When the cardinals of the Catholic Church gather next Monday to elect a pope at the first conclave of the new century, half of them will be non-European - a striking contrast to the first conclave of the last century, in 1903. Then there was only non-European.
He was a remarkable Irish-American, James Gibbons, who had a part in the dramatic climax to that conclave. His parents, Thomas and Bridget (Walsh), came from families of small farmers in Partry, Co. Mayo. They emigrated to Baltimore, where James was born in 1834. Thomas became a merchant clerk, but a serious depression, which saw banks and insurance companies collapse, hit the family hard and they returned to Ireland when James was three.
Thomas opened a grocery in Bridge Street, Ballinrobe, which prospered until the failure of the potato crop devastated the town in 1845. He was struck down by "famine fever" in 1847, when James was 12, and was buried in Kilkieran cemetery, Partry. His youngest daughter joined him there two years later.
James received all his schooling in Ballinrobe but his young widowed mother worried about the future prospects of her five children in Famine Ireland. In 1853 she returned to the US, settling in New Orleans. James, then 18, supported the family in the first difficult years by working in a grocery store. He was 21 when he decided to become a priest and was ordained in Baltimore in 1861.
He rose rapidly in the ranks after a short curacy. Within seven years he was the world's youngest Catholic bishop at the age of 33, ministering to the whole of North Carolina, which had only 700 Catholics scattered over 50,000 square miles. He wrote a catechetical resource book, Faith of Our Fathers, which has sold over four million copies and is still in print. Nine years later he became Archbishop of Baltimore, America's premier diocese, and was 51 when made a cardinal.
Gibbons and Kilkenny-born John Ireland, Archbishop of St Paul, were the outstanding American Catholic leaders of their time, pioneers in the drive to establish the Church within the mainstream of American life and culture. They strongly supported democratic government and the separation of church and state. In his first homily in Rome as a cardinal, Gibbons pointedly asserted that the church "can grow and expand in a free republic" when religious liberty is respected. This was a radical message at a time when relations between church and state in France and Italy were in bitter turmoil. Separation in the US, he declared, did not mean hostility to the church by the state, but protection from interference
Gibbons acquired a reputation as a champion of workers, though labour union leaders felt his actions sometimes belied his words. However, in 1887 his detailed defence of the Knights of Labour, led by Terence Powderley, a charismatic Catholic, prevented a Roman condemnation of the movement as socialist. The document impressed Leo XIII and helped to form his mind when he came to write his famous social encyclical, Rerum Novarum.
At the conclave to elect a successor to Leo XIII, Cardinal Sarto, Patriarch of Venice, was leading after the fifth ballot and looked certain of election when he astonished the cardinals by making a passionate plea that they ignore him. Terrified at the prospect of becoming pope, he said the responsibility was so great he could not undertake it. All the cardinals who spoke to Gibbons felt Sarto could no longer be considered a candidate.
Gibbons approached a senior curial cardinal, Francesco Satolli, and suggested that he go to Sarto and "beg him for the love of God to bow to the selection and to yield to the action of the Holy Spirit". He asked Satolli to get Sarto to say positively yes or no because "I don't know what to do".
Several cardinals who knew Sarto well spent a marathon session pleading with him not to refuse. Just before the conclave resumed Satolli whispered to Gibbons: "accepit". Sarto would leave matters to Providence and accept the papacy if elected. He became Pius X on the seventh ballot.
Gibbons was highly regarded in the US. The Baltimore Sun wrote: "The Catholic Church has given many distinguished prelates and priests to its works in this country but none has inspired the same general confidence or the same earnest esteem. To all he seems to speak their own tongues by some Pentecostal power, or by some subtle affinity that makes nothing human foreign to him".
The Apostolic Delegate to the US, Giovanni Bonzano, offered a negative assessment after Gibbons died in 1921, aged 87. While acknowledging that he had served the Church well in assuaging intolerance and bigotry, he said Gibbons had shunned acts of administration requiring responsibility or odium. Gibbons's collaborator and friend, John Keane of the Catholic University of America, also noted that "his efforts to please everyone jeopardised the prospect of pleasing anyone".
Bonzano told Rome that the Baltimore diocese was not in a flourishing condition and advised that "no future American bishop should be allowed to wield the power Gibbons had".
However, Thomas W. Spalding, historian of the diocese, has observed that Gibbons "was not an institution builder because he was not a wall builder". He encouraged immigrants to move into the mainstream as rapidly as possible.
"More than any other Catholic," Spalding wrote, "James Gibbons was embraced by his country. . .Concern for his reputation, according to some, made him conciliatory but overly cautious. To the querulous few he was vain, devious and timid. To most, however, he was assured, prudent and gentle."
Gibbons's biographer, John Tracy Ellis, wrote that his dominant characteristic was his simplicity: "In his 35 years as the ranking dignitary in the United States, he never gave evidence of the slightest tendency to aloofness or arrogance that sometimes accompanies high office."