McNamara’s Blog, a great church historian webpage notes that on today’s date in 1944 Cardinal William Henry O’Connell of Boston died. O’Connell was a former rector at the North American College in Rome (as was NY’s new Archbishop Timothy Dolan) and later became Bishop of Portland, Maine and then went on to become Archbishop of Boston. He was famously known for increasing parishes and vocations and was a huge political voice as well who legislators feared.
O’Connell had a nasty side. When he took over as Archbishop, he got rid of the Sulpicians from the seminary faculty. (He had a grudge against them from his own seminary days.) In addition, he exhumed their graves from the cemetery. But perhaps the biggest scandal of O’Connell’s career was one that never hit the papers.
It seems that his nephew Monsignor James O’Connell, whom he appointed Chancellor at a very young age, was leading a double life. He was secretly married to a woman in New York and was embezzling from archdiocesan funds to support his lavish lifestyle. The Cardinal was aware of the scandal for several years before he was forced to act by the Vatican.
Yeouch! You can check out more here.
