The Case for Fr. Charles Dominic Ffrench (1775-1851) (review)

Charles Ffrench, a Dominican priest of Irish origin, was a rather controversial character for at least half of his adult life. Father Dominic in religion, he lived in Ireland, Portugal, New Brunswick, New York, and Massachusetts in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Before moving to the United States for good in 1826, Ffrench could not refrain from enmeshing himself in controversy. He was accused of all sorts of misdeeds—defrauding old widows, abandoning and robbing his parishioners, staggering in the streets due to heavy drinking, enjoying the company of women and impregnating young servants, and inciting popular violence against episcopal and sacerdotal authority. In short, whenever contemporaries—and historians after them—needed to show the quintessential misbehaving Irish priest in North America, they selected Ffrench and picked at random among his long list of misdeeds. Now Lawrence Desmond, a medievalist historian, and Donna Norell, a French literature specialist, attempt to redress the balance by showing that, in spite of an irksome character, Ffrench was a good missionary who was unjustly accused for most of his life. Indeed, throughout a short book written in the sharp, dry, and cogent prose of a court case (well reflected in the book title), the authors argue that the accusations were "all false" (p. 14); that there is an "absence of firm evidence" against Ffrench "other than malicious rumours, confessed lies, and suspect testimony" (p. 127); and that his "negative reputation" is due to "baseless" charges (p. 159). As any good defense lawyer would do, on the one hand Desmond and Norell describe the context that made such a hostile environment possible and identify the causes of this unfair treatment, thereby providing the customary circumstantial evidence. On the other hand, they take apart the direct evidence on which the case against Ffrench was built and provide new evidence in Ffrench's favor.

With regard to context, Desmond and Norell maintain that Ffrench suffered from the personal antipathy of several ecclesiastics who made up accusations or publicized unwarranted rumors until these reached his highest territorial superior. In fact, the archbishop of Québec, Joseph-Octave Plessis, who had disliked him right from their first meeting (1812), in the end revoked all his spiritual powers, except that of celebrating Mass (1817). This generalized "aversion" (p. 141) toward Ffrench was bred in a conflict of an ethnic nature, in which Ffrench suffered on account of his Irish origin, his English language, and his belonging to a conquering nation. Indeed, the Ffrench case is, according to the two authors, "the most glaring example of the negative results of French-Irish tensions in the early nineteenth-century Canadian Church" (p. 17). In depicting this context of personal antipathy and ethnic bias, Desmond and Norell are convincing. Ethnicity was a major factor in the history of the Catholic Church in North America during Ffrench's lifetime. Admittedly, most of the evidence against Ffrench is provided by francophone sources, whereas most of the evidence in his favor comes either from Ffrench himself or from priests of Irish origin. (It should be pointed out, however, that Ffrench's earliest accuser was Nicholas Murphy, an Irishman, and that several Catholic English-speaking personalities sided against him, such as Andrew Morris, Thomas Stoughton, Lewis Willcocks, and the priests Paul McQuade and William Taylor.)

Circumstantial evidence cannot stand alone in a courtroom, as it needs direct evidence. On this, however, Desmond and Norell's case is rather shaky, in spite of the fact that the book is replete with archival references. The two main documents on which they base their defense, A Short Memoir (1822) and "Conversion" (1840), were authored by Ffrench himself. (The authors should of course be congratulated for having brought these significant documents to light.) Other documents they cite in Ffrench's defense all originated in English-speaking circles. Yet, if the authors do not accept francophone documents due to their inherent ethnic bias, why...