Patrick Aloysius O’Boyle, the son of Irish immigrants, was born on July 18, 1896, in Scranton, Pennsylvania. If there was little gayety and much hardship for newcomers to Scranton in that storied decade, many of their children nevertheless developed an enduring affection for and loyalty to the city. So it was with the future prelate. Although Patrick O’Boyle would remain a resident for just the first twenty years of a long life, he would ever be drawn to Scranton and its people. For many decades, even into his final years, any break in his schedule inevitably meant a return to...

If provincial Scranton with its strong immigrant working-class ethic molded Patrick O’Boyle’s progressive social philosophy, it was cosmopolitan New York that was largely responsible for his conservative theological outlook and strong respect for law and discipline. O’Boyle would prepare for the priesthood and labor for a quarter-century in increasingly complex executive posts in the Archdiocese of New York. Although in the process this particular provincial never evolved into the sophisticated cosmopolite, in many other ways he would become a thorough New Yorker. The brash, no-nonsense approach to getting things done commonly associated with that great metropolis became part of his...

With the exception of his wartime duty as director of the bishops’ overseas relief program, Patrick O’Boyle would spend the years from 1926 to 1948 working in the New York archdiocese’s mammoth charities network. The years at Catholic Charities, especially those periods that put the fatherless O’Boyle in close contact with some of New York’s neediest children, were among the happiest and most fulfilling in his life. Beyond the personal pleasure derived from working with orphans and foster children was the professional satisfaction gleaned from involvement in an exciting period in the nation’s social history. Social service as an academic...

Seasoned bureaucrats are wary of the phrase “other duties as assigned” in their job descriptions. Patrick O’Boyle, who seemed to relish such collateral work, was an exception. During his years at Catholic Charities, where his major task had been supervising and coordinating the work of the archdiocese’s many childcare institutions, he readily accepted additional duties that involved him in the day-to-day operation of several of these institutions.

By the close of 1936 New York’s Catholic Charities could boast of several successes in the fight for government recognition of the role of religious organizations in relief work. In October the city’s...

In early June 1943 Archbishop Spellman, then overseas visiting American troops, ordered Msgr. O’Boyle to understudy Msgr. McEntegart in his role as director of the just-organized War Relief Services. Before McEntegart was even able to recruit a staff or develop programs, his appointment as bishop of Ogdensburg, New York, was announced, casting doubt on his availability to the new national organization. Although decision on a replacement was the prerogative of the American bishops acting in concert, O’Boyle, whose training and administrative experience closely echoed McEntegart’s, was obviously Spellman’s nominee if and when the post became vacant. While continuing to direct...

On August 31, 1945, Archbishop Mooney received a handwritten communiqué from the director of War Relief Services. O’Boyle’s old friend and the chancellor of the archdiocese, Frank McIntyre, had just informed him that Archbishop Spellman was about to name him assistant director of New York’s Catholic Charities. With Spellman and Swanstrom both out of the country, O’Boyle confidently predicted that there would be no final steps taken at least until November. Although he admitted he would rather stay to launch the postwar relief program, he logically assumed that Swanstrom would succeed him to carry out their plans. He included a...

During his second week in Washington, the new archbishop called in a young priest to tell him that he was to be the archdiocese’s first vice-chancellor. When Father Leo Coady protested that he did not know that much about canon law, O’Boyle responded, “And I don’t know that much about being a bishop either. I’ve got to learn, and you go up there and learn.”¹ In fact on one level O’Boyle’s years in New York had superbly equipped him to lead a new ecclesial organization, but his expertise would be severely tested in the months to come. Ultimately, O’Boyle’s striking...

Washington may have shed its sleepy, small-town image after the war, but many of the city’s old, insular habits, including its laws and customs governing race relations, remained. The capital never experienced the overwhelming influx of immigrants that transformed the great cities of the East during the last century, and its social attitudes continued to reflect the outlook of a leadership comfortable with its Southern traditions. Many of those who arrived during and after World War II, including many African Americans from the rural South seeking a better life in the District, quietly accommodated to the city’s unremarkable but very...

Americans of a certain age tend to wax nostalgic about the 1950s. Overlooking the onset of the cold war and the battle for Korea, they remember most clearly a time of sleepy innocence filled with weighty matters like the direction of popular music and the size of tailfins on the family car. In a certain sense this selective recall is understandable because, weary of a world at war and its austerities, the public was reluctant to address signs of yet other revolutions threatening their way of life. The postwar reconstruction of Europe and Asia was already forcing the United States...

If the Second Vatican Council is seen as beginning a new chapter in the history of the Church, then the years immediately preceding its opening in 1962 represent some kind of ending. In fact an autumnal feeling was evident during those years in the American Church. Although its unprecedented postwar development, evident in its crowded schools and newly constructed sanctuaries, its thousands of charitable institutions, and its busy seminaries and convents, had transformed the Church into a powerful presence in American society, it was also an institution ripe for change. Even while old ways lingered, an increasingly educated laity was...

Pope John’s call to the world’s bishops on January 25, 1959, to participate in an ecumenical council did not meet with universal approval. Some conservatives, to use the title universally applied, considered the elderly pontiff’s initiative a dangerous gesture that threatened the time-honored order of Church doctrine and discipline. These men, chiefly curial officials and their allies in some dioceses, Vatican embassies, and schools of theology, feared that the pope’s often-quoted intention of aggiornamento, of updating the Church and opening its windows to the modern world, would openly encourage the growing demand not only for changes in the liturgy and...

Many American bishops returned from Rome in December 1965 pleased with what they had accomplished at the council and ready to work with the clergy and laity on beginning the renewal mapped out at their historic gathering. They would have agreed with Patriarch Maximus Cardinal Singh’s conclusion that the council had put the Church “into a permanent state of dialogue.” Henceforth, he predicted, dialogue within the Church over continuous renewal, with other Christians over ecumenical initiatives, and with the modern world, “those men of good will in all their diversity,” on subjects of mutual concern would be the order of...

In response to congratulations from well-wishers at the time of his elevation to the college of cardinals in 1967, Patrick O’Boyle stated that the honor was not meant especially for him. Rather, he insisted, it was an expression of the pope’s gratitude, not only to Washington’s Catholics, but also to “the many clergy and laymen of other faiths who have labored beside us in attacking the problems of racial and social injustice which are of common concern.”¹ A generous remark that understated O’Boyle’s considerable importance as a leader in the American Church, it nevertheless underscored what was probably his principal...

The Archdiocese of Washington found itself at the center of the controversy over artificial birth control that erupted in 1968. Pope John XXIII had exempted the subject from the deliberations of the Vatican Council and instead appointed a commission of experts to examine the matter. Bypassing the recommendations of the reconstituted commission’s majority, his successor, Paul VI, reiterated in July 1968 the Church’s traditional condemnation of contraception in his encyclical Humanae Vitae. Among those who sought a different approach to this moral problem was a loosely formed group of priests in Washington. Encouraged by the judgment of some American theologians,...

Cardinal O’Boyle retired in April 1973, five years after the Washington riot and just twenty-four months after adjudication of the Humanae Vitae crisis. A brief time, it was nevertheless long enough to demonstrate again those different elements in his philosophy of stewardship. On one hand, his genuine sympathy for labor and the poor, particularly those suffering because of racial discrimination, continued to be manifested in numerous social programs that placed him in the forefront of the progressive bishops in the post–Vatican II era. At the same time his narrower theological vision, along with an abiding reluctance to meet the...

Responding to a papal directive to the world’s bishops on the age of retirement for senior clergy, Cardinal O’Boyle submitted his resignation in July 1971, days before his seventy-fifth birthday. By all accounts the letter was a pro forma gesture. In good health, with a number of new social programs under way, and with the Humanae Vitae controversy just winding down, he was pleased that the pope did not respond immediately to his offer. While bishops, and especially cardinals, were often retained in office long after their seventy-fifth birthdays, O’Boyle was retired just twenty-one months later. (He would remain another...