The Life and Times of Bishop Louis-Amadeus Rappe by John F. Lyons (review)

BOOK REVIEWS581 The Life and Times ofBishop Louis-Amadeus Rappe. ByJohn F. Lyons. (The Author , 3175 West 165th Street, Cleveland, Ohio 44111. 1997. Pp. xii, 285. $29.95.) The Reverend John F. Lyons has published this "life and times" biography of Louis-Amadeus Rappe, first bishop of Cleveland (1847-1870), appropriately enough during the celebration of the bicentennial ofthe founding ofthe city of Cleveland in 1796 and the sesquicentennial ofthe establishment ofthe Diocese of Cleveland in 1847. The histories of both are closely intertwined. European immigrant Catholics flocking to the jobs available in such rapidly industrializing cities as Toledo and Cleveland simultaneously fueled the explosive growth of the region and the Catholic Church itself. Recruited by Bishop John Baptist Purcell of Cincinnati, Father Rappe journeyed from France in 1840 to become a successful missionary on the northwest Ohio frontier, preaching both religion and temperance. With grave misgivings, Rappe accepted Purcell's offer to become the bishop of the new Cleveland diocese, serving until he resigned in 1870, beset by charges of mismanagement and sexual misconduct. He then went to Vermont, where he was again what he always wished to be, a missionary and temperance advocate, until his death in 1877. Lyons dedicates his study to the late Reverend William A. Jürgens, H.E.D., whose extensive research and writing form a major part of the volume. Lyons relies almost exclusively on diocesan archives in Cleveland, Baltimore, Norwood (Cincinnati), and Burlington (Vermont) and on archival material at the University of Notre Dame and at the Propaganda Fide in Rome. There are fewer than a dozen references to the secondary literature, little ofit current and much of it cited improperly. Since there is no bibliography (or index, for that matter), the interested reader will have difficulty locating a particular secondary source. Either ignoring or unaware of the significant scholarship on both the Rappe administration in particular and the American Catholic Church as a whole, Lyons fails to place the events and personalities about whom he feels so deeply in any effective historical or analytical context. He has thus written not an evenhanded "life and times" biography of Rappe but, rather, a legal brief in which he pictures the bishop as a saintly man destroyed by lying, evil-minded enemies, both lay and cleric. For Lyons, disagreements over such issues as nationality parishes, placement of priests, or the language to be used in services and taught in parochial schools are not legitimate differences of opinion over important issues but selfish, imagined grievances which produced conspiracies, led by plotters (at first Germans but later and especially the Irish led by Father Eugene M. O'Callaghan) inflamed by the foul spirit of nationality. Lyons rarely acknowledges that Rappe himself was motivated by a spirit of French nationalism . On the other hand, Lyons stereotypes Rappe's opponents—the Germans suffered from an inferiority complex and were "a touchy lot" who "could explode at any moment with little or no warning" (pp. 1 18- 1 19). Most of the Irish were especially combative and untrustworthy and believed that only they were 582BOOK REVIEWS good Catholics. Lyons fails to recognize that disagreement over nationality issues and clashes among bishops and aggrieved priests and lay men and women were endemic in the Church in the United States at the time. In fact, they were usually intertwined. Differences over ethnic issues rapidly escalated into battles over authority almost everywhere in an American church struggling to establish its own identity in a democratic republic and to set up administrative structures adequate to solve the problems as well as take advantage of the benefits which rapid growth, mostly based on European immigration, created. Lyons does perform a useful service in uncovering some documents and letters hitherto lost, especially those dealing with sexual misconduct charges against Rappe, which clarify some of the issues surrounding Rappe's resignation and his opponents' motivations. But in the final analysis Rappe was brought down not by apparently untrue charges of solicitation (Rome discounted them) or by "conspiracies" led by selfish Germans and Irish but by his own administrative ineptitude, a weakness which Rappe himself recognized throughout his life. If Lyons fails to place Rappe in the...