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Pittsburgh takes the pledge
archived from: 2005-08-04
by: Mike Aquilina

First of two parts

He was Ireland’s “apostle of temperance” at the midpoint of the 19th century. Father Theobald Mathew was a temperance crusader who got Ireland to take “the pledge.” His every appearance drew enormous crowds and saturation coverage from the media. He was a sensation.

And he was coming to Pittsburgh. It was reported as news in Pittsburgh even before Father Mathew stepped off the boat in New York in 1849. The Pittsburgh Catholic tracked the preacher’s progress as he made his way through the eastern states and territories, then through the South and Midwest, before landing in Pittsburgh.

Father Mathew’s reputation had preceded him to America. He was singlehandedly responsible for accomplishing what the Irish patriot Daniel O’Connell called “that astonishing moral miracle” — that is, the sudden sobering-up of an island that had long suffered from a colossal drinking problem.

In the 1830s, per-capita annual consumption of beer and whiskey hovered around 3.5 gallons of each. Various temperance movements arose and vanished, for a variety of reasons. Often, their founders and promoters were evangelical Protestants otherwise known for their anti-Catholicism, and so were viewed with suspicion or even hostility by the fiercely Catholic Irish people.

Other early promoters were ethical humanists — or Unitarians, or liberal Protestants, especially Quakers — who, for dogmatic reasons, were just as suspect in the eyes of Catholic Ireland.

Taking up the cause

In the mid-1830s, a Quaker temperance leader named William Martin decided to approach his friend, Father Theobald Mathew. Father Mathew was a Capuchin friar in Cork renowned as a confessor and a pastor and for his work with the poor, but he had no association whatsoever with the total-abstinence movement. In fact, two of his brothers and one of his brothers-in-law owned distilleries, and Father Mathew himself enjoyed wine, brandy and even spirits, though never to excess.

Martin did not succeed immediately. But over time he seems to have shown Father Mathew that many of the poor families they encountered were poor precisely because of their alcohol abuse. Confronted with this evidence, Father Mathew felt conscience bound, “as a minister of the Gospel, to throw all personal considerations aside” and take up the cause. Famously declaring, “Here goes, in the name of God!” he signed the book of the newly formed Cork Total Abstinence Society.

Ireland apparently was ready for Father Mathew. He traveled the length and breadth of the island, and was seen by hundreds of thousands. At each appearance, he stood for hours while the men, women and children came before him, one at a time, knelt and recited the words of the pledge: “I promise, while I belong to the Teetotal Abstinence Society, to abstain from all kinds of intoxicating drinks, unless used medicinally, and that I will discountenance, by advice and example, the cause of intemperance in others.”

A little over two years after he joined the movement, he had brought 2.5 million into it — 30 percent of the total population of Ireland. By the time of the Potato Famine, in 1845, that number had more than doubled to 6 million, and teetotalers held a clear majority.

Criticism and suspicion

Father Mathew’s success was incontestable. But like any great success it was also the subject of some heated and persistent controversy. Father Mathew had his detractors among the clergy and hierarchy.

Some claimed he was ecumenical to a fault, compromising the clarity of Catholic faith so that he might attract Protestants to his movement. More theological controversies swirled around the nature of the pledge. Was it a vow? An oath? Or a mere resolution? How binding was the pledge? Was a violation a mortal sin, a venial sin or just a fault?

Another serious theological objection came from those who called teetotalism a heresy. Some were Catholics, and some were Protestant. But all alike pointed out that Jesus himself took wine, used wine in the institution of his most blessed sacrament, and even turned water into wine for a wedding feast. Therefore, alcohol consumption was not intrinsically evil, and could indeed be considered a great good.

All those controversies were serious, but none would impede Father Mathew so much as the accusation that he was unpatriotic. To quote his most recent biographer, Father Mathew “was an ecumenist and anglophile at a time when most of his Catholic brethren were militantly Catholic and nationalist.”

Father Mathew looked upon British rule as a fact of life. The best way to improve Ireland’s lot, he believed, was by a program of assimilation and accommodation. To that end, he worked toward more peaceful coexistence between Irish and English, Catholic and Protestant, rich and poor. Much of this was unobjectionable, and even ardent nationalists chose to overlook Father Mathew’s soft spot for Ireland’s oppressor. But in 1847, the apostle of temperance made a fateful decision.

Looking to America

He had funded his movement largely out of his own pocket, and now he was facing imminent bankruptcy. In near desperation, he accepted a pension from the British crown. It was a pittance, really; still, for many people in Ireland a paycheck from the crown made one an accomplice of the crown, and necessarily an apologist for the crown.

The decision haunted him, not only in Ireland but in the Irish diaspora. For Ireland’s poverty, which reached new lows with the famine of 1845-47, had driven many to emigrate, to find a better life elsewhere — in America, Australia and even in England. To these Irish, Father Mathew also felt a tender concern, and in 1843 he made a tour of England, appealing especially to Irish and Catholic enclaves.

By 1848, Father Mathew began planning a temperance tour of the United States. But the intervening years had been difficult. His temperance work was all-consuming. In addition, the Potato Famine placed even greater demands on him as a pastor. He opened a soup kitchen that fed 3,000 to 4,000 people each day. And every day, he gave 60 to 70 more paupers a decent burial in his cemetery.

Father Mathew worked himself to exhaustion, and then he kept working. In April 1848, when he was 57 years old, he suffered a stroke that left him partially paralyzed, but he recovered sufficiently to continue his plans for a voyage to America the following year.

He was, however, a much diminished man. He wrote to his American benefactor a letter that the Pittsburgh Catholic published at length: “From illness and excessive toil,” he said, “my friends in the States will find in me but a mere wreck of what I was, and I must throw myself on their kindness and forbearance, whilst I shall be amongst them. I fear that I will not be able to exert myself, as I have hitherto; nor can it be expected that I will address public meetings.”

Still, America — and certainly Pittsburgh — was eager to welcome him on those terms. On this side of the Atlantic, he was, quite literally, an icon of the temperance movement. The Irish-American newspapers, the Catholic newspapers and the temperance newspapers served as eager heralds of his U.S. tour.

The American hierarchy, however, was less enthusiastic. Some, like Bishop Hughes in New York, were Irish nationalists who resented Father Mathew’s pension from Queen Victoria. Others, like Francis Kenrick in Philadelphia, were teetotalers who quibbled with his methods and suspected him of fanaticism. In Pittsburgh, Bishop Michael O’Connor was a special case.

Change of heart in Pittsburgh

As a young priest, Irish-born Father O’Connor had served Bishop Kenrick in the Philadelphia Diocese, and there he imbibed his mentor’s views on the subject of strong drink. Father O’Connor promoted, for example, a petition to the Holy See requesting an indulgence for those who joined temperance societies.

But, while still in Philadelphia, he wrote a letter contrasting American methods with those of Father Mathew in Ireland. “Our success (in temperance) has hitherto been great,” he wrote to Father Paul Cullen, rector of the Irish College in Rome. “We have established it on a more religious basis than it is in Ireland. The pledge is administered before the altar. We profess to regard it as a religious act, and though we cannot refuse to give it to Protestants who come publicly for it in the crowd, we have declined all official connection with Protestant societies.”

Like most of the American hierarchy in 1842, Father O’Connor was not in an ecumenical mood, and he shared the U.S. bishops’ distrust of Father Mathew’s easy fraternizing with Protestants.

But the ensuing years were as eventful for Father O’Connor as they were for Father Mathew. In 1843, the Vatican announced the creation of the new Diocese of Pittsburgh, and in 1844 Michael O’Connor was named its first bishop. From his earliest days, he encouraged the establishment of parish temperance societies, and a larger Catholic total-abstinence organization arose as well, the Brotherhood of St. Joseph.

In 1845, Bishop O’Connor traveled to Europe to gather priests, sisters and monetary assistance for his new see. While in Ireland, he accepted an invitation to speak at one of Father Mathew’s rallies. There, “During the course of his remarks, O’Connor expressed his pleasure of being in the presence of Father Mathew and thanked him publicly for the influence his labors in Ireland had (had) in the American temperance movement.”

It was probably that personal encounter with Father Mathew and the eyewitness experience of his work that changed Bishop O’Connor’s attitude toward the man. Afterward, there is not a trace of suspicion in his discussion of Father Mathew’s movement and methods.

This article is adapted from the author’s 2005 Lambing Lecture for the Catholic Historical Society of Western Pennsylvania. For more on the subject, read “Father Mathew’s Crusade: Temperance in Nineteenth-Century Ireland and Irish America,” by John F. Quinn (Amherst, Mass.: University of Massachusetts, 2002).

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