Vagabond Priest: James H. O'Brien on Unhoused Priests and Canonical Rights in 1870s America

In 1880 James H. O'Brien self-published Sacerdos Vagabundus, or, The Tramp Priest , to call attention to an issue at once pastoral, disciplinary, and theological: diocesan priests in the United States, canonically a missionary territory until 1908, were without the protection of ecclesiastical law and could be dismissed by their bishop without due process. Such former priests often became unemployable and homeless, ineligible even for Catholic charity. O'Brien, himself a former priest in his mid-30s who had been summarily suspended twice and been homeless, made himself a magnet for testimony and documentary evidence of the phenomenon. Vividly evoking the world in which Catholic bishops and diocesan priests worked in the upper Midwest in the 1870s, his work presciently argued for canonical and spiritual reforms.