Benjamin J. Keiley (1847-1925): Confederate Soldier, Catholic Bishop

During the American Civil War, two future bishops served as military chaplains, Fathers John Ireland and Lawrence McMahon. But only one bishop had actually served as a private soldier in the ranks during the war. Benjamin Joseph Keiley was born in Petersburg, Virginia, to Irish immigrants from County Cork. At age seventeen, he enlisted in Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia, serving with in an artillery unit during the last year of the Civil War.

After the war, Keiley was a law clerk before entering the seminary. He studied in Rome at the North American College. In 1873, he was ordained for the Wilmington Diocese. For several years he served as a pastor in Delaware. When Wilmington’s Bishop Thomas Becker was transferred to Savannah in 1886, he brought Father Keiley with him as Vicar-General (the bishop’s second-in-command) and rector of the cathedral.

In April 1900, Father Keiley succeeded Becker as Bishop of Savannah, a diocese covering the entire State of Georgia. One of the greatest challenges he faced during his tenure was a rabid anti-Catholicism. But he was, in the words of one historian, “a feisty Irishman.” In 1916, he wrote to a fellow bishop:

I am becoming quite an issue in this benighted state of Georgia. I have been publicly assailed in the Senate… denounced by a candidate for the U.S. House… accused by Mr. Watson* of a great desire to murder him, and a host of little politicians have made me a campaign card. And I am really enjoying it.

Bishop Keiley was active in Confederate veteran organizations, and a frequent speaker at memorial services. In a 1902 address, he declared that “purer patriots and better men never lived” than the Confederate solder. For him the “Lost Cause” (as Southerners called the war) was “a moral question.” In 1904, he presided at the funeral of Lieutenant General James Longstreet, who converted to Catholicism in 1877.

Bishop Keiley oversaw an extensive outreach to African-Americans. In 1906, he invited the Society of African Missions, a French order, to Savannah. In fifteen years they founded seven parishes, six parochial schools, and an order of Black nuns. But the bishop harbored the traditional prejudices of many Southern whites. He did not believe, for example, that African-Americans should be ordained priests “because they are held in such contempt by whites.” In 1905, he publicly criticized President Theodore Roosevelt for inviting Booker T. Washington to the White House.

Poor health led to Bishop Keiley’s resignation in 1922, three years before his death. His funeral bier was draped with a Confederate flag.

*Georgia Senator Thomas E. Watson (1856-1922) was known for his racism, anti-Semitism, and an anti-Catholicism that bordered on the pathological.