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c h a p t e r 1 4 Molding an Elite 338 UPON DEPARTING ROME after having succeeded in gaining papal approval for the Faribault plan, John Ireland had traveled at a leisurely pace through his beloved France and then on to Ireland. When he arrived in St. Paul in July 1892, he had been gone from Minnesota for nearly six months. In a celebrated malapropism, an ardent admirer used to describe the archbishop as “an international figure both here and abroad.” And so he was. That he relished such a role need hardly be said. To play it, however, involved frequent and sometimes protracted absences from home. The journeys across the Atlantic were only one side of the coin: Ireland, in demand as a lecturer on temperance and colonization, often attended sometimes lengthy rallies and conferences in Chicago or New York or other far-flung places. He liked to go to the University of Notre Dame where his speeches promoting Americanization always roused lively applause from the youthful audience. As a prominent member of the group that founded the Catholic University of America, he was often in Washington, and he was not loath when there to lobby the federal government for this cause or that. In 1898, at the request of the Vatican , he hastened off to the capital in a fruitless attempt to avert hostilities between the United States and Spain.1 The archbishop’s credentials as a solid Republican gave him entrée to four presidencies, those of Harrison, McKinley , Theodore Roosevelt, and William Howard Taft. After his victory in the election of 1908, Taft wrote: “No one will receive a more cordial welcome in the White House while I am there than the Archbishop of St. Paul.”2 1. See O’Connell, John Ireland, 442–454. 2. Taft to Ireland, November 21, 1908, MHS, JIP, roll 11. I Molding an Elite 339 Ireland’s opponents within the American hierarchy, notably Bishops Spald­ ing of Peoria and McQuaid of Rochester, were not slow to chide him for this proclivity to busy himself about many matters outside his diocese and to suggest strongly that he would do well to mind his own ­ ecclesiastical business . Such complaints, however, were seldom voiced by Minnesotans, Catho­ lic and non-Catholic alike. His own were proud of the archbishop’s reputation as a mover and shaker, as one who walked, head erect, beside popes and presidents . Nor did his coreligionists among them appear to have felt any sense of neglect. It is one measure of John Ireland’s immense energy and self-­ confidence that he managed to combine incessant travel—­ always slow and often uncomfortable—with a firm and even creative control over his local jurisdiction . And he did so more or less by himself. Elaborate bureaucratic structures lay far in the future. His chancery was an unadorned room in the cathedral presbytery, and later in the basement of his house on Portland Ave­ nue. Not that the archbishop of St. Paul was without able adjutants. As the pio­ neer generation of Augustin Ravoux slipped into its dotage, stalwarts like Anatole Oster and Louis Caillet, who remembered Bishop ­ Cretin’s times, still kept their hand on the plow. But younger men came to the fore too, ecclesiastics all—after Dillon O’Brien’s death no layman enjoyed a place in Ireland’s inner circle3 —as was to be expected in the clerical culture of the time. A sampling of those whom the archbishop came to regard as close col­ laborators—and those whom he marked out for promotion to high office— tended to display certain basic attributes: they were Irish-born or of Irish extraction, they were strong temperance advocates, they were fiscally prudent , and they were dedicated to the cause of Americanization. Joseph Cotter was born in England in 1844 and as a child was brought to Minnesota by his Irish parents. His father was a ne’er-do-well journalist who ultimately gained a civil service job in St. Paul.4 Joseph began his theological education at St. Vincent’s Abbey in Pennsylvania, but he came back to Minnesota to complete it when, in 1867, he joined the charter class of the newly founded seminary at St. John’s.5 Shortly after ordination four years later, Cotter was assigned as pastor of St. Thomas parish in Winona, the bustling and charming Mississippi River town where he was destined to live out the rest of his life. 3. See chapter...

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