John Baptist Purcell

John Baptist Purcell

John Baptist Purcell (born February 26, 1800 in Mallow , Ireland , † July 4, 1883 in Brown County , Ohio ) was an Irish-born American Roman Catholic clergyman and from 1833 until his death bishop - from 1850 archbishop - of Cincinnati . He is one of the prominent figures of the consolidating US Catholicism in the 19th century.

Life

John Baptist Purcell left Ireland at the age of 18 to pursue his vocation as a priest in the United States. Since he was destitute, he accepted an assistant teaching position at Ashbury College in Baltimore . In 1820 he was admitted to the Mount St. Mary's Seminary in Emmitsburg to study philosophy and theology , which he finished at the Sulpizian college in Paris . In 1826 he received in Notre-Dame , the ordination .

In 1827 Purcell became professor of philosophy at Mount St. Mary's Seminary and its president the following year. In a few years he improved and enlarged the seminar considerably. In 1833 Pope Gregory XVI appointed him . to the second bishop of the diocese of Cincinnati , established in 1821 , which then included all of Ohio. On 13 October 1833 he received in the Baltimore Cathedral , the Episcopal ordination by the archbishop of Baltimore , James Whitfield . Co- consecrators were the Bishop of New York , John Dubois , and the Coadjutor Bishop of Philadelphia , Francis Patrick Kenrick .

When Purcell took office there was only one small Catholic church in Cincinnati and 16 in all of Ohio. In the years that followed, the Catholic population increased rapidly with German and Irish immigrants. Bishop Purcell promoted the building of churches and schools, educational institutions and monasteries, and established English- and German-speaking congregations. From 1841 to 1846 the Cathedral of St. Peter was built in chains . In 1847 the Diocese of Cleveland was separated from Cincinnati; further divisions followed until 1868. In 1850, Cincinnati was elevated to an archbishopric.

When the American Civil War broke out in 1861 , Purcell was the first Catholic bishop in the United States to advocate the immediate abolition of slavery .

In 1869 Purcell took part in the First Vatican Council . He did not consider the dogmatization of papal infallibility to be opportune - like 60 other bishops he left before the vote - but he publicly acknowledged its content.

Purcell's final years in office were overshadowed by a financial scandal. The construction work had required a great deal of money, to which the bishop and his brother and vicar general Edward Purcell accepted money deposits. However, they lacked the financial knowledge to manage them and millions were lost. Although John Baptist Purcell made no personal accusations - his ascetic way of life and unreserved generosity were notorious - the administration of the diocese was transferred to a coadjutor in 1880 . He himself retired to a small convent in Brown County, where he died three years later.

In addition to the external development work, Purcell succeeded in several public controversies in making the content of the Catholic faith understandable for Protestants and non-Christians and in breaking down prejudices. A seven-day public dispute with Presbyterian pastor and revivalist Alexander Campbell in 1837 attracted nationwide attention.

literature

• Appleton's Cyclopedia of American Biography : Article "Purcell, John Baptist"

Individual evidence

1. ↑ David J. Endres: Rectifying the Fatal Contrast: Archbishop John Purcell and the Slavery Controversy among Catholics in Civil War Cincinnati ( Memento of the original from June 16, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (PDF; 2.9 MB), 2002 
2. ↑ For the background and the course s. Edmund Hussey: Some Notes on the History of the Presbyterate of the Archdiocese of Cincinnati (PDF; 2.8 MB), pp. 5-7

Web links

• Entry on John Baptist Purcell on catholic-hierarchy.org ; Retrieved November 4, 2013.
• Publications by and about John Baptist Purcell ( WorldCat )

predecessor	Office	successor
Edward Dominic Fenwick	Archbishop of Cincinnati 1833–1883	William Henry Elder