May Their Memory Be a Blessing

Father Thomas Farrell marched to a different drummer—his own conscience. As the pastor of St. Joseph’s Church on Sixth Avenue in Greenwich Village during the Civil War, he defiantly displayed the Stars-and-Stripes on the façade of his church to advertise not only his support of the Union but also his detestation of slavery. It was a courageous gesture in a city where the majority of voters twice rejected Abraham Lincoln’s bid to win the Presidency of the United States.”

SECOND IN A SERIES

Father Thomas Farrell was the rarest of rare birds among the diocesan clergy of the archdiocese of New York in the mid-19th century. He was an Irish-born abolitionist and a Radical Republican at a time when most of his clerical confrères were indifferent to the existence of slavery on American soil and ardent supporters of Tammany Hall.

William McCloskey, a New York diocesan priest who became the bishop of Louisville, called Farrell “a good man, but crazy on some points,” a reference to his liberal views on a number of issues. It would be accurate to describe Father Farrell as a civil rights advocate, but not as a civil rights leader, because he was a lonely figure, a general without an army.

Shortly after the outbreak of the Civil War, in October 1861, Archbishop John Hughes warned Simon Cameron, the Secretary of War, that, if Catholics were asked “to fight for the abolition of slavery, then indeed, they will turn away in disgust from the discharge of what would otherwise be a patriotic duty.”

After the end of the Civil War, in 1869, Father Farrell and his like-minded friend, Father Sylvester Malone, a priest of the Diocese of Brooklyn, made a tour of the Southern states to assess the status of the Freedmen, as the emancipated slaves were called. The bishop of Richmond, John McGill, a native of Philadelphia, got wind of their activities and criticized them severely for their efforts. 

Bishop McGill complained to Archbishop John McCloskey, Father Farrell’s superior, that Farrell was guilty of negrophilia (literally love of black people) as if it were a sin or a crime instead of a virtue.  McGill also accused Farrell of “stirring up the negroes,” which really meant that Farrell was encouraging African Americans to assert the civil rights (including the right to vote) that were legally guaranteed to black men by the three Civil War amendments to the Constitution.

After the disputed presidential election of 1876, the last federal troops were withdrawn from the former Confederate states, enabling white-dominated Southern legislatures to erase the gains that African Americans had made during the previous decade and to create the racially segregated Jim Crow South that was to last for the following 90 years until the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of the following year.

To compound the plight of African Americans in the late 19th century, by the 1870s many Northern abolitionists lost interest in the fate of black people in the Jim Crow South. Father Thomas Farrell was an honorable, if humble, exception. He could do little to prevent racial discrimination in the South, but he made a modest effort to come to the aid of African American Catholics in New York City where they were often made to feel unwelcome in Catholic parish churches.

For example, in the summer of 1842, Pierre Toussaint, the leading figure in New York’s minuscule Catholic African American community, was insulted by a white usher because of his presence at Mass in St. Patrick’s Old Cathedral. When Louis Binsee, the French-speaking chair of the parish trustees, heard of the incident, he offered Pierre Toussaint an apology, but the apology revealed the unconscious racism that prevailed among even the best-intentioned white Catholics. “If God by His will has created you and your wife with black skin,” said Binsee, “by His grace he has also made your heart and soul as white as snow.”

In 1989 Cardinal John O’Connor introduced the cause of the canonization of Pierre Toussaint in Rome, exhumed his body and placed it in the crypt beneath the high altar of St. Patrick’s Cathedral. The following year, Pierre Toussaint was declared Venerable, the title that he now enjoys in the Church’s liturgical calendar.

Long before the canonization of Pierre Toussaint was ever envisioned, Father Farrell decided to establish an African American parish in New York City where black Catholics could feel welcome in their own spiritual home. 

He left $5,000 in Alabama state bonds for this purpose in his will. Aware of Cardinal McCloskey’s lack of enthusiasm for a black parish in his archdiocese, Farrell shrewdly added a codicil to his will specifying that, if the $5,000 was not used for that purpose within three years of his death, the legacy would go to the Colored Orphan Asylum, a non-Catholic institution.

For three years after Farrell’s death, McCloskey did nothing.  Then, two of Farrell’s closest clerical protégés took action.  Edward McGlynn pleaded with McCloskey not to let slip “this golden opportunity.” Richard Burtsell offered to purchase a former Protestant church on Bleecker Street at his own expense.  The result in November 1883 was the establishment of the Church of St. Benedict the Moor, the first Catholic African American church in New York City and the first Catholic African American church north of the Mason-Dixon Line.

ABOUT THIS SERIES
The articles in this series on priests who have served in the Archdiocese of New York are planned to run monthly throughout 2021. Father Michael Morris, pastor of Regina Coeli parish in Hyde Park, and Msgr. Shelley will write the profiles.