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  • United States Documents in the Propaganda Fide Archives: A Calendar, Volume Twelve
  • Robert Trisco
United States Documents in the Propaganda Fide Archives: A Calendar, Volume Twelve. Compiled by Anton Debevec ; edited by William J. Short , O.F.M. (Berkeley, California: Academy of American Franciscan History. 2002. Pp. x, 355.)

After an interval of fifteen years the next volume in this grand project has at last been brought out. This long delay was due mainly to the regrettable relocation of the Academy of American Franciscan History from Bethesda, Maryland, to Berkeley, California, and the consequent, inevitable disruption of its activities. The retirement of the co-editors of Volume Eleven, Fathers Mathias C. Kiemen, O.F.M., and James McManamon, O.F.M., must also have prolonged the hiatus. It is ironic that the name of Anton Debevec, who collected all the information about the documents on printed forms as he toiled away in Rome, never appeared on the title pages of the first seven volumes (1966-1977), which were published while he was still living, but is prominently displayed now that he is long dead. Certainly, the new editor, Brother Short, also deserves high praise for arranging the massive data under 2,187 numbers (many with references to more than one document) with elaborate cross references and a detailed index. As far as a reviewer without access to the original papers can judge, the volume is free of typographical errors on the inside, but, unfortunately, has a misspelling ("Calender") on the spine.

It would have been helpful to indicate on the spine and on the title page the years of the material here calendared, namely, 1876 and 1877, although some older documents, as far back as 1869, are included in the archival volumes labeled with these years. The editor might also have given in an introduction the names and dates of assuming and leaving office of the prefect and secretary of the Sacred Congregation de Propaganda Fide. As has been the practice since Volume VIII (the first of the second series), all the documents dating from these years and existing in the five main record groups of the Propaganda Fide Archives are brought together between the two covers; this arrangement is most convenient, because documents pertaining to the same topics are located in different record groups.

Although 1876 was the centennial of the Declaration of Independence and the last full year of the presidency of Ulysses Grant, one finds few references to political events in these pages. The fiftieth anniversary of Pius IX's episcopal consecration [End Page 827] in 1877 was the occasion of countless congratulations and contributions to Peter's Pence. In the United States this might be called the age of Cardinal John McCloskey, Archbishop of New York, who had been elevated to the sacred purple in 1875, the first American to be so honored, but it was also the time of the rise of James Gibbons, who was promoted to the coadjutorship of Baltimore and then succeeded to that metropolitan see in 1877, of John Lancaster Spalding, who was appointed first bishop of Peoria in 1876, and of John Moore, bishop of St. Augustine the following year. As the Holy See gradually increased the number of American sees (although the only new one in these two years was Leavenworth, whose first bishop, Michael Fink, O.S.B., had previously been vicar apostolic of Kansas and the Indian Territory), the Propaganda had to spend more time in keeping them filled and in dealing with complaints about their occupants. The other McCloskey, William G., bishop of Louisville, alone is the subject of more than 150 numbers related to his troubles with his clergy, who denounced him for his frequent, arbitrary, and vindictive transfers of priests and his inept financial management of the diocese, with the Sisters of the Good Shepherd, and with the Abbot of Gethsemani, Benedict Berger, O.C.R. Adversarial relations between bishops and their successors can be traced in Pittsburgh (Michael Domenec, C.M., and John Tuigg) and in Albany (John J. Conway and Francis McNierny). Many papers concern the approval of the constitutions of congregations of religious women, e.g., the Sisters of...

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