Paulists and the presidents
by Stefani Manowski
February 16, 2015
As we celebrate President’s Day, Father Paul Robichaud, CSP, shares six things you didn’t know about Paulists and their relationships with U.S. presidents and presidential candidates.

 


Father George Deshon, CSP (left) and President Ulysses S. Grant
1.Father George Deshon, CSP, one of the Paulist founders who served as the community’s superior general, was the roommate of Ulysses S. Grant at West Point. Grant was the 18th President of the United States (1869–1877).

The future Father Deshon was a brilliant student, especially in mathematics, and was accepted to West Point in 1839. Historian Michael J. Connolly wrote in Paulist History that the roommates were a study in contrasts. “Deshon was a hard worker and cleancut; Grant was a poor student, ‘lackadaisical’ and sloppy.” Yet, the two were “close at West Point, and although they drifted apart after graduation, they would rekindle their friendship years later.”

 


Father Alexander P. Doyle, CSP (left) and President Theodore Roosevelt
2.Father Alexander P. Doyle, CSP, would often take walks around the neighborhood of the Paulist mother church, Church of St. Paul the Apostle, with New York City’s police commissioner and future president Theodore Roosevelt, according to Father Paul Robichaud, CSP, Pauist historian.

During President Roosevelt’s tenure in the in the White House, Father Doyle would join the president for lunch, often hand-delivering letters from Cardinal James Gibbons of the Archdiocese of Baltimore, which at that time included Washington, D.C. (Editor’s note: Cardinal Gibbons’ predecessor as archbishop of Baltimore was James Roosevelt Bayley, a distant cousin of both Theodore and Franklin D. Roosevelt as well as being the nephew of St. Elizabeth Ann Seton.)

 


Father James Martin Gillis, CSP (left) and President Franklin Delano Roosevelt
3.As editor of The Catholic World, Father James Martin Gillis, CSP, wrote an editorial criticizing some of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal social programs.

“[Father Gilles] even moved the editorial from the back of the publication to the front, so it was the first thing readers encountered,” Father Robichaud said. In response to these actions, Cardinal Francis J. Spellman of New York removed Father Gillis as host of The Catholic Hour, a popular radio program broadcast on Sunday afternoons, noted Father Robichaud. Father Gillis’ successor was none other than the future Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen, who later had is own issues with Cardinal Spellman.

 


Father Isaac Hecker, CSP (left) and Gen. George McClellan, in an 1861 portrait by Matthew Brady
4.Paulist founder Father Isaac Hecker befriended Gen. George McClellan in Rome.

The two met when Father Hecker was in Rome for the First Vatican Council, and McClellan, the former leader of the Army of the Potomac during the Civil War, was visiting the future Italian capital while traveling in Europe with his family after the war, according to Father Robichaud. The Democrats selected Gen. McClellan to run against Abraham Lincoln in the election of 1864. “For all his popularity with the troops, Gen. McClellan failed to secure their support and the military vote went to President Lincoln nearly 3–1. President Lincoln’s share of the vote in the Army of the Potomac was 70 percent,” according to Wikipedia.

 


Father John Duffy, CSP (left) and Vice President Al Gore
5.Father John Duffy, CSP, past president of the Paulist Fathers, was a classmate of Al Gore, the former vice president who ran for the presidency in the 2000.

 


President John F. Kennedy
6.President John F. Kennedy took up the collection at the Paulist Center in Boston.