
The World and Work of Father John J. Burke:
A Mystic in Action
by douglas j. slawson
st. augustine’s, 600 pages, $36
In 1928, Undersecretary of State William R. Castle Jr. wrote about “by far the most important Roman Catholic in this country”: “Obviously a man of great power and authority,” he was “very sure of himself.” Castle’s successor, Sumner Welles, observed of this man that, “in addition to all of his other rare and fine qualities, he was a statesman of an unusual breadth of vision.” Walter Lippmann, one of the founders of the New Republic and for sixty years a journalistic man-about-the-globe, judged him to be the “most impressive man I have ever met.” Castle confided to his diary that “I should like him and at the same time be afraid of him.” The man was “so adroit and persuasive” that Castle feared “he would make me promise something that I did not want to promise.” This from America’s number two diplomat during the Hoover administration.
The man of whom these notables spoke was not a politician or a bishop or a titan of industry. He never had any money or held an academic position. He was by all accounts—including his own—an introvert, a lover of solitude. He suffered from perennially poor health and endured long periods of rest at doctor’s orders. Born in Manhattan to working-class Irish immigrant parents and educated in local public and parochial schools, he longed throughout his public career to return to his native New York City, to the editorship of the Catholic World magazine, and to his “spiritual family,” comprising devout Catholic women with whom this unmarried man worked and with whom he maintained deep—and transparently chaste—friendships. He tried several times to leave the post that made him collaborator and confidant of Presidents Coolidge and Roosevelt. His episcopal employers refused to accept his resignation. “They said he could come and go to the office as he pleased and take whatever vacations he needed,” writes Douglas Slawson in his magisterial new biography of Fr. John J. Burke. The bishops “simply wanted benefit of his judgment.”

The Paulist priest John J. Burke was indeed “by far the most important Roman Catholic” in America between the death of unofficial primate James Cardinal Gibbons in 1921 and his own death in 1936. During that time, Burke served as founding General Secretary—CEO, if you will—of the National Catholic Welfare Conference. (Today’s USCCB is its lineal descendant.) Pope Pius XI awarded him an honorary doctorate in sacred theology, a degree rarely granted and then only for “exceptional service to the Church.” Burke was also the first American priest of a religious order to be named a monsignor by the pope. The night Burke died, President Franklin Roosevelt issued a statement: “A powerful spiritual force has been lost to our national life.”
Now professor emeritus of history at National University in San Diego, Slawson has written the only biography of Burke in print and the only scholarly biography in existence. It is exhaustively researched. The fruit of decades spent in archives, The World and Work of Father John J. Burke is nonetheless written in pellucid prose free of academic pretense. It is the definitive treatment of the man who most powerfully shaped the public profile of American Catholicism in the last century. It should be read by anyone interested in twentieth-century American history or in matters Catholic—and especially by anyone interested in both.
The author is an ideal match for his subject. Slawson’s many previous books include two that describe the world in which Burke worked. One is The Foundation and First Decade of the National Catholic Welfare Council. The other is The Department of Education Battle, 1918–1932: Public Schools, Catholic Schools, and the Social Order. A third adjacent project is Slawson’s biography of the NCWC’s archnemesis, William Cardinal O’Connell of Boston. (O’Connell was an exceptionally autocratic prelate, back when episcopal practitioners of that dark art were not few.) In all three books, Burke played a featured yet supporting role. In this compelling new work Slawson puts him at the center, in the cockpit of the Church’s public life between the world wars.
When America entered the Great War, the Catholic Church in this country was a collection of independent dioceses with a common faith and a common, though distant and sporadic, relationship to the Vatican. The Church’s political interlocutors were cities and states. The national government was out of the picture. The American bishops had not met as a body since their Third Plenary Council in Baltimore in 1884, and although the nation’s archbishops gathered annually in Washington, they issued no public statements, paid almost no attention to social justice questions, and projected no national presence or identity at all.
But in the spring of 1917, America needed millions of soldiers; about a quarter of those in uniform would be Catholic, creating a huge demand for chaplains. The Wilson administration turned—eventually—to the American bishops. Burke was then editor of the Catholic World, but he capitalized on his good relationships with Cardinals Farley and Gibbons to found the Chaplain’s Aid Association. Before long, Slawson writes, Burke had written “to each bishop and every Catholic society urging they send representatives to a meeting at Catholic University in August to coordinate how the Church would provide its soldiers with recreation halls, complete with chapels and non-military chaplains.” Indeed, as early as 1905, Slawson writes, Burke had possessed a “vision of united, coordinated Catholic action.” In 1917 he had the chance to “mobilize the entire national Catholic community behind the war effort.” He was then “a forty-two-year-old editor inclined to introversion and contemplation, with experience only in publication.”
From that mobilization arose the National Catholic War Council. It evolved in haphazard fashion—influenced by Burke above all—and after 1918 became the National Catholic Welfare Council (and later, “Conference”), of which Burke would become General Secretary. The time was right. Pope Benedict XV saw that America would play the crucial role in post-war reconstruction, and he hoped that the Church would be at the center of it. “Rome,” declared emissary Archbishop Cerretti, “now looks to America to be the leader in all things Catholic and to set the example to other nations.” Meanwhile, the bishops had begun to sense—and Burke saw clearly—that the federal government in that Progressive era would intersect with Church interests in unprecedented ways. Burke said that to protect Catholic welfare, the “Church must have its finger on the pulse of power” in Washington.
The bulk of this magnificent book is Slawson’s guided tour of Burke’s “world and work.” The bookmarches forward through the calendars, oscillating between Burke’s involvement in international matters—chiefly, those involving Catholic countries such as Mexico and Haiti—and domestic issues. One of the most prominent of these was birth control, which first surfaced as a political topic on Burke’s watch in 1923, with initiatives at the national level by Margaret Sanger and Mary Ware Dennett. Burke lamented that we “have, practically, been left alone as Catholics in our opposition to birth prevention.”
Protestant churches and Protestant organizations will not, as a body, unite with us. There is grave danger that the question will be looked upon not as one of basic public morality, as a fundamental factor in our whole national life—but as a question solely of Catholic dogma.
This became a staple of liberal rhetoric in later cultural and legal battles not only over contraception, but also over divorce, abortion, and same-sex civil marriage. (For example, in pending Establishment Clause litigation in Indiana and elsewhere, pro-choice plaintiffs maintain that restrictive abortion laws are based on a theological account of when life begins.)
Another recurring headache for Burke was the need to coordinate efforts to combat indecency in cinema, then an exploding and adventurous medium. The last straw for Burke—who was surely prudish—was a silent movie scene in which a nightgown was sheer enough to convince the discerning viewer that underneath was Gloria Swanson’s bare backside. Stray matters of particular concern to Burke included Prohibition’s consequences for the availability of sacramental wine—he painstakingly negotiated an arrangement with the federal liquor authorities—as well as a proposed constitutional amendment banning child labor. When Boston’s cardinal put the brakes on any NCWC endorsement of the child labor provision, Burke noted that “O’Connell had no more interest in child welfare than he had in polar expeditions.”
Paramount among domestic matters for Burke was certainly the Catholic school. The resurgent anti-Catholic nativism of the 1920s, fueled by an uptick in Klan and Masonic political activism, challenged parochial schools’ existence (where state laws attempted to close them), their independence (where state laws or federal bureaucrats sought to dictate curricula), and their financial viability (when the Depression made public financial assistance nearly essential). The bishops—meaning, chiefly, Burke—coordinated the successful legal challenge to Oregon’s law requiring attendance at public schools. Their Supreme Court victory in Pierce v. Society of Sisters (1925) inaugurated the “parents’ rights” line of authority that has wound its way into the Court’s jurisprudence to the present moment.
Mexico was nonetheless Burke’s major preoccupation. Slawson writes that putting “an end to the Church–state conflict in Mexico . . . monopolized much of Burke’s time and energy in the final decade of his life.” The problem was that a series of anti-clericalist governments held sway in Mexico starting in 1917. In 1925 the NCWC got involved, at the request of the Holy See, to enlist the United States’ help in negotiating at least a benign toleration of the Church. Difficult negotiations produced a Burke-engineered modus vivendi in 1929. It was repeatedly violated by Mexican authorities, or so Rome and Burke thought. Slawson meticulously explores the whole saga. And it is here, with Mexico, that one can see the unique skill set that mesmerized men as seasoned as William Castle.
Through this decade-long diplomatic crisis, Burke spoke conclusively for the American hierarchy; that was a given. He also spoke, authoritatively though not finally, for the Holy See, which asked him to take the lead role. Burke spoke, too, as the American government’s special representative, and everyone knew it. FDR frequently met with him for advice about the Mexican situation. Both the Hoover and the Roosevelt State Departments relied on Burke not only to speak for the American bishops and for the Vatican, but to formulate specific diplomatic proposals. The Mexican presidents, with whom Burke met personally more than once, treated him with utmost respect. On one occasion, “provisional” President Portes Gil informed the American Undersecretary of State that he would continue the negotiations of his predecessor—but only with Burke, not with any of the Mexican bishops. And Burke managed the restive, exiled Mexican bishops’ expectations and responses as skillfully as anyone could have done. The de factoauthority Burke exercised reflects the extraordinary trust all five interested parties placed in him.
Even so: To one of his spiritual family Burke wrote that he “daily faced the Mexican issue. . . . I never dreamt I would have such problems to meet, and I feel altogether unfitted.” Undersecretary Castle observed, by contrast, that Burke “is rather the type of the great ecclesiastic of two or three hundred years ago who ran the political affairs of the Church, adaptable outwardly but steel underneath.” Almost unbelievably, Burke carried it all off without lying or deceiving. In fact, through the several hundred pages chronicling his World and Work, Slawson reports just one occasion on which Burke told a lie. It was a domestic matter of little consequence, and the lie was told only to shield the indiscretion of a collaborator at the NCWC. It did not affect any negotiations. Burke nonetheless tattled on himself, if only in a memorandum to his file.
John Burke’s work for the bishops’ conference included at least the following four additional insights and norms, which shaped national AmericanCatholicism in its infancy. The bishops’ conference and the Church’s teachers have often forgotten or fudged on these lessons. Each time, however, I think that their lapse has been to the detriment of Church and state.
First, John J. Burke did more than anyone else in the first third of the twentieth century to define a distinctly American Catholicism. Burke was after all a Paulist priest. Founded in 1858 by the convert Isaac Hecker, this order of priests was guided by the twin convictions that European Catholicism was decrepit and that there was a deep harmony between the Catholic faith and the truths on which the United States was founded. Burke’s own spirituality was thoroughly Paulist and not especially ultramontane. In Slawson’s account, Burke did not often reference even the leading papal social teaching documents,” even as he worked hand in hand with Vatican officials.
The American Church Burke helped to create was a unique construct: not as Roman as many conservatives (such as Cardinal O’Connell) wished, or as balkanized as many ethnic groups wanted, or as Gallican as some liberals would have liked. And it was not at all as Erastian—as subordinate to the state—as many non-Catholic Americans hoped. Slawson’s judgment is that Burke “blended love of Church with love of country, both of which he drew together in the NCWC, the organization he came to symbolize and embody.”
Burke also challenged the assumption that the chief goal of education is to mold a child for a part in American life, in accordance with the national “soul” or “spirit.” “Education should be education,” argued Burke, “and our democracy presupposes that in the hands of the people the destiny and government and soul of the nation may be left.”
Put differently, but I think with substantially the same meaning: The perennial conviction of the American people had been that their republican form of government—not “our democracy”—rested on the beliefs and habits inculcated by the churches, which operated free of government interference. Religion is infrastructure or foundation. It is bottom-up. Political life is based on what the people affirm to be true about divine realities. For the Founders and for generations of Americans thereafter, “civil religion” (soft or otherwise) would have been incomprehensible.
We lived with what the founder of this journal deemed “the naked public square” for more than sixty years, until the courts began slowly to reopen that space to the sacred early in this century. The Supreme Court is still trying to shake off what Burke spied as a radical inversion of American tradition.
Second, Burke often declared that “common,” “unified” Catholic action could be wrought only through episcopal leadership, but he was no clericalist. On the contrary: He held and articulated a more robust understanding of the lay apostolate than anyone else before John Courtney Murray. He wrote,
We have forgotten the call of perfection was issued by Christ not alone to priests and religious, but to all without exception. We practically preach the contrary. . . . We have assumed that decision and direction of all matters Catholic belong to the clergy. And the people have allowed the assumption to rest with us.
If the laity were entrusted with the responsibility for Catholic truth regarding familial, social, political, industrial, and literary life, he believed, the Church and America would both be better off for it, especially compared to the Old World “Catholic” countries, such as Italy and France.
That also meant giving Catholic laywomen the chance to use their gifts. As social welfare was one of society’s great needs, social work would prove fruitless unless founded on truth and justice, two pillars of the Catholic Church. Welfare work was preeminently the field of the laity, so female Catholic social workers must be trained in both the knowledge of the Catholic faith and the knowledge of the profession. To that end, Burke founded the National Catholic School of Social Service, which instilled both through its curriculum. After its foundation, the school became his unofficial parish.
Third, Burke was as well connected as any churchman of his time. Constantly neck-deep in political negotiation at home and diplomatic intrigue abroad, he was the most skillful operator of what was—in large part—a lobbying organization. Yet this Paulist priest was never a courtier or a dealmaker. He was unimpressed by those with money or power or both. He was relentlessly plain-spoken and candid, even in tight political contests. In these ways he was an exemplary public figure and, more important, a jealous guardian of the Church’s independence and its credibility as a speaker of truth. To thisend he insisted that the NCWC must be “non-political” and not “compromised in speaking the truth.” Even though the NCWC understood itself to be the guardian of Catholic “interests” in the nation’s capital, Burke was keen to keep the Church strictly nonpartisan. He held that churches had no right in the “open domain of general public activity,” except regarding “moral principles enshrined in civil law as foundations of decency and social stability.” Furthermore, “as the charge against the Church is that she is a political power or aims to be such,” concluded Burke, “we to whom has been entrusted her public national position must sacredly strive to keep her position intact, above suspicion.”
In other words, the Church’s teachers have a vital but limited portfolio when it comes to pronouncements about political and other public affairs. Pastors’ remit does not include instructing, much less obliging, the laity with regard to any particular, specific economic or social program. Burke himself regularly said that a “living” or “family” wage was the touchstone of the good society and the protector of family stability. But he said little about the specific way in which it should be provided. He almost never referred to the bishops’ 1919 plan for a “reconstruction” of post-war America, a highly particularized, tendentious, and, yes, partisan set of proposals drafted by Fr. John Ryan. The bishops adopted Ryan’s draft in whole and without much apparent thought. Ryan—who leaned into his popular reputation as the “Right Reverend New Dealer”—later worked for Burke in the NCWC Social Action Department. It is evident throughout Slawson’s narrative that Burke did little to promote Ryan or his ideas, and occasionally had to rein him in.
Fourth and finally, Burke pioneered an enduring model of political persuasion. In almost every matter he addressed, from Haiti to birth control to parochial schools, he came up against a culture still afflicted with anti-Catholic prejudice. To get anything accomplished in the American public square in the 1920s, Burke and his collaborators had to make philosophical arguments about human rights, about justice, and about our whole constitutional and political tradition. Burke’s arguments for a just settlement of church–state friction south of the border, for example, centered on broad American norms against religious intolerance and persecution. Defenses of parochial schools were about parents’ rights and proper limits on government power over the minds and hearts of children. Rather than cite or even paraphrase a papal encyclical, the NCWC argued for the justice of labor’s right to organize, on grounds of introducing fairness in uneven power relations. It argued for the “family wage” as an essential protector of the stability of marriage and the family.
Burke and the bishops resisted any special religious pleading in court cases. They retained accomplished constitutional lawyers to make arguments that would pass muster in any court or law school classroom. Years after Burke’s death, the bishops would go even further. After Everson’s secularist manifesto, they chose to counterattack in court with historical arguments about the Founders’ intent, rather than even with natural law arguments about what is right and just. The strategy did not succeed, and perhaps none would have. Burke very probably would have disapproved of skirting, however, the morally normative for the historically contingent. He probably would have made, in other words, arguments of moral principle like those he deployed during the Pierce controversy, and linked them (as he did in the 1920s) to the genius of the American way (and not to either the contingencies of historical events or the strictures of the Baltimore Catechism).
These modes of persuasion were, to some extent, creatures of necessity. They nonetheless promoted greater acceptance of Catholic political action as properly American, opened up opportunities for fruitful partnerships with non-Catholic Americans interested in the same issues (especially decency in movies and the protection of the laboring man), and reinforced the independent initiative of the laity by cabining the sway of the hierarchy.
All this makes World and Work an important contribution to our understanding of American history and of a formative period for the American Catholic Church. The book works as well, and most edifyingly (in my judgment), as the spiritual biography of one whom Slawson describes as a “mystic in action.” Slawson describes a man who was more or less “worked to death” by the bishops who depended on him. Fr. Edward Mullaly preached the homily at Burke’s funeral. He said, “I have sat with him at times when it seemed to me that he must fall from fatigue. But he had pledged himself to his God, his Church, and his Country, and right ready was he to die in their service.” Pittsburgh’s Bishop Hugh Boyle eulogized Burke as “a unique compound of the mystic, the priest, and the skillful man of affairs.” Boyle said that this man of affairs internalized his priesthood. He took “very literally” the words of St. Paul: “I live. Now not I, but Christ liveth in me.”