Corporate Greed Attacked from Pulpit, 1900

PULPIT ATTACK ON TRUSTS.
Money Power, Father Ducey Says, Has Become Tyranny.
Attempts, the Priest Declares, to Control Educational Institutions in America and Church Itself.
The New York Times, January 2, 1900


The Rev. Father Thomas J. Ducey, pastor of St. Leo’s Roman Catholic Church, delivered a sermon after the special midnight mass to commemorate the coming in of the holy year of 1900, which, though brief, caused considerable surprise in the congregation, for the discourse was a fierce attack on the trusts. It was in line with the clergyman’s attitude toward the great moneyed interests of the country, which has caused the Church to lose some of its wealthiest and most prominent members, and to these he devoted his closing words, saying: “Some of our people do not like the way I have spoken about these things, and they have left us, and I am glad they have gone.” The sermon was, in part, as follows:

“My dearest brethren, this crowded church, filled with men and women evidently influenced by the spirit of thought and conviction in this midnight solitude, is solemn beyond measure. I shall say a very few words to you. You know that for eighteen years as pastor of this church I have taken up all questions bearing upon the justice of God and the rights which the God of Justice gives to all his children.

I have presented to you from time to time the great demands of humanity in the closing quarter of the nineteenth century, and have dealt with all the social and economical questions, enunciated by our common brother, Jesus Christ, in the interest and for the happiness of humanity.

Prophets and reformers are always despised factors in the social economy of this world, but always recognized factors in the economy of Jesus Christ. Every question which I have enunciated from the altar in the past nineteen years has been affirmed by the utterances and encyclicals of that marvelous pontiff now reigning, Leo XIII.

For the past twenty years the tyranny of the money power has been growing in this Republic, and I believe there is permitted today more freedom of speech today in Great Britain, in its House of Parliament and its House of Lords, than we are allowed to exercise in this country. The monarchy of Great Britain is less tyrannical than the money and trust power in these United States, in my judgment. In the past few years, this power has attempted to control the educational institutions of this country and the just financial interests.

It has used its powers to drive from the larger universities unselfish and self-sacrificing professors. It has throttled the liberty of speech, and in the great centers of the Middle States the press, with rare exceptions, has been silent.

But a few years ago a man who was President of a university presumed to express convictions upon certain public questions and was ousted, and a great money power, which is attempting to control the Government of this country, the judiciary, and even the very centers of non-Catholic thought in its pulpits, is dictating to men how they must think and how they must speak: that they must not think or speak as God wishes them to speak or their own consciences direct them, but as these psalm-singing, Bible-reading hypocrites want them to speak. They pervert the truths of Holy Scripture and, like the devil, quote Scripture to suit their own purpose.

This is the great question for solution in the nineteenth century, according to Leo XIII, for which, as he says in his famous encyclical, ‘a remedy must be found quickly, or the good people will be driven into rebellion and violence.’

This closing year of the nineteenth century must find teachers of Christianity keenly alive to the demands of the people and to their rights. I believe firmly that a great crusade of moral evolution and development will manifest itself in the coming decade of the twentieth century, and will be prefaced in preparation by the just and fearless utterances of men in public life and the pulpits of God demanding justice for the people.

The men who are now attempting to control the industrial and mental forces will be forced to the wall, and the rights of the people will be asserted and that which God has given them will be grasped from the hands of the oppressors as successfully as Moses grasped justice for the Hebrew people from the tyrannies and oppressions of the Pharaohs.

I hope that every member of this congregation will protest against the covetousness and luxury of unjust and tyrannical oppression by the corrupt, corporate powers of the times in which we live.

NOTE
Born in Waterford, Thomas James Ducey (1843-1909) emigrated to America with his family at age five. After his parents died, he was adopted by James Brady, a family friend who was one of New York’s foremost attorneys. He studied at the College of St. Francis Xavier in Manhattan (now Xavier High School), and worked at a law office before he decided to study for the priesthood.



His family and friends felt he should enter the legal profession, but he entered the seminary and was ordained in 1868. As a young man, he inherited a considerable amount of money from his adopted father. He served at Nativity parish on the Lower East Side, and ministered to prisoners at the Tombs, the city jail. As a young priest he attacked the infamous Boss Tweed, who tried to get him removed from his parish. But the archbishop stood up for him and he remained where he was. Tweed eventually ended up in jail.



With his own money, Father Ducey founded St. Leo’s Church in 1880. Named for Pope Leo XIII (1878-1903), it was located on 28th Street near Fifth Avenue. He was one of the founders of the People’s Municipal League and the Social Reform Club, which was organized in his rectory. A local newspaper said of him: “Father Ducey is highly esteemed as a pulpit orator, and is greatly admired. In his preaching he dwells with masterly learning upon the urgent public and social questions of the day.” Another paper referred to him as “this most independent of men and priests.”



As pastor of St. Leo’s, he offered a helping hand to the city’s poor artists and writers. He also started St. Leo’s Repose for the Dead. It was a place to store the city’s unidentified dead, people of all religions or none, and the bodies were kept there until family or friends could be contacted.


In his history of the New York Archdiocese, Monsignor Thomas J. Shelley describes Father Ducey as a “flamboyant character with a flair for self-advertisement who combined a taste for high society with progressive views on social reform.” He frequently ate at Delmonico’s, the city’s finest restaurant, located two blocks from his rectory. He also spoke at union rallies and strikes, and he called Catholicism “the religion of the masses, of which I am proud to be a Catholic priest.”



Father Ducey had an ongoing quarrel with his Archbishop, Michael A. Corrigan (1839-1902) over whether or not he was named a Monsignor. He was often called such in the press, and was slow to correct it. At times he planted stories in papers that he had been named a Monsignor, which led the Archbishop to issue “indignant denials.”



After Ducey’s death, St. Leo’s Church was attended from St. Stephen’s, a few blocks away. It was later made a convent and chapel for the Sisters of Mary Reparatrix, a cloistered order of nuns from France. Both church and rectory have since been demolished.



The encyclical to which Father Ducey refers in his homily was Pope Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum, issued in 1891. It was a landmark in the history of Catholic social thought, endorsing the rights of workers to organize and calling on employers to observe basic human rights and create decent working conditions.