty.” Brennan then gushed forth about the pivotal importance of Texas
in America’s Manifest Destiny: “If America is the hope of the world, the
grandest expression and most powerful exponent of human freedom that ever was
or could be, Texas, the home of our birth or of our adoption, is the hope of
America.[25]
Intent on making his nationalism explicit, in a pastoral letter
to his clergy of 22 February 1892, Brennan directed them to celebrate Columbus
Day on 12 October with High Mass and sermons in all churches. “America is the
world’s greatest blessing,” he told the priests. “God’s greatest blessing to
mankind since the coming of Christ was the discovery of America.”[26]
Such nationalist sentiments may have gone over well with some of his
congregants, but with his fellow bishops and priests, they would have smacked
of hubris and an unadvised religious foray into the realm of the secular. For
his pronouncements Brennan made a most determined enemy in Dutch-born
Archbishop Francis A. Janssens of New Orleans, who for 7 July 1892, wrote in
his diary: “Left today for Dallas where I stayed one day with the Bishop, and
assisted the following day at the dedication of the new, fine, stone church at
Fort Worth. Among the clergy, sisters, and laity there are signs of much
dissatisfaction on account of the arbitrary and uncanonical actions of the
Bishop.”[27]
Janssens also described Brennan as “an impudent letter writer, lacking the
least idea of delicacy of sentiment.”
Brennan’s imprudence and indelicacy may have originated in his
zeal to find money with which to pay diocesan debts and cover the expenses of a
cathedral, the main item on his agenda, about which he informed his
congregation when he met them on 27 April.[28]
But the new bishop’s deficiencies also extended to matters of personal tact,
diplomacy, and good judgment. A banker with children in the Ursuline Academy of
Dallas approached Mother M. Evangelist of the Ursuline Sisters, inquiring
whether the school and property belonged to the bishop, because Brennan had
listed both as collateral property when pressed on the debt of his diocese.[29]
Shocked and in fear, Mother Evangelist then wrote Mother General Ignatius in
New Orleans warning that Bishop Brennan was claiming Ursuline property as his
own. He had written to her asking her opinion of “the Council of Baltimore
which says, no. 272, ‘The Bishop is guardian and superior of all church
property in his diocese’; and no. 280, ‘that schools should be in his name?’”
Now, he intended to try to change the Ursuline congregation’s Constitution in
order to take over its school and property.[30]
Mother Evangelist was instructed to hold fast and inform the bishop that the
constitutions of religious congregations could not be changed without Roman
approval. At the behest of clergy in the diocese, Mother Evangelist complained
about Brennan to his superiors at Propaganda Fide in Rome, grieving about the
“suffering of the Community” and seeking the protection of the Holy See “from
the dangers which threaten us.”[31]
Furthermore, when Brennan began to accumulate significant personal debt, he
began applying monies he had borrowed from the parish of Corsicana, south of
Dallas. The pastor of Corsicana learned of this and also protested to
Propaganda. Brennan’s actions sparked an outpouring of complaints from various
priests in his diocese who accused their bishop of being a “tyrant” who used
“spies” to intimidate them; that he was a proud and outspoken man; that he used
“rude and scandalous” language,[32]
and worst of all, that he approved of non-Catholic schools, an accusation which
insinuated that Brennan was infected with Americanism and secularism.[33]
Disregarding the growing tumult in his diocese, Brennan actively
lobbied Rome to raise Dallas to the status of a metropolitan see, with himself
as archbishop,[34] even
going so far as to encourage civic leaders such as the mayor, state senators,
the US Consul in Rome, and even Texas Governor James Stephen Hogg to write
Propaganda in favour of Brennan’s elevation.[35]
To Propaganda, Brennan wrote extolling the virtues of elevating the See of
Dallas, pulling out all the stops with what Mgr. James Tucek has called the
“Texas brag.” He boasted that Texas had 9,000 miles of railway, 11,000 miles of
telegraph lines, the taxable wealth “of untold millions” and “an inexhaustable
mountain of iron and coal insuring its preeminence as a manufacturing state.”
Texas, he said, was “larger than the German Empire...larger than Austria.”
Furthermore, Brennan revealed his Americanist bent to Rome when he mistakenly
played the ethnic card, blithely informing the Roman curia of his fear that to
elevate the Diocese of San Antonio, with its predominantly Spanish-speaking
Catholics to metropolitan status would, along with French-speaking New Orleans,
and Spanish-speaking Santa Fe, complete the “foreignization of the Southwest.”[36]
Such claims would have played poorly among an international body of cardinals
and curia in Rome, who by Brennan’s inability to get along smoothly with the
creditors, religious, and clergy in his diocese had now been made the court of
last resort for the local problems of the Diocese of Dallas. On one hand,
Propaganda was receiving Brennan’s boundless and immodest requests for greater
prestige and power, supported by a galaxy of politicians, while on the other
hand, Propaganda was faced with the matter of the Ursulines and Archbishop
Janssens of New Orleans and his suffragan Bishop Nicholas Gallagher of the
Diocese of Galveston, who opposed Brennan’s elevation to the archepiscopacy,
and who had tired of him and his antics. Brennan left Rome in an impossible
situation, which was overdue for resolution.
One final complaint against Brennan tipped the balance against
him. At some point near the end of his tenure in Dallas, Brennan faced what
came to be interpreted as serious accusations from a woman in his diocese,
Agnes Duncan. These charges were not documented until long after Brennan left
Dallas, but in Rome’s eyes the growing evidence was enough to tip the balance
against Brennan, for the bishop clearly had made some enemies. Arriving in Rome
in August 1892 in advance of his regular ad
limina visit, expecting to return to America as an archbishop, Brennan
discovered that Italy had gone on its summer holidays and the pope was away at
Castel Gandolfo. When Brennan finally found curial officials, he appeared
before Propaganda Fide, and was welcomed not with the adulation of cardinals,
but rather was confronted with a litany of complaints and charges from Dallas.
Stunned and saddened, he wrote to Cardinal Ledochowski on 19 November 1892,
offering his resignation.[37]
Pope Leo XIII reserved the case to himself to consider, but he accepted the
resignation. Ledochowski wrote Archbishop Janssens on 14 March 1893 advising of
Brennan’s resignation and directing Janssens in New Orleans to prepare a new terna.
Given Brennan’s career in Dallas, what happened next is
puzzling. Rome had on its hands a bishop who was unacceptable in Dallas, but
who was still young enough to discharge pastoral duties. Perhaps Brennan might
grow in the job. Perhaps he wasn’t seen as a complete liability. So what should
be done with him? Brennan was sent
to Bishop Michel-Thomas Labrecque of Chicoutimi, Québec, whom the Holy See
authorized to give Brennan the faculties of a vice-prefect apostolic, despite
Brennan having had “legal difficulties” in Dallas.[38]
But Lebrecque did not want Brennan once he discovered Brennan’s history, so he
suggested that Propaganda approach Irish-born Thomas Joseph Power (1830-1893,
Bishop of St. John’s, Newfoundland 1870-93), who agreed to take Brennan as
coadjutor.[39]
Cardinal Ledochowski sent Brennan to the Diocese of St. John’s as coadjutor to
Bishop Power, but when Brennan arrived, the appointment was clearly understood
in Newfoundland as being without
right of future succession. Perhaps Propaganda
was giving him another chance. Maybe all Brennan needed was to be placed under
the wing of a “good influence.”
Just before Power’s appointment to the See of St. John’s in
1870, he had exercised a position of considerable formative influence as Rector
of Holy Cross Seminary at Clonliffe, Dublin. For St. John’s, Power was the
clear choice of his friend and patron, Paul Cardinal Cullen, who performed his
episcopal consecration, and Power proved to be a calming influence, avoiding
politics, and spreading liturgical reforms and inculcating the principles of
Ultramontanism among priests and people who on more than one occasion had
previously found themselves mixing religion and politics. But by the 1890s,
physical and mental infirmities began to curtail Power’s administrative
effectiveness, even though in Newfoundland the church was at the relative
zenith of its development. Overwhelmingly composed of third-generation and
older families whose ancestors had come from southeast Ireland, Catholicism had
become a cradle-to-grave ethno-religious cultural environment for the island’s
35,000 Catholics. Compared to Dallas, St. John’s was not the wild, wild west,
but rather the civilized quiet east.
For all this, Power seems not to have known much of Brennan’s record,
and it is possible that he consented to accept a coadjutor sight - unseen.
When Brennan arrived in St. John’s in the spring of 1893, he
found a city in the midst of a construction boom following a devastating fire
that had destroyed two-thirds of the housing stock. He soon gained the strong
favour of local Catholics, but the reasons for this are unclear; perhaps they
adopted him as one of their own once they learned of his birth in Tipperary, a
county in Ireland from which many of their own ancestors had come. Any joy at
Brennan’s arrival, though, was eclipsed by the steady decline in Bishop Power’s
health. His priests were all abuzz with speculation about a successor, and
their discussion of Brennan’s reputation followed soon behind. When Power died
on 4 December 1893, Bishop Ronald Macdonald of Harbour Grace, Newfoundland
hastily appointed Archdeacon John Scott as Diocesan Administrator.[40]
Scott declared the Diocese of St. John’s to be sede vacante, and Brennan was left in limbo. Complicating matters was
that Brennan claimed to be the administrator upon Power’s death, but Propaganda
Fide sustained Scott over Brennan.[41]
His credibility in the diocese was made increasingly tenuous by growing news of
the mess he had left behind in Dallas.
It took until the latter half of 1893 for more serious charges against
Brennan’s episcopacy to begin to arrive in Rome, but by then, they were the
common talk of the North American Church.
As it turned out, not only Propaganda Fide had been on the
receiving end of complaints about Brennan. The Apostolic Delegate to the United
States, Archbishop Francesco Satolli, was also besieged with correspondence. In
June Bishop Edward Fitzgerald of Little Rock, Arkansas (who had replaced
Brennan as the administrator for the Diocese of Dallas), reported to Msgr.
Donato Sbaretti, Auditor of the Apostolic Delegation, that a booklet had been
published making charges against Brennan.[42]
Then on 24 June 1893, one Agnes M. Duncan of Oakland, Texas wrote Satolli,
declaring that she did not wish to enrage Brennan, but that a certain statement
recently made about him was wrong.[43]
That August, Satolli received a letter from one George Hunter and “other
American Citizens” charging that in May 1892, they had loaned $1488 to Brennan
for his diocese, but now that he had left Dallas, they had learned that he had
not used the money for his diocese but instead used it for his personal
reasons, furnishing it to a private party.[44]
Countering the accusations against Brennan was F.J. Murnane, a Dallas notary
who was Brennan’s chief informant on the affairs of his former diocese, and
possibly, was his lawyer. Murnane wrote Satolli on 26 September 1893 about the
Delegate’s defence of Brennan in the Dallas press as “a most worthy prelate” to
be transferred to Newfoundland, arguing that if Satolli was reported correctly,
“our many clergy [in Dallas], together with our Bishop Administrator
[Fitzgerald], are to be regarded as the worse league of assassins that God, in
His Wisdom, ever permitted to live in iniquity.”[45]
Murnane later wrote Satolli that he was “now convinced” that the Delegate did
not know the truth about the supposed “infamy” of Brennan, and that even the
Protestant press in Dallas had tried to protect Catholics against the scandal.[46]
Finally, Brennan seems to have learned of the charges against him by Duncan,
and he himself wrote Satolli on 6 October, informing the Delegate that he could
stay in Newfoundland, but noting that he did not like to be criticized by a
woman, and he asked Satolli to send him a copy of Agnes Duncan’s charges
against him.[47]
Exactly what happened in Dallas remains a mystery. Was Agnes Duncan the
“private party” for whom he borrowed money to pay? What is clear is that
Brennan, impecunious and possessing poor judgment, at best seems to have gotten
into enough debt to draw public attention and scorn in Dallas, and into some
sort of relationship with Agnes Duncan which turned sour.
While the laity of St. John’s remained blissfully ignorant of
the accusations against Brennan, rumours about his past quickly spread among
the clergy of the city. Although Brennan is an elusive figure in the recorded
annals of Newfoundland church history, some indication of the local
understanding in St. John’s of the charges against him was documented by John Luke
Slattery, an Irish Christian Brother. Slattery was an inveterate diarist and
the President of St. Bonaventure’s College, the Church’s most prestigious institution of higher learning in
Newfoundland. As gatekeeper and referee of the graduates of St. Bon’s into the
professions and apprenticeships, he was one of the most influential
power-brokers in late nineteenth century Catholic Newfoundland.[48]
In January 1894, Slattery reported on Brennan’s character to the Brother
Assistant of his order in Dublin, Ireland:
There is great excitement
over the appointment of a new bishop.
You remember Dr. Brennan was sent here as assistant to Dr. Power. He had been only two years in Dallas (Texas)
and had to resign. Dr. Power was delighted with him at first, but when
he found out his real character and the causes of his leaving Dallas,
his heart broke and he sank under a simple illness. The people are immensely
taken with the new man. He aims at popularity. The priests, knowing now
his real character and past history, have sent a protest to Rome. They have also recommended Dean Ryan for the
Mitre but of course the Holy See is not easily influenced. Very grave charges are made against
the private life of Dr. Brennan and the Holy See is aware of all. May the Lord
have mercy on us and give us a good Bishop. Dean Ryan is a very holy man and a
sincere friend of ours. He was one of
the strongest advocates in our getting the college and is one of its
directors...P.S. don’t mention about Dr. Brennan as a very few persons are aware
of things. The priests tell me what is going on. Peter [Kennedy] knows there is
something wrong but does not know the [details] and nor of course [do] any of
the Brothers.[49]
By 12 February 1894, Slattery reported that Brennan had been in
America for several weeks, and the situation among Catholics in St. John’s was
tense as the people awaited to learn the identity of their new bishop:
I fear very much that
matters will be very strange here before the final settlement is made. We have
all the elements for serious trouble - no matter which way the wind blows. I need not say that the Brothers are
cautious - the ice is thin. The people
are all for Dr. Brennan, the priests all against him. They are in a painful position, knowing the charges against Dr.
Brennan and having abundant proof they must resist his appointment, at the same
time without frightful scandal they cannot justify themselves before the
people.[50]
Slattery’s note would seem
to indicate that a significant division existed in St. John’s between Brennan
and the priests of that diocese, a division which again would necessitate an
intervention by Rome. In the interim, Brennan had been relieved of pastoral
duties. Petitions to cardinals and officials in Propaganda Fide from his former
congregants in Texas seeking his reinstatement in Dallas were common,[51]
but ultimately these proved futile. Brennan also memorialized Rome with his own
unseemly requests to be given the See of St. John’s; he even suggested that
Rome translate a Canadian bishop to Newfoundland and appoint Brennan to the
vacancy.[52] But
in the same breath Brennan discredited himself even more, as he was unable to
resist slandering the Newfoundland priesthood without proof, resorting to
claims that “the Catholics of St. John’s hate Macdonald, Howley and the Irish
priests of St. John’s who are always drunk,” revealing to Propaganda the chasm
which had opened between himself and the Newfoundland clergy.[53]
On 7 May 1894, Slattery, now desperate for a new episcopal
appointment for St. John’s, reported to his correspondent in Ireland the
imminent appointment of a new bishop, and made clear his own view that Brennan
had overstayed his welcome in Newfoundland. Rome, Slattery reported, had
“ordered” Bishop Michael Francis Howley of St. George’s, Newfoundland and
Bishop Ronald MacDonald of Harbour Grace to meet Archbishop Cornelius O’Brien
of Halifax and create a new terna.
MacDonald himself had solicited Slattery’s input as to who the new bishop
should be, but Slattery claimed:
I was astonished and
declined any interference. ...the choice lies between Fr. Scott and Dean
Ryan. Neither wants it. Dr. Brennan is still here - he seems out of
the count. His sad story is known to
all the priests now and to all the bishops in the States. ‘He will never get a
diocese again’ was Dr. McDonald’s summing up.
One would be inclined to pity him, if he did not force your contempt by
his continual want of honesty and truth.
Only last week Fr. Scott told me the facts relative to a “lost”
letter. There could scarcely be a doubt
but Dr. Brennan had intercepted and appropriated an important letter to Fr.
Scott! Those who know him [Brennan] best say that he is a most imperious man,
overbearing and authoritative - that he despises those whom he can frighten,
that any respect he has is given to those who don’t cringe but show fight, etc.[54]
At the conclusion of the
Halifax conference, Slattery reported that the bishops “unanimously requested
the Holy See to remove Dr. Brennan at once from St. John’s,” and
Slattery opined, “So with God’s blessing we shall soon see the last of this
awful man.”[55] But
Slattery was compelled to further elaborate on Brennan’s character and his
flawed understandings of important issues of Catholic education and the need to
respect his fellow clergy and religious:
Last week he said to one of
the nuns, ‘Look here – I’d put a bullet in MacDonald as easily as he would put
one in a seal.’ This was in reference to the fact that he found out Dr.
MacDonald was opposed to him. I think I sent the Brother Assistant a copy of a
letter I wrote re school matters here... I made reference to the defects
of the U.S. system. Dr. Brennan’s Yankee tail was trodden on, and at one of the
Convents, he said, ‘I’ll knock the head off Slattery if he says another word
about the schools in the States.’ These things will give you an idea of the
character of this man. His favorite subject of conversation at the Convents is
the drunkenness of the nuns in the States, their illicit familiarity with
priests, & etc. The priests who are intimate with him say he has no faith
and that the possibilities for the future are frightful. Apostasy seems the
most probable.[56]
Despite Brennan’s seeming loss of vocation, he was still held in
high regard by many of the townsfolk of St. John’s. “The people,” wrote
Slattery, “are simply infatuated with Dr. Brennan and they may show their teeth
unpleasantly when he is ordered away.” For his part, Brennan spent the summer
of 1894 in St. John’s and remained there until late that year. He avoided the
priests of the diocese and at the Palace in St. John’s he refused to take his
meals with them, spending his nights playing cards with a servant man in a room
off the Palace kitchen. Slattery reported that even the servants “whom his
blatant democracy won at first, now think little of him. Indeed they say that
‘he tells lies.’” And then, giving full vent to his own hatred of Brennan,
Slattery wrote that Monsignor Scott was forced to forbid him “to go beyond the
vestry of the Convent...There were solid reasons. He is the most awful liar
ever known. He cannot tell the truth. What is most strange is the extraordinary
infatuation of the people.” [57]
Slattery’s observations went well beyond reportage, and we can only speculate
as to his motives for slandering Brennan. Did he fear Brennan, who was an
outsider, a newcomer to Newfoundland? Slattery certainly was wary of Brennan’s
ability to know who his enemies were, for he reported to Ireland that Brennan
knew “every step taken” by the priests in St. John’s and Dallas, as well as “every
priest who signed a protest,” and that somehow, “some high official in Rome”
was “in collusion” with Brennan, for everything against him in Rome “seemed to
get ‘side-tracked.’”[58] Was Slattery jealous of Brennan’s popularity
(despite his flaws) among a people who, given to occasional flashes of Irish
anti-clericalism, may not have held the shrewd Slattery or the priests of the
diocese in quite the same regard? Or, was Slattery simply reporting the truth
about Brennan?
Brennan’s relations with the Newfoundland clergy reached an all
time low by the time Monsignor Scott and twenty priests of the Diocese of St.
John’s petitioned Cardinal Ledochowski on 20 June 1894, notifying him that
Brennan’s continued presence in St. John’s had become the cause of troubling
speculation and rumours among the Newfoundland public. Newfoundlanders, they
reminded the cardinal, were “of British Isles origin,” and they and their
politicians were becoming troubled that any confirmation of Brennan’s
appointment to St. John’s might signify that the island colony was about to be
detached from the British Empire and attached to the United States.[59]
Newfoundland in 1894 was in the midst of serious disputes with the British
government over Britain’s reversal of policy and disallowance, at Canada’s
behest, of a free trade treaty negotiated by Newfoundland politician Robert
Bond with U.S. Secretary of State James Blaine. Talk of confederation with
Canada, or indeed, talk of any constitutional change, was always a source of
aggravation among the anti-confederate Catholic Irish of St. John’s who
believed that they had “put over” responsible government and an independent
parliament of Newfoundland in 1855. In December 1894, in the wake of a rush on
Newfoundland’s banks following the suicide of the London director of one of the
banks, confederation was briefly considered as a solution to the island’s
problems by Britain, and by the acting premier of Newfoundland. The petition of
the St. John’s clergy to Propaganda was perhaps as much a statement of fact as
it was an attempt to shock Rome into action, for Scott knew that the Roman
curia would not want the Church to incur the wrath of a politically-aggrieved
population in any country. The clerical petition was the high water mark in the
Brennan affair. It was one of the most significant examples of vicious clerical
infighting over appointments ever witnessed in Newfoundland, and it marked the
end of any hope Brennan had of becoming bishop of St. John’s.
Propaganda Fide came to see that the solution to the vacancy in
St. John’s was to appoint a qualified local candidate, and for his part,
Michael Francis Howley had proven eager for translation to the see of his own
hometown, and to become the first native-born bishop of St. John’s. Having met
with O’Brien and MacDonald at Halifax and proposed a terna with his own name on it, Howley had a strong hand in seeking
his own appointment. On 20 December 1894, Propaganda proposed Howley to Pope
Leo XIII and he approved. Where Brennan had been indiscreet and outspoken,
Howley kept his own counsel. A scholar of the history of the Church in
Newfoundland, and having studied in Rome at the Urban College of Propaganda
Fide, from which he had taken a doctorate, he possessed sterling credentials
and was of an orthodoxy which left Rome in no doubt. Howley was sent the brief
of translation to St. John’s on 21 January 1895.[60]
Brother John Luke Slattery’s last report on Brennan was 16
December 1894, in which he noted that Brennan at last had returned to America
for good.[61] Even
after this, Brennan continued to lobby Rome for appointments to various vacant
Canadian sees. But the fullness of the reportage against him in Rome ensured
that he would have no future as an active pastor or bishop. After he left
Newfoundland, Brennan retired to no. 112, Via del Seminario in Rome, and later,
to the Monastery of Grottoferrata in the Alban Hills, six miles outside Rome,
where his maintenance was paid by Propaganda Fide until 1916, when the bishop
of Dallas agreed to pay.[62]
On 7 October 1905 Brennan was translated to the titular see of Caesarea in
Mauritania, but he remained in Rome. He died on 21 March 1916 at the age of
sixty-one, and was buried at Frascati, Italy, in an ornate outdoor tomb
fashioned like an ancient temple fallen into ruin.[63]
Brennan, whose episcopal career in two North American sees proved short-lived,
was memorialized by a euphemistic inscription which in death glossed over the
rough spots of life: “After having yielded up the Diocese of Dallas, he
performed apostolic labours on the eastern shores of Canada.”[64]
Brennan’s tenures in the Dioceses of Dallas and St. John’s speak
clearly to the trials of the developing Church in nineteenth century North
America, as well as to the role of the Holy See, particularly Propaganda Fide, in
trying to foster but also regulate that development. In one sense, Brennan was
an unfortunate and almost tragic figure whose inexperience, lack of judgment,
and youth were overlooked by the Vatican in its haste to place men of zeal and
charisma in the increasingly heterogeneous dioceses burgeoning in the American
Southwest. His shortcomings ultimately discounted him from effective
shepherding in the more established Newfoundland Church, where sharp tongued
gatekeepers such as Slattery were quick to judge. He earned enemies early in
his career, and was placed in situations from which he was unable to escape.
The difficulties created for other dioceses, particularly St. John’s and
Chicoutimi, when they received Brennan’s services before fully learning his story,
and before they learned how ill-fitted by culture he was for ministry among
people who were not Americans, ultimately created more scandal, and greater
difficulties for a Roman curia unsure of what to do with an embarrassed and
embarrassing bishop. The only remedies available to Rome in the late nineteenth
century may well have been to dismiss and move those who had given offence, but
this strategy was counterproductive and seriously divisive for the dioceses on
the receiving end of such appointments. Brennan could run but he could not hide
from his reputation. Brennan’s story eerily foreshadowed the crisis and scandal
that came to plague the North American church a century later when a similar
unsuccessful strategy was employed in attempting to geographically relocate
offending clerics.