William Henry O'Connell

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William Henry Cardinal O'Connell (December 8, 1859 – April 22, 1944) was a Cardinal Archbishop of the Roman Catholic Church.

One of 11 children born to Irish emigrants, O'Connell was an 1881 graduate of the Jesuit Boston College. O'Connell was moved to join the priesthood in 1882 after hearing a sermon by His Excellency John Joseph Williams, then Archbishop of Boston. Because he showed above average scholastic aptitude, O'Connell was sent to Rome to study at the Pontifical North American College.

After serving in various pastoral roles as a priest, O'Connell was eventually appointed the Bishop of Portland, Maine on April 22, 1901. He was ordained to the episcopate on May 19 of that year.

Due to Archbishop Williams's declining health, Rome appointed O'Connell as coadjutor of the Boston Archdiocese on February 21, 1906.

O'Connell succeeded Williams on August 30, 1907. On November 27, 1911, O'Connell became Boston's first Archbishop to become Cardinal (Cardinal-Priest of S. Clemente). He managed to be late to two papal conclaves in a row, in 1914 and 1922, due to having to cross an ocean in the slower transportation of the day. (He made a strong protest to Pope Pius XI, who in response lengthened the time between the death of the Pope and the start of the conclave. O'Connell participated in the 1939 conclave.)

O'Connell favored a highly centralized diocesan organization, encompassing schools, hospitals, and asylums in addition to parishes.

"In 1908 during ceremonies commemorating the 100th anniversary of the establishment of a Roman Catholic diocese in the Puritans' Boston, Archbishop William Henry O'Connell ... set the tone for the fast-growing church's next phase [by stating] "[t]he Puritan has passed. The Catholic remains" (see [1]). See the below partial excerpt from Militant and Triumphant: William Henry O'Connell and the Catholic Church in Boston, 1895-1944:

From 1907 to 1944, William Henry O'Connell was Archbishop of Boston. This was the period when the American Catholic Church, so to speak, came of age. Churches, schools, convents, and hospitals were being built, quite literally, by the dozen. Thousands of children were enrolled in parochial schools, where they were taught by nuns and brothers. Priests were ordained each year by the dozen, and seminaries were built to accommodate the growing number of vocations. Some have called this the golden age of American Catholicism.

Nowhere was this more seemingly true than in Boston under O'Connell's leadership. Political leaders referred to him as "Number One", and sought his approval before taking action on a particular issue. And O'Connell loved every minute of it. One contemporary described him as a "battleship in full array."

The only politician who had anywhere near O'Connell's political clout in the state was the Governor (and future U.S. President), Calvin Coolidge; and even Coolidge picked his battles carefully, preferring to ignore the Archbishop whenever possible. He was also a powerful force for the neutralists in trying to keep the United States out of World War II, in the pre-Pearl Harbor era.

His tenure as archbishop, as O'Toole's book details, was marred by a scandal involving his nephew, a priest made chancellor of the archdiocese at a young age but later found to have been secretly married and living a second life with his wife in New York.

William Henry Cardinal O'Connell died on April 22, 1944, aged 84.