Gerry Bradley on Fr. Burke: "Creating U.S. Catholicism"

My friend and colleague Prof. Gerry Bradley has a great review in the latest First Things of a book about a fascinating and crucially important character in U.S. Catholic history -- about whom I didn't know much before the review, I have to admit -- Fr. John Burke.  Here's a bit:

Walter Lippmann, one of the founders of the New Republic and for sixty years a journalistic man-about-the-globe, judged him to be the “most impressive man I have ever met.” Castle confided to his diary that “I should like him and at the same time be afraid of him.” The man was “so adroit and persuasive” that Castle feared “he would make me promise something that I did not want to promise.” This from America’s number two diplomat during the Hoover administration.

The man of whom these notables spoke was not a politician or a bishop or a titan of industry. He never had any money or held an academic position. He was by all accounts—including his own—an introvert, a lover of solitude. He suffered from perennially poor health and endured long periods of rest at doctor’s orders. Born in Manhattan to working-class Irish immigrant parents and educated in local public and parochial schools, he longed throughout his public career to return to his native New York City, to the editorship of the Catholic World magazine, and to his “spiritual family,” comprising devout Catholic women with whom this unmarried man worked and with whom he maintained deep—and transparently chaste—friendships. He tried several times to leave the post that made him collaborator and confidant of Presidents Coolidge and Roosevelt. His episcopal employers refused to accept his resignation. “They said he could come and go to the office as he pleased and take whatever vacations he needed,” writes Douglas Slawson in his magisterial new biography of Fr. John J. Burke. The bishops “simply wanted benefit of his judgment."

Read the whole thing!