The Radio Priest, Father Charles Coughlin (1891-1979)

There’s never been a priest as controversial as Father Charles Coughlin in American Catholic history. Born in Canada, Coughlin was ordained for the Basilian Fathers in 1916. In 1923, he was incardinated into the Archdiocese of Detroit. In 1926, facing Klan activity in the area of his parish, Father Coughlin decided to take to the waves to combat anti-Catholicism. He soon attracted a large audience, and by the time of the Great Depression, he was speaking out on issues of social justice. By the early 1930’s, it was estimated that he had forty million listeners a week. At first he was a big supporter of President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal. However, he began offering his own solutions to ending the depression and got offended when President Roosevelt didn’t adopt them. He then organized a political party in 1936 to run against FDR, and started his own newspaper titled Social Justice. Unfortunately, by the end of the decade his original good intentions devolved into an ugly anti-Semitism that smacked of pro-Fascist sentiments. As a result, Father Coughlin lost much of his original support. The government threatened to press charges against him after he praised Hitler and Mussolini for their anticommunism on the eve of World War II. In 1942, he shut down the paper and stopped his public speaking. For the last 37 years of his life, he served as a pastor in Royal Oak, Michigan, and stayed out of the limelight until his death on this day in 1979.