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The Catholic Historical Review 86.3 (2000) 459-479



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Indomitable Nuns and An Unruly Bishop:
Property Rights and the Grey Nuns' Defense Against the Arbitrary use of Diocesan Power in Nineteenth-century Cleveland

Leslie L. Liedel


Tension within the nineteenth-century American Catholic Church often centered on the question of ownership of several types of church property. Bishops may have resolved periodic disputes over parish real estate simply by asserting their ecclesiastical authority over the laity, but they faced more complicated situations concerning hospitals and orphanages owned and operated by women religious. Most American bishops shared the opinion that institutions supported by the faithful belonged to the diocese and that the ordinary should hold the title in the name of local Catholics. Not all property fell easily into this selective category, however, because rarely were charitable institutions dependent solely on the financial contributions of local Catholics. Still, bishops who sought the acquisition of property that rightfully belonged to religious orders accused recalcitrant women religious of greed and disregard for the needs of the diocese. Nuns were angered that bishops refused to recognize not only their legal right to own real estate but property rights guaranteed in their constitutions. 1 [End Page 459]

The debates over the ownership of such property were a struggle for power at varied levels of the church hierarchy in which bishops, priests, theologians, women religious, and Rome all played significant roles in the effort to define authority. Historians have emphasized the deliberations of American bishops without adequately considering the motivation of sisters and their desire to protect the rights of their orders. 2 The 1880's case in which the Sisters of Charity of Montreal, familiarly known as the Grey Nuns, protected their order's interests against what they regarded as the arbitrary usurpations of Bishop Richard Gilmour of Cleveland illustrates the guarded approaches that nineteenth-century nuns and bishops took toward the exercise of power. Further, this episode reveals how the centralization of the Church aided in remedying this power imbalance by protecting the interests of the sisters and harmonizing relations between the order and the diocese to protect a growing and diverse American Catholic Church.

Richard Gilmour emerged as a leader among the American hierarchy favoring greater episcopal control over the tenure of church property. Indeed, his first Lenten pastoral, issued just weeks after his appointment in 1872, which proclaimed, "Titles to church property, whether in the form of deeds or land contracts, shall be made directly to the bishop . . . ," all but confirmed his position. 3 By the Third Plenary Council of Baltimore (1884) Gilmour's colleagues looked to him to lead in the effort to persuade Rome to approve legislation that would forbid religious orders from holding title to property that depended on offerings made by the faithful for the benefit of the diocese. Although the Baltimore Council adopted two decrees that limited the rights of religious orders to hold property, Rome failed to approve either. Its refusal to sanction the decrees despite Gilmour's lobbying effort demonstrates its traditional support of religious orders against the increasing power of the American hierarchy who favored "independence of Rome, of the lower clergy, and of religious orders." 4 [End Page 460]

Although American bishops may have desired a little more freedom from Roman intervention, Julie Deschamps, the forthright mother superior of the Grey Nuns, utilized Rome's position by citing the history of the order in the Cleveland diocese to demonstrate its right to maintain ownership of its property. After arriving in Toledo in 1855, the Grey Nuns purchased two acres of land and built an orphan asylum in accordance with the policy of Gilmour's predecessor, Bishop Amadeus Rappe, who permitted religious orders to hold property. 5 Although Rappe, Gilmour, and the diocese depended on and appreciated the services offered by the sisters during their thirty-year history in Toledo, the Grey Nuns' philanthropic endeavor often faced challenges typical of late-nineteenth-century Catholic benevolent institutions. 6...

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