This murder no mystery

Fr. James Coyle. Credit: Starquest Media

I'm on a mission to get people to learn history. It's so important. Yes, it's written by the victors but the losers often find ways to air their story. It's important to learn about both sides. And to learn truth, not biased fabrications from anyone who has an extremist agenda, right or left. But learn. Please. 

Onward to today's glimpse of the past: the 1921 murder of a Catholic priest in Alabama. (I figure it's close enough to Florida.)

I'm a history fan and I knew nothing of this incident until a couple of weeks ago. The American Catholic History podcast did an episode about the killing of Father James Coyle. Find the show and episode on your favorite podcast platform or listen via the Starquest Media website.

In a nutshell, Fr. Coyle was gunned down by a Methodist Episcopal minister who was angry because his daughter had converted to Catholicism. And had then married a man who was Puerto Rican. And that Fr. Coyle had performed both the baptism and the marriage ceremony.

Pastor of the cathedral in Birmingham, Fr. Coyle wasn't even 30 years old yet. This being 1921 Alabama, the minister was acquitted at his trial. Apparently he and his court system cronies were all members of the locally powerful Ku Klux Klan. Wikipedia says the Klan even paid for the minister's defense.

But there's a brighter side to this sad story. People reallly were shocked. I mean, Fr. Coyle was sitting on his front porch and the angry minister strode up and shot him in the head. The anti-Catholic sentiment that was heavy and strong in that time and place started to wane slowly - very slowly. 

Pockets of anti-Catholicism remain, even now, but nothing like in the past. I went to a non-Catholic funeral a few years ago in a small town in Florida. The Penecostal pastor refused to shake hands or look me in the eye as we filed out after the service. He'd seen me make the sign of the Cross during the service. 

That was one person, not an entire congregation or denomination. But you have only to look around for a few seconds to see the division that separates people today. I'm firmly in the camp that extends a hand and wants to sit down and talk. I just buried my parents' cremains a week ago after a COVID-induced delay of many months (years in my mother's case). I'm reminded that life is short. And that love is what matters.

Hangings as entertainment

This historical photo of the 1927 hanging
 was reprinted in the DeLand Sun News
 as part of a 1964 article about the hanging.

On this day of manufactured macabre, I'm reminded that real-life morbidity is never far from the surface. That was as true in pioneer Florida as much as it is in today's violent culture.

Although I generally prefer to write about cozier domestic doings, the reality of everyday life in frontier Florida included the occurrence of legal hangings. Illegal too, as in lynchings, but that's a topic for a different post. This post's focus is on legal instances, which some people considered a fine source of entertainment.

In 1907, a Catholic priest in Fernandina took to the pulpit to denounce the "morbid curiosity of the people who rushed and crowded around the jail" during the execution of a man named John Brown. Father John O'Brien chastised those who craved a look at the man or a chance to "see him as the trap was sprung."

The priest had been the former rector of St. Monica's Catholic Church in Palatka. The report of his sermon was first printed in the Fernandina paper and then carried in the Palatka Daily News on Dec. 27, 1907. Under the headline "Roasts Morbidly Curious," the article said Fr. O'Brien spoke with kindness but "severely condemned those who were present upon occasions of this kind only to see a condemned felon die."

Fr. O'Brien had provided spiritual counsel to Brown, which was why he was present at the hanging and noticed the crowd's attitude. In a comment years ahead of his time, Fr. O'Brien told his congregation he felt capital punishment "ought to be abandoned if people looked upon it as they appeared to do when Brown met his fate."

The article concluded by saying O'Brien's sermon met with approval not only from his congregation, but from the people of Fernandina in general.

But memories can be short. Several miles downstate, and exactly 20 years later, a large crowd gathered for the last hanging of a state prisoner to be carried out in Florida. It took place in downtown DeLand in April 1927.

In eerie coincidence, the condemned man in the 1927 hanging was also named Brown. That name, though, was an alias. Charles Brown's real surname was some variation of Pisella, Pisellia or Piselli.

In a 1964 writeup about the hanging, the DeLand Sun News noted that more than 2,000 people attended the execution in the heart of DeLand. The city's population in 1920 was 3,324, and in 1930 it was 5,246. You do the math.

The spectator count was at least the equivalent of 38% to 60% of the town's population, if not more. The crowd swelled the city. To compare, had that hanging taken place in 2014 it would have drawn between 11,000 and 17,500 people to the center of town, or more. That's a sorry statistic. No wonder Fr. O'Brien got upset back in 1907.

At least, in 1927, spectators seemed somewhat cognizant of the event's seriousness. In Sun News staff writer Bernard Bishop's 1964 history article about the 1927 hanging, he wrote, "The crowd was silent as the rope swung back and forth ..."

May they all rest in peace.

Florida as mission territory

This image of Fr. Patrick Bresnahan
is from his memoir of mission work,
Seeing Florida With a Priest

While researching an early 1880s Catholic colony near Sanford, I found a fascinating book by Father Patrick J. Bresnahan on the excellent Central Florida Memory website. The 1937 Seeing Florida With a Priest recounts his journeys through Florida mission territory in the first decade of the 1900s. What's doubly interesting is that Fr. Bresnahan afterward became the first resident priest at All Souls Catholic Church in Sanford. That church's roots are in the early colony, whose history I'm exploring. Nice circle.

The dichotomy between ecumenism and religious prejudice in frontier Florida continues to intrigue me, and is found aplenty in the 97-page book and elsewhere. At the Sanford church and elsewhere in Florida, local non-Catholics often supported the building of Catholic churches. That seemed especially true in the 1880s. 

Meanwhile, Fr. Bresnahan writes of his first mission in Madison, Fla., in 1904, that "bigotry and prejudice were then rampant in that pretty town" (page 14).  One man who secretly attended mission services was regularly accused of being Catholic by his neighbors, because he tried to dispel misconceptions.

By the time a church building was under construction in Madison in 1907, "all the Catholics contributed generously, and some non-Catholics" (page 15). But all was not completely well. On the same page, Fr. Bresnahan tells how the sheriff threatened to arrest the Catholic church ladies for selling tickets for a giveaway of a patchwork quilt.

The raffle was part of a fundraising bazaar and supper. The town marshal came to the rescue, the publicity generated attention and the gala raised $400. My go-to inflation calculator website doesn't go back to 1907, but were that $400 raised in 1913, it would be the equivalent of $9,483 in 2015 dollars.

Once the church was built, non-Catholics converged to help form a robust choir for a two-week mission. "I left Madison with a feeling that I had done something to remove prejudice" (page 16), writes Fr. Bresnahan humbly. Soon after, he was in Tallahassee, where he found little bigotry despite the occasional "vomitings  of 'cheap' politicians" (page 18).

The above is just a sampling of what can be found in this valuable memoir, which was published by Economy Print Shop in Zephyrhills. I've not yet finished reading the book, but can't end this blog post without mentioning Fr. Bresnahan's encounters with Florida Crackers in Sopchoppy, "which is real country and 'cracker' village" (page 23). His experience bears quoting, because it corrects cultural history that, at times, still depicts pioneer Florida Crackers as backwoods bigots.

"The great interest exhibited during the mission was remarkable; it was conducted in the public school building. The natives, all 'crackers', vied with one another, unlike any other place, in giving me hospitality; and, they went so far as to get up parties for my entertainment, even though many had never seen a priest before. Moreover, they all seemed glad to find out what they had heard concerning priests hitherto were 'lies'." (page 23)

Ignorant backwoods folk? Hardly. The Crackers exhibited a genuine human dignity that contrasts starkly to the antics of some of the era's movers and shakers. There's a lesson in that.