If you work long enough, many, if not most of us, have had the experience of being removed from a job we were doing, only to find ourselves soon doing something else very different and altogether unexpected. As today marks the first anniversary of soundingsjohnbarker, which saw its first blog post, “Labour history: Mine-Mill v. Steel” around this time of day a year ago on Sept. 3, 2014 (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/09/03/labour-history-mine-mill-v-steel/) 167 posts and 42,000 readers later, I’ve been there and done that. But few, I suspect, present such a vivid example as Hartford, Connecticut-born Roman Catholic Bishop Bonaventure Finbarr Francis Broderick, who went from being the auxiliary, and later coadjutor bishop of what was then the Diocese of San Cristóbal de la Habana in Cuba in March 1905 to pumping gas in the Hudson Valley in Millbrook, New York, while writing a weekly column for the local newspaper, the Millbrook Round Table, founded in 1892, before being restored to an episcopal role in November 1939.
The request from the Vatican to restore him as an active bishop again after 34 years in church wilderness came after Broderick was discovered running the Millbrook gas station by the newly-appointed archbishop of the Archdiocese of New York, then Archbishop Francis Spellman, out making the rounds in his new pastoral charge.
As an able seminarian marked to go places in the early 1890s at the Pontifical North American College in Rome, Broderick was also sent to study at the Pontifical Athenaeum of Sant’ Apollinare and Pontifical Urbanian Athenaeum de Propaganda Fide before being ordained as a priest for the Archdiocese of Hartford on July 26, 1896 by Archbishop Francesco di Paola Cassetta, who would later go on to serve as the librarian of the Vatican Library.
When his former Italian instructor in Rome, Bishop Donato Raffaele Sbarretti Tazza, was appointed in 1900 as the ordinary of the Diocese of San Cristóbal de la Habana, he appointed Broderick as his secretary.
Broderick represented the Catholic Church in Havana on May 20, 1902 when the Republic of Cuba gained its symbolic, although not practical, independence from the United States, which had ruled Cuba for four years since its victory over Spain in the Spanish-American War of 1898. While in Cuba, Broderick had to settle claims against the United States government because of damage done to church property during the Spanish-American War.
On March 1, 1905, Broderick resigned as coadjutor bishop of the Diocese of San Cristóbal de la Habana, and returned to the United States. While the details are murky, it appears Broderick had a falling out with the Holy See over financial matters, and was effectively sent into episcopal limbo by Baltimore’s long-serving and powerful Cardinal James Gibbons, with “no appointment, no pastoral duties, and no income other than a small stipend provided by Rome,” notes Rick Becker in an Aug. 31 article in the National Catholic Register, headlined, “The Strange Saga of the Bishop Who Ran a Gas Station for 40 Years.” Becker writes that Broderick’s “ecclesiastical exile compelled him to pump gas and hawk auto parts for decades on end.”
We do know that eight years after his return from Cuba to the United States, on Aug. 26, 1913, Bishop Broderick, then living in Saugerties, New York, near Millbrook, and his business partner, former Democratic Congressman John Andrew Sullivan from Massachusetts’ 11th congressional district in Boston, who were associated with a contracting firm in Cuba known as Donovan & Philips, which had a water and sewer contract in Cienfuegos, Cuba, successfully sued Bishop Broderick’s brother, David A. Broderick, who had acted as agent for Donovan & Phillips, in Connecticut Superior Court for Hartford County, with Judge Marcus H. Holcomb awarding the bishop and congressman a judgment for $18,901.
Bishop Broderick, who had a doctorate from his time in Rome, wound up spending the First World War and the decades of the 1920s and 1930s living in obscurity while remaining obedient to the church, keeping his vows, and saying his daily office, but known not as a bishop but simply as “Dr. Broderick” (in the academic sense) who ran the gas station and wrote a weekly column for the Millbrook Round Table, until restored to a public role as Spellman’s auxiliary bishop and a hospital chaplain in Riverdale, New York in November 1939, serving for the remaining four years of his life, until he died in November 1943 at the age of 74, having been a bishop for 40 years, and a gas jockey almost as long.
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