This two-part post explores how the weekly Pittsburgh Catholic newspaper reported—or ignored—two of the most violent episodes in twentieth century Irish history. Both events—in November 1920 in Dublin, and in January 1972 in Londonderry, Northern Ireland—came to be known as “Bloody Sunday.” Pittsburgh, and the Catholic, had strong ties to Ireland through immigration. These two posts are revised from a paper I wrote for the American Journalism Historians Association. I presented a short overview of the research at AJHA’s annual conference, Oct. 3-5, 2024, in Pittsburgh. MH
Introduction
Pittsburgh has deep Irish roots. Irish Presbyterians, primarily from the province of Ulster, today’s Northern Ireland, began to arrive in the western Pennsylvania outpost during the eighteenth century. The Great Famine of the mid-nineteenth century drove large numbers of Irish Catholics to what was becoming a growing industrial city. In 1914, a ground-breaking sociological study of Pittsburgh observed, “here the old Irish cleavage has been repeated in the two strong religious elements in the community life.” These sectarian differences were simultaneously aggravated by the transatlantic debate over whether Ireland should maintain its 1800 political union with the United Kingdom, as favored by most Irish Protestants, or pursue the nationalist desires of many Irish Catholics.
Pittsburgh was the sixth largest Irish hub in the United States in the first quarter of the twentieth century. The Irish ranked fifth largest among the city’s immigrant groups, while their American-born children were second among those with at least one foreign-born parent. As Pittsburgh’s Irish immigrant population decreased over the next half century, the cohort of their offspring grew and developed a new Irish American identify.
Michael O’Connor, a native of Cork, Ireland, became the first bishop of the new Catholic diocese of western Pennsylvania in 1843. Within a year he established the Pittsburgh Catholic newspaper. An unsigned editorial in the first issue stated the paper’s mission to serve the Catholic faith, “to expound and defend its doctrines, to impart information regarding its history and development, and in general to give every information in our power regarding its condition in our own and in other countries.” (My emphasis.) The editorial—published on the eve of St. Patrick’s Day—also declared: “As it will be gratifying to a great body of our readers, we will endeavor to give copious extracts from journals and private communications regarding the affairs in Ireland.”
The U.S. Catholic press that emerged in the mid-nineteenth century was preceded and influenced by Irish journals. In addition to informing immigrant readers about their new country, these journals detailed Irish agitation against British political rule and the suppression of Catholics. “Although these papers were not distinctly Catholic in purpose, their sympathetic tone toward those of the ancient faith merits a place for them in any description of Catholic journalism,” wrote Rev. Paul J. Foik, a Catholic priest, historian, and director of the Notre Dame University library from 1912 to 1924.
By the early twentieth century, the Irish and Catholic press in the U.S., “particularly the latter,” exerted significant influence on its readership, historian Thomas Rowland has noted. “In an age without radio and television, Catholic newspapers joined the popular press in serving as windows on the world for the Irish community, presenting a glimpse of things beyond the borders of one’s own parish. Consequently, these papers expressed attitudes and opinions that went virtually uncontested by any other source readily available to the Irish American community.”
This post explores how the Pittsburgh Catholic reported 1920 and 1972 “Bloody Sunday” events in Ireland. The earlier episode remains an “emotive subject,” historian David Leeson wrote in 2003, “because it brings to mind another Bloody Sunday fifty-two years later.” It is appropriate to consider how the Catholic covered these two events due to the paper’s ties to Ireland, and because Ireland and Catholicism were so intertwined in the twentieth century. Having the religion’s sabbath day twice stained by the same adjective makes the pairing even more poignant.
My research focused on November 25, and December 2, 1920, issues of the Catholic, when the paper was published on Thursdays, and February 4 and 11, 1972, when it appeared on Fridays. The Catholic’s archive was viewed through Duquesne University’s Gumberg Library Digital Collection. Coverage of the two events in Pittsburgh’s daily papers and the wider Catholic press was also reviewed through the Newspapers.com and Catholic News Archive websites. Manual page reviews and key word searches were used to assess news sources, editorial opinions, and efforts to connect the events in Ireland to local readers. The surrounding page content was also reviewed for context.
Details of the 1920 Bloody Sunday follow below the graphic. The 1972 event is covered in the second post.
Graphic compiled by Mark Holan, 2024
Bloody Sunday, 1920
Irish resentment of English rule dated back seven centuries. King Henry VIII’s sixteenth century break from the Roman Catholic Church and declaration as the king of Ireland is a significant episode in the troubled history between the neighboring islands. Another was the 1690 defeat of deposed Catholic King James II by the Protestant King William III near Ireland’s River Boyne; an event still celebrated every July by Irish Protestants. The 1800 political union with Great Britain sparked several failed risings in Ireland through the nineteenth century. “Political violence is an ineradicable theme of modern Irish history,” historian Marc Mulholland has observed.
By the eve of the First World War, Irish nationalists renewed their periodic effort to secure domestic autonomy within the union, called home rule. It was largely, but not exclusively, supported by the Catholic majority in Ireland’s three southern provinces. As pro-union Protestants in Ulster opposed the change, moderate Irish nationalism yielded to the physical force republicanism of the separatist Sinn Féin party. Ireland’s ancient sectarian division, industrial-age labor unrest, and protests over military service on the continent underscored the ensuing political violence. The Irish war of independence, 1919-1921, resulted in the preliminary foundation of today’s 26-county Republic of Ireland and partition of the six-county Northern Ireland, which remains part of the U.K.
The first Bloody Sunday was a pivotal event of the Irish war. In the early morning hours of November 21, 1920, Irish rebels assassinated 14 British intelligence officers in Dublin as they slept or dressed in their houses or hotel rooms. A fifteenth man died later, and three others survived their gunshot wounds. The operation was designed to disrupt the network of spies and informers the military had established to thwart the guerilla tactics of the Irish Republican Army (IRA). Later that afternoon, members of the British Army and Royal Irish Constabulary opened fire at a Gaelic football match at Dublin’s Croke Park, killing 13 spectators and one player. From four dozen to eight dozen other people were injured.
News of the bloodshed reached the front pages of Pittsburgh newspapers the next day. The morning Post declared:
November 22, 1920
Seven general-interest dailies were published in the city at the time. The locally-owned Pittsburgh Press claimed the largest circulation at 116,000 weekdays, slightly less on Sundays. The evening paper published a United Press story that described the Sinn Féin “murder raids” as followed by a “counter-attack of police” at Croke Park. The stadium deaths were blamed on “panic … precipitated when Sinn Fein pickets (soldiers) opened fire on police.”
In the following days, the Press also used Irish coverage from the Hearst-operated International News Service (INS). Correspondent Earle C. Reeves, a 30-year-old Indiana native who became INS’s London bureau manager during the First World War, described the IRA as “Irish terrorists.” More often papers used the term “murder gang,” usually attributed to Chief Secretary for Ireland Sir Hamar Greenwood and other British government and military officials. A few months later, after the combatants declared a truce and opened negotiations to end the war, the Press editorialized that “murder gang” was no longer viable as a “propaganda denunciation of the Irish Republican Army.”
Pittsburgh newspaper reports were deferential to the established government, ally in the late First World War. Most of the wire services attributed details to “Irish office authorities,” a reference to the U.K. government administration at Dublin Castle, or “the government version” of events. Some information was sourced to London newspapers.
The Press did not include any comment from Sinn Féin officials, or from the Irish Bulletin, official organ of the provisional Irish Republic. The evening paper made no editorial comment about the event within two weeks. National columnist Authur Brisbane (1864-1936) mentioned the Irish situation several times in his regular “Today” column, which the Press published on its front pages. “A hundred other peoples have settled down comfortably under the yoke,” he wrote three days after Bloody Sunday. “The Irish never settle down, insisting ‘We will be free.’” In another column, Brisbane noted the “suffering and terror of poor people, guilty of no offense against anybody,” who paid the highest price in Ireland’s “war of reprisals.” Syndicated humorist Arthur “Bugs” Baer (1886-1969) jabbed at the London government and ridiculed the League of Nations: “England killed a couple more folks in Dublin and will be suspended from the league for 15 minutes.”
Finally, Pittsburgh was home to the Irish Pennsylvanian, one of nearly a dozen Irish-interest weeklies listed in the 1920 Ayer and Son’s newspaper directory. The 3,000-circulation paper folded in 1921 and no copies appear to survive. The Press was sold to the Scripps Howard chain in 1923.
Catholic’s coverage
Francis Patrick Smith was in his thirtieth year as editor of the Catholic by November 1920. Born to Irish immigrants in Pittsburgh, he was educated at Catholic schools in the city and in Maryland. Smith began his newspaper career in Washington, D.C., worked at a paper in Ohio, then returned home.
Bishop Canevin
Bishop John Francis Regis Canevin administered the Pittsburgh diocese. He also was the local son of Irish immigrants and had worked with Smith at the Catholic in the 1890s, before being elevated to lead the see. By 1920, the 10-county dioceses counted 560,000 adherents, nearly a quarter of the jurisdiction’s 2.3 million population. Canevin’s “official approbation,” which stated the Catholic was “deserving of approval for its service in the cause of truth and morality,” appeared under the masthead of the 17,000-circulation paper. Such endorsements were as common in the U.S. Catholic press at the time as Irish American editors and bishops.
The name of founding Bishop Michael O’Conner also remained under the front-page nameplate of the Catholic’s November 25, 1920, issue, its first after Bloody Sunday. The paper published two page 1 stories about Ireland above the fold, but neither was about the events in Dublin four days earlier. A National Catholic Welfare Council (NCWC) News Service story dated November 18 from Washington, D.C., detailed the American Commission on Conditions in Ireland testimony of Rev. James H. Cotter, of Ironton, Ohio, and Rev. Michael English of Whitehall, Montana. The Commission was a non-U.S. government panel created by Irish activists with the help of Oswald Garrison Villard, editor of The Nation magazine, to keep the Irish cause in the news. Commission members included two U.S. senators and progressive activist Jane Addams. The NCWC story described how the “American Catholic priests” each claimed to be eyewitnesses of “outrages committed in Ireland by British forces” during their visits to the country earlier in the year.
The U.S. Catholic hierarchy established the NCWC News Service in January 1920 from the decade-old Catholic Press Association, which provided advertising assistance and news from Rome, London, and Washington, D.C. Justin McGrath, a Hearst executive, was hired as NCWC’s director. By April, 40 Catholic papers paid $2 per week for the mimeograph News Sheet, while 21 others paid $5 per week for cable service. The NCWC “attempted to be to the Catholic Press what the Associated Press, United Press, and Universal Services were to the secular papers, but it concentrated on news that was strictly Catholic or of particular interest to Catholics.”
The second story on the front the November 25 Catholic was dated the same day as Bloody Sunday in Dublin, but it came from Galway, Ireland. No news source was provided. The story detailed the discovery of the body of Father Michael Griffin in a shallow bog near the town, a bullet wound in his temple. The Catholic priest was reported to have been kidnapped several days earlier by British troops as he prepared to sail to Washington to give testimony before the American Commission.
Six more stories about Ireland were scattered through the issue’s remaining seven pages. They include a second story about the American Commission hearings, and separate allegations of British offenses against the Irish people in general and Catholic priests in particular. Other stories detailed the desecration of a Catholic church in Dublin and damage to Catholic homes and businesses in Belfast. One of these stories was attributed to the NCWC News Service, but the others had no byline or source. None of them reported on the assassinated military officers or the slaughter at Croke Park. Not directly, anyway.
One story, however, featured an extended quotation from Arthur Griffith, leader of the separatist Sinn Féin party, who addressed Irish attacks on the police. The story was not dated, but the statement appeared to have been made before Bloody Sunday and Griffith’s arrest a few days later. British Prime Minister David Lloyd George “says that the murders, as he calls them, in Ireland, are the work of a band of assassins,” Griffith said. “This is true if he speaks of the arson and the assassination by (his own) uniformed men.”
The 25-page NCWC News Sheet distributed to Catholic newspapers for the week of November 22, 1920, did not include any coverage of Bloody Sunday. Papers such as Philadelphia’s Catholic Standard & Times and Cincinnati’s Catholic Telegraph did not contain any reports in their first issues after the Dublin events. Other Catholic papers did. The Catholic Columbian of Columbus, Ohio, headlined:
Hell Hounds Let Loose on
a Happy Football Crowd
The front-page story was based on “meager and nicely-colored newspaper reports” but did not specify the sources. It described the soldiers who opened fire at Croke Park as “demons” and the military officers killed earlier in the day as “the scum of English jails.” The roundup-style story included other developments in the Irish war from both sides of the Atlantic, including the disappearance of Father Griffin and the U.S. travels of Eamon de Valera, another Sinn Féin leader. The story assailed “the British-controlled press” and selective pro-British or anti-Irish reporting “intended only for American newspapers.”
In Brooklyn, New York, the Tablet carried a front-page story “by cable” from Dublin that declared the situation in Ireland “was never as dark as at present.” The story reported “some dozen” of British officers were killed and “over one hundred innocent people” died in the “desperate reprisals.” Inaccurate, but not ignored.
Next Catholic
If a tight deadline prevented the Catholic from publishing news about Bloody Sunday in its November 25 issue, the continued absence of reporting about the events in Dublin appears more conspicuous in the following week’s paper. Bishop Canevin’s resignation announcement dominated the December 2 issue. It contained eight news stories dated after November 21, including an NCWC “Special Cable” from Balboa, Panama, about President-elect Warren G. Harding’s Thanksgiving Day visit to a Catholic women’s community house in the Central American isthmus. That week’s 27-page NCWC News Sheet did not include any coverage of Bloody Sunday among dozens of stories.
The Catholic gave its readers three locally generated opinion pieces about Ireland:
- On page 2 it published the full sermon of Rev. Peter J. Brennan, a diocesan priest, from one of the local memorial masses for Terence MacSwiney, the separatist lord mayor of Cork city. MacSwiney died October 25, 1920, after more than a month-long hunger strike in an English prison. Brennan said: “Let us highly resolve that we shall never rest till the hopes which sustained murdered MacSwiney in his life and death struggle with the English enemy shall be realized in all their fullness. Ireland shall be free and self-determined.”
- An unsigned editorial on page 4, probably written by editor Smith, made an economic argument: “A free Ireland would mean an immense impetus to American commerce, not only with Ireland, but with Continental Europe. Ireland is closer to us than England and Scotland are. It has more harbors by far, and larger and more serviceable there, if the waiting possibilities were developed, as they would rapidly be in a free Ireland.”
- In a back-page column, Rev. Thomas Coakley, another diocesan priest, suggested that “Catholic hating England … Ireland’s implacable persecutor” was helping to fulfill a divine design. “God in His providence has used British imperialism to good advantage. The English language, the Irish race, and the Catholic faith are overrunning the world. This my friends, in the counsels of God, is the enchanting triple destiny of the sons and daughters of Ireland.”
Brennan was the American-born son of two Irish immigrants. Coakley was the American son of an Irish immigrant father and American mother. As a U.S. Army chaplain in the First World War, he tended the spiritual needs of troops in France and German. Shortly after his return to Pittsburgh, Coakley and seven other army chaplains led a non-denominational rally in Pittsburgh to support self-determination for Ireland.
It is unclear why the Catholic ignored Bloody Sunday, especially the civilian massacre at Croke Park. The 14 victims included four males aged 10 to 19, and a woman engaged to be married the following week. Most were Catholics, though initial reports in the secular press did not provide their names, ages, or details such as their religious affiliation. Reporting on the stadium shootings would have meant including the assassinations, too, which would have challenged the Catholic’s pro-Irish editorial views. But this was not impossible, as proven by the church itself.
Image from American Commission on Conditions in Ireland Interim Report, 1920
Cardinal Michael Logue, the top Catholic prelate in Ireland, released a “scathing” pastoral letter a week after Bloody Sunday, reported in the daily Pittsburgh Gazette Times via the Associated Press. Logue denounced all the Bloody Sunday violence, saying the separatist assassins “are not real patriots but enemies of their country.” The shooting deaths at Croke Park, however, were “a graver outrage … (as Crown forces) “turn(ed) lethal weapons against defenseless, unarmed, closely packed multitudes.”
Three more weeks passed before the Catholic reported the cardinal’s letter, on page 3, its first mention of Bloody Sunday. The same December 23 issue, on page 2, also contained an undated and unsourced report that some Canadian newspapers “of supposed standing” had selectively quoted the cardinal’s letter to make it appear he blamed Sinn Féin for all the violence in Ireland. This story included an undated response from Cardinal Logue, who wrote that he was not responsible for “dishonest journalists.”
It is possible that editor Smith had withheld the news from Dublin in an abundance of caution. Two months before Bloody Sunday, an editorial in the Catholic acknowledged the paper’s Irish news had been “irregular” and subject to censorship. “In the exercise of a judgment, prudent and safe, it was, at times, thought advisable to be chary in selecting this press matter unless absolutely verified and conformable to the ethics of Catholic Journalism,” the editorial said. “This is a point that some well-intentioned friends do not perceive; they measure in their criticism the Catholic paper by the same standard as they do the secular press.”
In addition to its deference to the British military and government, secular coverage of Bloody Sunday certainly contained errors, as also seen in the Catholic press. Most significantly, there was never any compelling evidence that Sinn Féin “pickets” or IRA snipers fired at the military and police at Croke Park. That was propaganda. Of less consequence, the first-day Press story stated the crowd had gathered to “watch a hockey match.” It was a Gaelic football contest, not even the Irish field sport of hurling, which involves a long, wooden stick with a broad, flat base to strike the ball, like a hockey stick.
Fifty-two years later, the Pittsburgh Catholic would provide quicker and more detailed coverage of the second Bloody Sunday in Ireland. Read Part 2.
