I’ve written about Fr. James Coyle before. Irish born, he was rector of the Cathedral of St. Paul here in Birmingham in the early part of the 20th century. In August 1921, he was murdered on the front porch of the rectory.
Earlier in the day, Fr. Coyle had married a young Caucasian woman, and a convert, to a Puerto Rican man. The murderer was the young woman’s father – a member of the KKK and a Methodist minister. At trial, defended by future Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black, Stephenson was acquitted.
On Oct. 17, only nine days before President Warren Harding arrived in the Magic City to mark its semi-centennial, “the trial of the century” was gaveled to order in the crowded Jefferson County Courthouse. A jury consisting of mostly Klansmen was impaneled by Judge Fort.
Hard evidence clearly pointed to Stephenson’s guilt, but the prosecution called only five witnesses to present its case, three of whom were rendered questionable in the public mind by the defense’s assertion that they were Catholics. Religious prejudice was wielded like a cudgel through inflammatory statements such as Black’s, “A child of a Methodist does not suddenly depart from her religion unless someone has planted in her mind the seeds of influence.” This played to popular fears that agents of the Pope might be trying to brainwash susceptible Protestants.
Worse, Stephenson’s defense team had no qualms about groundless appeals to racial bigotry. In what might be the nadir of Black’s career in private practice, he tried to present Ruth’s husband, Pedro Gussman, not as a Puerto Rican but as a black man, going so far as to close the Venetian blinds in the courtroom before Gussman’s appearance to make his complexion seem darker than it really was. By invoking the basest taboo of Jim Crow’s South — race-mixing — Black sought to suggest that Father Coyle’s enabling of depravity might well have driven his client past rational response to the commission of murder.
The story is told here in this article, as well as in the book Rising Road.
Every year, the a Mass in Fr. Coyle’s honor is celebrated at the Cathedral on the 
anniversary of his murder and death. Here are a couple of the rector’s homilies delivered on that occasion – in 2018 and 2017 (the latter nicely tying in Fr. Coyle’s sacrifice to the feast of St. Clare, which was that day).
Well, you are obviously doing the math and noticing that these dates mean that Fr. Coyle was rector of the Cathedral during the scourge of the Spanish Flu. Today, the paper ran a nice piece reprinting a column Fr. Coyle had written at the time about the decision to suspend public celebration of the Mass.
During the 1918 influenza pandemic in Birmingham, churches were closed. The Birmingham News offered to print sermons, service outlines, scriptures and announcements sent in by various clergy to help people worship at home. Coyle kept copies of the newspaper clippings, which are still in the parish records of the cathedral. (See “What clergy said when influenza closed churches in 1918).
On Monday, Oct. 7, 1918, Alabama Gov. Charles Henderson ordered the closing of schools, churches and theaters to avoid the spread of the Spanish influenza…
If you are interested, head to the link above – well, this link – reprinting sections of the paper published during the Spanish Flu containing, by invitation, the texts of sermons from local religious leaders (including the local rabbi) – it struck me as similar what we’re doing now – the online streaming services, the newsletters, the email blasts.
Anyway, from Fr. Coyle’s contribution, published for thousands to read in a secular newspaper in the Deep South:
By order of the civil authorities, and by the advice of your religious leaders, you will not assemble, as you were wont to assemble on Sundays, in your various Catholic churches to assist at Holy Mass. That you may have some words of uplift and cheer, The Birmingham News, with its wonted up-to-dateness, has courteously invited me to write a few words for its many Catholic readers, and I am thus enabled to address, by means of the printed word, a congregation greater far than the five congregations that Sunday after Sunday gather at St. Paul’s. I gratefully accept the courtesy of The News.
You are for the first time in your lives deprived of the opportunity of hearing Mass on Sunday, and you will, I trust from this very circumstance, appreciate more thoroughly what Holy Mass is for the Catholics. Sunday service is no mere gathering for prayer, no coming to a temple to join in hymns of praise to the Maker, or to listen to the words of a spiritual guide, pointing out he means whereby men may walk in righteousness and go forward on the narrow way that leads to life eternal. No, there is something else that draws the Catholics, to the wonderment of non-Catholics, from their warm homes on cold bleak Winter dawns to trample through snow-covered streets in their thousands and hundreds of thousands to a crowded church, where they kneel reverently absorbed in the contemplation of a man, who in a strange garb, at a lighted altar, genuflects and bows and performs strange actions and speaks in a long dead tongue.[2] What draws the multitude?
The Mass, the unutterable sweetness of the Mass. Nothing human could draw, but the Mass is the God-given sacrifice offered the Creator, it is Holy Thursday come down and Calvary made present today. Mass is God really and truly present on our Catholic altars, a living unbloody victim offered again for the sins of men, offered, too, in thanksgiving for all the wondrous graces that unceasing flow from God’s great mercy throne on high.
So, the point is….faced with this circumstance, this justifiable order from the civil government to suspend the public practice of one essential aspect of Catholic practice, what does Fr. Coyle do?
Evangelize.
Charlotte was Both 