A 20th-Century Hecker

 

Monsignor John J. Burke, CSP (1875-1936) was, among other things, a foundational figure in the establishment of the National Catholic War Council, which eventually became the National Catholic Welfare Conference (the antecedent of today's United States Conference of Catholic Bishops). His story is told, in almost day-by-day detail, in this new biography by historian Douglas J, Slawson, The World and Work of Father John J. Burke: A Mystic in Action (South Bend: St. Augustine's Press, 2025).

This is a long book (almost 700 pages), written in a narrative, chronological form, which may make reading somewhat tiresome, but which captures the enormous amount of detail and sheer work, which characterized Burke's life and ministry. While doing so, however, it also reveals his intense emotional life, his reliance upon and genuine devotion to his friends (mostly women), and an intense spiritual life, deeply devoted to the Catholic Church and inspired by his community's founder, Servant of God Isaac Hecker (1819-1888).

Burke grew up in an Irish immigrant family in New York City, a parishioner of the Paulist Fathers' westside parish. He became a Paulist priest, as did his older brother, Thomas, the Paulists' sixth Superior General (1919-1925). After his early religious formation and ordination in 1899, Burke served as editor of The Catholic World from 1903 to 1922. His actual life as a Paulist gets relatively modest attention in this account, however. Once Burke becomes fully engaged in running the NCWC, the religious community aspect of his life seems to recede.

The same cannot be said for the Paulists' founder, however. The author believes Burke "absorbed Hecker's conviction that only Catholicism satisfied humanity's deepest longings and that it harmonized best with American principles." Like Hecker, Slawson argues, Burke believed "the soul's true end was union with God, which began here on earth with the indwelling of the Holy Spirit," who "uplifted and sanctified human nature's every faculty, directing each toward love of God and neighbor. A Spirit-filled laity would then bring Christ into workshop, marketplace, and office." Slawson seems particularly impressed by and attentive to how Burke seemed to live out Hecker's mystical spirituality of public Catholicism and is very attentive to Burke's strong Church-as-Mystical-Body spirituality, in regard to which he seems to have been especially influenced early on by another great Paulist figure, Joseph McSorley (1874-1963). While Burke's Paulist contemporaries play only a relatively modest role in this account, Hecker looms large and influential.

World War I brought Burke to Washington, DC, and the formation of the NCWC. Slawson's account follows in great detail Burke's increasingly national ministry in service to the U.S. Bishops' Conference, dealing with such varied and complicated matters as Catholic wartime military chaplaincy services, the Knights of Columbus, forming female social workers, lobbying regarding motion pictures and federal involvement in education, the procurement of sacramental wine during prohibition, and the crisis surrounding the suppression and restoration of the NCWC itself. (The latter crisis a casualty of ecclesiastical politics and the machinations of Boston's Cardinal O'Connell.) Weaved through this narrative is Burke's own intense spirituality, highlighted especially in his deep friendships with and personal letters to his female co-workers. 

Through it all, we also get a picture of a workaholic Burke, whose health was rendered increasingly fragile by his overwork. He was periodically forced to take time off for rest and vacation, the only practical remedy early 20th century medicine could prescribe. He was even told by his doctor not to celebrate Mass! Like Hecker before him, he had seemingly hard-to-explain episodes of disablingly poor health. One wonders what contemporary medicine, with its enhanced capacities to address both mental and physical health issues, might have made of this and what it might have been able to accomplish to enhance his personal and professional life.

Some of Burke's activities, like censoring motion pictures, may seem solely of historical interest today. But among Burke's many interests were issues of ongoing salience,  for example, his efforts to mitigate some of the effects of the anti-immigrant legislation of the mid-1920s and later. That was also when the Klan was at its height of influence, requiring principled politicking on the Church's part. "I.t would be a sad and wretched mistake," he warned the Church, "to barter for political advantage her spiritual independence" - advice as relevant now as then.

The 1920s and 1930s also saw Burke becoming increasingly engaged in foreign affairs - especially in Haiti (under U.S. occupation since 1915) and in Mexico, where the conflict between Church and State had completely paralyzed formal religious activity and where the Church's struggle was just to be able to be present and operate publicly. The author's typically detailed account becomes especially interesting in its description of the diplomatic difficulties into which Burke was inserted. "You," said Archbishop Ciccognani, the Apostolic Delegate, to Burke in 1934, "are the soul of this work of solving the Mexican situation in the United States."

On September 21, 1936, Burke was invested as Domestic Prelate, a "Monsignor," at the National Shrine, a rare honor for a member of a religious community. A little over a month later, on October 30, 1936, Burke died suddenly.

"The picture of Burke that emerges," concludes his biographer, " is of a man who lived in and with Christ in his own life. Deeply loyal to the Church, he believed the principles of Catholicism alone held thr answer to national problems, and he sought to impart that truth to his fellow citizens. His vision was broad, and his sense of the Mystical Body of Christ enabled him to view the operations of the Church as a whole and to understand the importance and function of the various members. He blended love of Church with love of country, both of whcih he drew together in the NCWC, the organization he came to symbolize and embody."