JOHN BAPTIST PURCELL. - American prelate, born at Mallow (County Cork, Ireland) on 26 Feb. 1800, died in the Ursuline convent at Brown County (Ohio, U.S.A.) on 4 July 1883. Ordained priest in Paris on 26 May 1826, he returned to America, where he had emigrated as a boy, and on 13 Oct. 1833 was consecrated bishop of Cincinnati.
The diocese, which then embraced the entire State of Ohio, counted a Catholic population of about 30,000 souls; his pastoral visitation of 1834 immediately made him aware of its manifold needs. He encouraged the building of churches and founded a “Seminary Fund Association”; in 1840 he established the “Catholic Society for the Diffusion of Knowledge.” Urban and demographic growth convinced Purcell of the impossibility of properly administering so vast and populous a territory and thus of the urgency of separating its northern portion from his jurisdiction. This proposal also met with the approval of the Holy See, which in April 1847 erected the diocese of Cleveland in the northern part of the State of Ohio. Three years later Cincinnati was raised to a metropolitan see, and Purcell was preconized archbishop by the Consistory of 18 July 1850. When he came to Rome for the Vatican Council, he was among the minority opposed to infallibility. Evidence of this position is found, among other things, in the letter he sent, together with three other American prelates, to the president of the General Congregation, in which he threatened to leave the Council ipso facto if the definition of papal infallibility were to be carried by acclamation. The final years of his life were embittered by the sudden outbreak of a financial scandal in which he and his brother were implicated. During the celebration of his sacerdotal jubilee in 1876 he could look with pride upon the development of the diocese under his episcopate: when he had arrived in Cincinnati it had been a small town with a few churches; now it had a population of nearly 300,000 inhabitants, forty parishes, and countless other religious institutions.