Edward McGlynn

Overview

Father Edward McGlynn (27 September 1837 – 7 January 1900) was the pastor of St. Stephen's Roman Catholic Church in New York City and, from 1886, Henry George's closest political ally and most controversial supporter. McGlynn counselled George to accept the 1886 labour nomination for Mayor of New York — George's son called the resulting acceptance letter, drafted after the consultation, McGlynn's "master stroke" — and his public backing of George's candidacy, in defiance of Archbishop Michael Corrigan's direct order, triggered a Church conflict that ran for a year: suspension during the campaign, removal from his parish in January 1887, and formal excommunication on 4 July 1887 after McGlynn refused a summons to Rome to answer for his land doctrines.[1][3] He was reinstated in December 1892 after a Vatican inquiry found nothing in his land doctrine contrary to Catholic teaching. The conflict was not an isolated flashpoint: McGlynn had clashed with the New York hierarchy over public schools and church discipline for two decades before George's candidacy made him famous, and historians of American Catholicism treat the "McGlynn affair" as a formative episode behind Pope Leo XIII's 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum.[2][6]

Early Life and Formation

McGlynn was born in New York City on 27 September 1837 to Peter and Sarah McGlynn, Irish immigrants from County Donegal who had come to the United States in the 1820s; he was one of eleven children, and his father's death in 1847 left his mother to raise the family alone.[3] After schooling at the Thirteenth Street Grammar School and the Free Academy (later City College of New York), the thirteen-year-old McGlynn was sent to Rome for seminary education — sponsored by Archbishop John Hughes of New York — first at the Urban College of the Propaganda and then, from 1859, at the Pontifical North American College, where he earned a doctorate in theology and philosophy and was ordained on 24 March 1860 at the Basilica of St. John Lateran.[3][5] After an assistant pastorate under Rev. Thomas Farrell at St. Joseph's Church and further assignments at St. Brigid's and St. James', he was appointed pastor of St. Stephen's — then New York's largest parish, with roughly 25,000 parishioners — in 1866, at age twenty-nine.[3][5]

Pastor of St. Stephen's and the Turn to the Land Question

McGlynn's tenure at St. Stephen's predates his fame as George's ally by two decades, and it was already contentious. He opposed building a parochial school at St. Stephen's despite the Second Plenary Council of Baltimore's 1866 mandate, arguing the public schools were adequate, and he cultivated open friendships with Protestant clergy — he once addressed a meeting at Henry Ward Beecher's church — drawing criticism as a "liberal Catholic" from the conservative Catholic press.[3] According to Mason Gaffney's account of the affair, McGlynn was also willing to publicly question papal infallibility, clerical celibacy, and other points of Church governance well before 1886.[2] Confronted daily by poverty in his tenement parish, McGlynn later recalled of the depression years of the 1870s: "I had begun to feel life made a burden by the never-ending procession of men, women and children coming to my door begging not so much for alms as for employment."[5] Reading George's Progress and Poverty around 1880 crystallized his thinking; he called it "an excellent exposition on the industrial and social conditions of man ... a poem of philosophy, a prophecy, a prayer."[5] McGlynn met George in 1882, and — according to Gaffney, citing the historian Robert Emmett Curran's archival research — Cardinal Giovanni Simeoni, the Vatican's Propaganda Fide prefect, had already authorized Archbishop Corrigan to move against McGlynn's land-tax views as early as that year, four years before the public rupture of 1886; Cardinal McCloskey separately reprimanded McGlynn and ordered him to remain publicly silent on the subject.[2] The single tax, in other words, was added to an existing list of grievances, not the sole cause of the eventual break.

The 1886 Campaign and the Church Conflict

Archbishop Corrigan had warned McGlynn in advance not to speak at a pro-George rally at Chickering Hall in October 1886; McGlynn spoke anyway — "as if he expected that night to be his last," by one account — telling Corrigan he was "determined to do what I can to support Mr. George" because his rights and duties as a citizen "were not surrendered why I became a priest."[1][5] He was suspended for two weeks days after the election.[1] When Corrigan then obtained a cable summons ordering McGlynn to Rome, he refused on health grounds (he had heart disease) and doubled down publicly: "I have taught and shall continue to teach... that land is rightfully the property of the people in common and that private ownership of land is against natural justice, no matter by what civil or ecclesiastical laws it may be sanctioned."[1] George championed McGlynn's case in the first issues of his new weekly The Standard, comparing the impending excommunication to the persecution of Galileo. The Archbishop removed McGlynn from St. Stephen's in January 1887 — his replacement took possession of the rectory in McGlynn's absence and later tore his name from the parish confessional — and Rome excommunicated him on 4 July 1887 for defying the summons.[1][3] McGlynn maintained throughout that he remained a Catholic and a priest.

Corrigan's campaign against McGlynn's supporters continued after the excommunication: he circulated a loyalty pledge among New York clergy, screening non-signers out of promotions, and his Vicar General, Thomas Preston, told priests that "the rights of property are sacred ... by divine authority. You must not think as you choose; you must think as Catholics."[2] Within the Vatican, Cardinal Camillo Mazzella — who recommended both McGlynn's excommunication and placing George's works on the Index of Forbidden Books — derided McGlynn as a priest who treated George, rather than the Pope, as the poor's "Redeemer" and his own personal "Holy Father," a hostile characterization McGlynn himself never endorsed.[2]

The Anti-Poverty Society

In 1887 McGlynn became founding president of the Anti-Poverty Society, with George as vice-president, formed to carry the land question into New York's tenement districts through mass Sunday meetings; its first meeting at Chickering Hall on 1 May 1887 packed the hall and, per George's account in The Standard, ended with the crowd cheering the Lord's Prayer.[1] McGlynn campaigned alongside George in the 1887 New York State election on the United Labour Party ticket and remained a leading voice of the single-tax movement through the 1890s, defending it from the Anti-Poverty Society's Sunday-afternoon platform throughout his years under Church discipline.[1][3]

Reinstatement and Theological Vindication, 1892

McGlynn continued preaching the single tax through the Anti-Poverty Society for five years under the ban. Pope Leo XIII eventually sent Archbishop Francesco Satolli to the United States as his representative; at Rev. Richard Burtsell's urging, Satolli asked McGlynn to submit a full written statement of his land doctrine. A committee of theologians at the Catholic University of America (Revs. Bouquillon, O'Gorman, Shahan, and Grannan) reviewed it and found "nothing contrary to the teachings of the Catholic Church." McGlynn made a profession of adherence to the Church and the Holy See, reserved the right to keep expounding the single tax "at Cooper Union or elsewhere," and Satolli formally lifted the excommunication on 23–24 December 1892 — Archbishop Corrigan, per George's account, was "completely flabbergasted" by Rome's reversal of his own condemnation.[1][3] On being told the censure was lifted, McGlynn's own response was brief: "I rejoice that you are prepared to remove the ecclesiastical censure."[5] George read the reinstatement as vindicating his own 1891 Open Letter to Pope Leo XIII, writing that the Church's highest authority had now "declared in the most emphatic manner that there is nothing in [single-tax doctrines] inconsistent with the Catholic faith."[1] McGlynn did not return to a parish until December 1894, when he was appointed to St. Mary's, Newburgh, New York.[1][3]

The reinstatement came only after Rome had, in 1891, issued Rerum Novarum — Pope Leo XIII's foundational social encyclical, which defended private property in land against the doctrines George and McGlynn had pressed into Vatican counsels. Gaffney argues, from the surrounding correspondence and internal Vatican commentary he surveys, that Rerum Novarum's unnamed references to a "mere utopianist" and "discordant voices" reflected direct anxiety about George and McGlynn specifically, not merely a general reply to European socialism — an interpretation consistent with the encyclical's timing but which he acknowledges rests on inference rather than an explicit textual naming of either man.[2] George's own Open Letter to Pope Leo XIII, written in direct reply that same year, argued that the encyclical confounded God-made land with man-made capital.

Later Life, Death, and Legacy

McGlynn officiated at the 1895 wedding of George's daughter Jennie, and, after her sudden death in May 1897, conducted her funeral. When George himself died five months later, days before his second mayoral campaign was to conclude, McGlynn was among the clergy who spoke at his funeral service, praised for "the pulsing sympathy" of his eulogy.[1]

McGlynn died at Newburgh on 7 January 1900 of Bright's disease (chronic nephritis) after a six-week illness.[3][5] His body lay in state at St. Stephen's in New York, where an estimated crowd filed past the coffin, before a second funeral service and burial at Calvary Cemetery, Queens.[3][5] In 1901 supporters organized the Dr. McGlynn Monument Association to fund a memorial; a life-size bronze statue, completed in 1920, was placed in the non-denominational Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx.[4] The reconciliation with the hierarchy that Satolli brokered in 1892 did not erase institutional memory of the conflict: decades later, according to the Carmelite scholar Alfred Isacsson (as cited by Gaffney), Cardinal Francis Spellman — Archbishop of New York from 1939 — had McGlynn's portrait removed from the wall of St. Stephen's and had archival material documenting the Corrigan–McGlynn struggle withdrawn from the Archdiocesan archives.[2] Historians of the affair credit McGlynn's clash with Corrigan, and its ripples through Rome, as a contributing thread in the broader "Americanism" controversy over the independence of the American Catholic Church that culminated in Leo XIII's 1899 condemnation Testem Benevolentiae.[2]

See Also

• Henry George — McGlynn's political ally and friend
• 1886 New York City Mayoral Election — the campaign that precipitated the Church conflict
• 1897 Mayoral Campaign — George's fatal second run, at whose central funeral McGlynn spoke
• Tom L. Johnson — fellow George backer in the same campaigns
• Anti-Poverty Society — the organization McGlynn co-founded and led
• The Condition of Labour: An Open Letter to Pope Leo XIII — George's 1891 reply to Rerum Novarum, the encyclical shaped in part by the McGlynn affair
• From Wasteland to Promised Land — Andelson and Dawsey's biographical appendix on "the McGlynn affair"
• The Life of Henry George (George Jr., 1900) — the primary source for this page

Sources

1. Henry George Jr. (1900), Life of Henry George, Third Period, Ch. VIII, IX, XIII, and XIV — public domain, reproduced on this wiki: life-of-henry-george — used for McGlynn's role in the 1886 campaign, the suspension and excommunication sequence (with directly quoted letters from McGlynn and Archbishop Corrigan's office), the founding of the Anti-Poverty Society, the December 1892 reinstatement by Archbishop Satolli, and his role at Jennie George's wedding/funeral and Henry George's funeral (A-claims for quoted correspondence and reported dates; a sympathetic filial biography favorable to McGlynn as George's ally, cited accordingly).
2. Mason Gaffney, "Henry George, Dr. Edward McGlynn, and Pope Leo XIII," paper delivered to the International Conference on Henry George, Cooper Union, 1 November 1997, revised 12 March 2000, Robert Schalkenbach Foundation. https://masongaffney.org/publications/K18George_McGlynn_and_Leo_XIII.pdf — used for the pre-1886 Vatican pressure on McGlynn's land-tax views (citing Curran 1978), Corrigan's post-excommunication campaign against McGlynn's supporters and Preston's statement, Cardinal Mazzella's role and characterization of McGlynn, the Rerum Novarum connection, and the later Spellman-era erasure of McGlynn's memory (citing Isacsson) (D-claims on Rerum Novarum's intended targets are Gaffney's own interpretive argument, flagged as such; other facts are A-claims Gaffney draws from cited archival historians. Gaffney is a Georgist economist and an advocate for George's legacy; his framing of the conflict is sympathetic to McGlynn and George throughout, cited accordingly).
3. "McGlynn, Edward," New Catholic Encyclopedia, via Encyclopedia.com, https://www.encyclopedia.com/religion/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/mcglynn-edward — used for birth/family details, education and ordination, parish assignments, the excommunication and reinstatement dates, and death details (A-claims; a tertiary reference encyclopedia entry).
4. Henry George School of Social Science, Archive and Historical Research Center, "Father Edward McGlynn and the Dr. McGlynn Monument Association" (finding aid), https://hgarchives.org/historical-collections-2/father-edward-mcglynn-and-the-dr-mcglynn-monument-association/ — used for the 1901 founding of the Monument Association and the 1920 Woodlawn Cemetery statue (A-claim; an archival finding aid from the Henry George School, an advocacy-affiliated institution, cited for factual/institutional detail).
5. Geoffrey Cobb, "Father Edward McGlynn – A Controversial Catholic Priest," New York Irish History Roundtable, 2019, https://nyirishhistory.us/article/father-edward-mcglynn-a-controversial-catholic-priest/ — used for McGlynn's early biography, his 1873-depression recollection, his description of reading Progress and Poverty, his statement to Corrigan defending his right to campaign, his response to Satolli in 1892, and his death/funeral details (A-claims for quoted material; a local-history journalistic source, cited accordingly, and corroborated against the New Catholic Encyclopedia and Gaffney where dates overlap).
6. Robert V. Andelson and James M. Dawsey, From Wasteland to Promised Land: Liberation Theology for a Post-Marxist World (Orbis Books / Shepheard-Walwyn, 1992), Appendix A — see From Wasteland to Promised Land — used for corroborating that the "McGlynn affair" is treated by Georgist scholarship as a defining episode in George's biography (D-claim/framing; a supplementary, advocacy-adjacent theological text).