Tea at Trianon: James Healy, Portland’s African-American Bishop

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Saturday, June 11, 2022

James Healy, Portland’s African-American Bishop

From The New England Historical Society:

James Healy and two younger brothers, Hugh and Patrick, attended Quaker schools in Flushing, N.Y. Their father came to know Bishop John Fitzpatrick of Boston. Fitzpatrick then arranged for the boys to enroll in the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Mass.
James Healy earned a B.A. from Holy Cross in 1849 and declared his intention to enter the priesthood. But he couldn’t study at the Jesuit seminary in Maryland, a slave state. Fitzpatrick, who knew of his parentage, helped him enroll in a Montreal seminary. Then he helped James enroll in the Sulpician Seminary in Paris. In 1854 he was ordained at the Cathedral of Notre Dame.
Fitzpatrick stepped up to help Healy again and made him his secretary and chancellor of the Diocese of Boston. Neither revealed that James Healy had African-American blood.
In 1866 James Healy became pastor of St. James Church, Boston’s largest Roman Catholic congregation. In that post, he spoke out against the General Court’s attempts to tax Catholic Churches. He also founded several Catholic charities to aid Irish immigrants who arrived in Boston during the famine years.
James Healy bought a wooden frame house in Newton, Mass., where he lived with his brothers and sisters. The siblings remained close over the years. (Read more.)