Archbishop Purcell of Cincinnati

John Baptist Purcell (1800-1888) was the bishop and later the archbishop of Cincinnati for fifty years. He was a skillful and eloquent defender of his faith in debates, speeches, pastoral letters and newspaper articles. He was an Irish bishop in a largely German city and had functioned so capably in that role that the Catholic Church in Cincinnati was virtually free of ethnic tensions. As the bishop in a city on the border between the North and the South, he struggled to move beyond the mer...