Seasons of Grace by Tentler Leslie Woodcock;Szoka Edmund Cardinal;

Author:Tentler, Leslie Woodcock;Szoka, Edmund Cardinal;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wayne State University Press
Published: 2017-04-10T00:00:00+00:00

THE GALLAGHER YEARS

The history of the Gallagher episcopate is more difficult to reconstruct than that of any other of Detroit’s ordinaries, save for the enigmatic Bishop Frederick Rese (1833–1840). This is because relatively few documents from the Gallagher administration are deposited in the Detroit Chancery archives. Just how the Gallagher papers came to be so sparse is something of a mystery, but it certainly has to do with Gallagher’s close connections to Father Charles Coughlin. There are relatively few documents in the archives today that bear on Father Coughlin’s career, and almost none that bear on his relationship to Bishop Gallagher. The Gallagher papers were obviously edited at some point in the past, and material relating to Coughlin—and perhaps other sensitive material as well—was removed and presumably destroyed. Any account of the Gallagher episcopate, then, and particularly of Gallagher’s association with the controversial Father Coughlin, must be disturbingly incomplete. And the Gallagher personality, a key to much in his clouded career, must remain fundamentally an enigma.

We do know that the future bishop was born late in 1866 in Auburn, Michigan, a farming hamlet in the vicinity of Bay City. His parents were Irish immigrants, the father a boilermaker before he took to the rural life, and the mother a hotel cook in the years before her marriage. The couple apparently met in Detroit, where they were married, in the Jesuit church, in 1862. They eventually had three children—daughters Kate and Fanny, and son Michael.2

As the only boy and a promising student, young Michael was apparently made aware at an early age that his family’s hopes for success in this life rested largely on him. It is not clear, however, at what point he decided to become a priest. He was sent at the age of twelve to live with relatives in Bay City so that he could attend a Catholic school, and completed high school in St. James parish at the age of seventeen. He then taught briefly in the public school at Pinconning, a village north of Bay City, but evidently only to earn money for his further education. He subsequently attended the Basilians’ Assumption College in Windsor (Ontario), presumably as a seminarian from the Diocese of Grand Rapids. His academic achievements were impressive enough that his bishop sent him abroad for the rest of his seminary training. Gallagher received a degree in philosophy from Mungret College in Limerick in 1889, and took his theology courses at Innsbruck, where he was ordained in 1893.3

The life of the Gallagher family by this time turned almost wholly on the needs and prospects of the young seminarian. “Your Degree and the Pope’s picture are hanging at home for Ma,” Fanny wrote to Michael in the fall of 1890. “When you send your picture, try to have a good one, for if I don’t do it in crayon Ma will certainly have it enlarged life size.” Fanny was now a teacher, and putting a portion of each month’s salary into an account for her brother’s benefit.

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