HEALY, JAMES AUGUSTINE

Bishop; b. Macon, Ga., April 6, 1830; d. Portland, Me., Aug. 5, 1900. He was born on a plantation in Jones County, Ga. His father, Michael Morris Healy, was an Irish immigrant from County Roscommon. His mother was a Negro slave, Eliza Smith. In 1837 James was placed in a Quaker school at Flushing, Long Island, N.Y. He was sent in 1844 to the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Mass., from which he graduated in the first class (1849). After two years in the Sulpician seminary in Montreal, Canada, he entered the Sulpician seminary in Paris. He was ordained in the Cathedral of Notre Dame, Paris, on June 10, 1854. Healy was transferred to the Diocese of Boston, Mass., by Bp. John Bernard Fitzpatrick, and served there for 21 years in various capacities. He was the bishop's secretary, the first chancellor of the diocese, the assistant at St. John's Church, the rector of the cathedral, and the pastor and builder of St. James Church in Boston. Healy, active in welfare work and civic life, played a decisive role in the development of the Home for Destitute Catholic Children, the House of the Good Shepherd, St. Anne's Foundling Home, and the Catholic Laymen's Union.

In February 1875 he was named to the See of Portland, Me., where he was consecrated on June 2, 1875. For 25 years he governed his large diocese, supervising also the founding of the Diocese of Manchester, N.H., when it was cut off from Portland in 1885. His administration added to the diocese more than 60 parishes, 68 mission stations, 18 new schools and convents, and a well developed series of welfare institutions. Healy also achieved recognition as a pulpit orator and appeared frequently as the featured speaker at civic and ecclesiastical functions in the New England states. Among his other activities were his contributions to American Church law at the Baltimore Council of 1884 and his work as a consultant to the Bureau of Indian Affairs of the Department of the Interior, Washington, D.C. On his silver jubilee as a bishop he was named assistant at the papal throne.

Bibliography: a. s. foley, Bishop Healy: Beloved Outcaste (New York 1954). w. l. lucey, The Catholic Church in Maine (Frances town, N.H. 1957). a. s. foley, Dream of an Outcast: Patrick F. Healy (Tuscaloosa 1989). c. davis, The History of Black Catholics in the United States (New York 1993).

[a. s. foley]