Purcell, John Baptist

PURCELL, JOHN BAPTIST. - American prelate, b. at Mallow (County Cork, Ireland) on 26 Feb. 1800, d. in the Ursuline convent, in Brown County (Ohio, U.S.A.), on 4 July 1883. Ordained a priest in Paris on 26 May 1826, he returned to America, where he had already emigrated as a boy, and on 13 Oct. 1833 he was consecrated bishop of Cincinnati.

The diocese, which then embraced the whole State of Ohio, had a Catholic population of about 30,000 souls; his pastoral visitation of 1834 immediately made him aware of its many needs. He encouraged the building of churches and founded a "Seminary Fund Association"; in 1840 he brought to life the "Catholic Society for the Diffusion of Knowledge" (Catholic Society for the Diffusion of Knowledge). Urban and demographic growth convinced the P. of the impossibility of providing with due care for the administration of so vast and so populous a territory, and therefore of the urgency of detaching its northern part from his jurisdiction. This proposal also met with the favor of the Holy See, which in Apr. 1847 proceeded to erect the diocese of Cleveland in the northern part of the State of Ohio. Three years later Cincinnati was promoted to metropolitan see, and the P. was preconized archbishop in the Consistory of 18 July 1850. Having come to Rome for the Vatican Council, he was among the members of the anti-infallibilist minority. Of this position of his there is testimony, among other things, in the letter sent together with three other American prelates to the president of the General Congregation, a letter in which he threatened to abandon ipso facto the Council in the event that the definition of pontifical infallibility were proceeded to by acclamation. The last years of his life were embittered by the sudden outbreak of a financial scandal, in which his brother and he himself were involved. During the celebration of his priestly jubilee in 1876 he could look with pride upon the development of the diocese under his episcopate: when he had come to Cincinnati it was a small city with a few churches; now it had reached a population of nearly 300,000 inhabitants, counted forty parishes and countless other religious institutions.

Silvio Furlan