Page:Journal of Religion and Society Volume 24.pdf/5

Who Lynches on the Frontier? Jesuits addressed lynching in textbooks for their students and in US periodicals such as Revista Católica and, in the twentieth century, America (Fleming 2020, 46–47). The Society’s flagship Italian journal, La Civiltà Cattolica, published an important exchange on US lynching in the early 1890s (Fleming 2020). The discussion to follow, however, will concentrate on four English-language references to lynching, all but one taken from the Woodstock Letters, an internal Jesuit publication printed at the Maryland theologate from 1872 until 1969. All, like the Colorado example from 1874, are incidental references – in other words, the author mentions lynching to make another point instead of analyzing the practice itself. All concern events on the Western frontier during the 1880s. The first, published in 1947, reflects the extended influence of the frontier justice or institutional immaturity paradigm for interpreting lynching. By contrast, the second, third, and fourth, all published in the nineteenth century, anticipate contemporary lynching studies’ attention to race and ethnicity through references to the identity of the perpetrators. Lynching, suggest these narratives from Alaska and New Mexico, was a practice associated with dominant Anglo-American culture (WL 1947; Barnum 1893; Hughes 1880; Deane 1884).

The Influence of the Frontier Lynching Paradigm

The 1947 volume The Woodstock Letters includes a striking illustration of the Western lynching trope in an obituary for the long-lived Jesuit John Brown, who during his more than sixty years in the Society had served as president of the College of the Sacred Heart and as Superior of the New Mexico-Colorado Mission (WL 1947, 170–76; Stansell 1977, 62–76; McKevitt 2007, 186, 220–21, 304–5). Born in Michigan in 1867, Brown moved with his family to Colorado when he was nine. From there, his parents sent him to a new Jesuit college in Las Vegas, New Mexico. Brown applied to become a Jesuit, and entered the Society on November 13, 1881 (WL 1947, 170; WL 1878, 40–43; CLV 1880-1881, 13; CDRSI 24.105).

Brown’s obituary includes a story concerning his early novitiate in the Southwest. One morning, when he was opening the residence’s shutters, he saw three bodies dangling from ropes outside the window. The victims had been taken from the house next door, which was serving as a jail, and lynched while the Jesuit community was asleep. Brown told his fellow Jesuits that he slammed the shutters closed again and ran back to bed. According to the author of his obituary, Brown “was transferred, at the end of the year, to the more stereotyped noviceship at Florissant, where he finished his probation with no more lynchings” (WL 1947, 171).

The Jesuit author of Brown’s obituary clearly invokes the frontier justice lynching trope in describing these events, not only because he uses the term “rope justice” in speaking of the victims’ fate, but also because he emphasizes the stark difference between the present and the “era of Billy the Kid,” when John Brown entered the Society (WL 1947, 170–71). For the