Ghost of Bishop in Chicago?
Steve Dufour
Ghost book popular among priests
January 11, 2004
BY CATHLEEN FALSANI Religion Reporter Advertisement
The way Rocco Facchini tells it, thunderous commotion like a freight
train crashing into the downstairs kitchen jolted him from sleep in
the Chicago rectory where he lived one unforgettable, sweltering night
in August 1956.
The walls of his second-floor bedroom trembled, the floor shook,
furniture moved and the lights flickered. But when Facchini and
another Roman Catholic priest ran downstairs to investigate, they
found nothing.
The kitchen was in perfect order. Not a pot, pan or dish out of place.
No intruder. Not a soul.
Well, almost.
"It was Muldoon," Facchini, now 74, recalled nearly four decades after
that spooky night when he was a rookie priest on his first assignment
as an assistant at Chicago's old St. Charles Borromeo on the Near West
Side.
Facchini believes the ghost of Bishop Peter J. Muldoon, an early
auxiliary bishop of the Chicago archdiocese who later became the first
bishop of the Diocese of Rockford, haunted St. Charles Borromeo, the
parish where he had been pastor from 1895 to 1908.
For the four years he served the struggling St. Charles parish and its
difficult pastor, Facchini had what he says were numerous encounters
with Muldoon's mischievous ghost.
Mostly it was noises, of furniture moving across the floor and
pictures falling from the wall; moaning and chain-rattling; radios
blaring on and off; doors slamming and heavy footsteps on the stairs
when no one was there.
Once, however, a heavy, plaster-framed oil painting anchored deep into
the wall by metal bolts crashed to the floor, barely missing the head
of St. Charles' pastor -- a man Facchini portrays as a corrupt
misanthrope who had run Muldoon's beloved parish into the ground. (The
pastor was terrified of Muldoon and hung his portrait prominently in
the rectory hallway to appease the poltergeist, Facchini says.)
"I always felt that Muldoon was a friendly spirit," he said. "I felt a
conscious connection to him. When I'd sit down with nobody around, I
felt it almost as a physical presence. I felt him on the back of my
neck."
Facchini, who left the priesthood in 1971, married in 1972 and has two
grown children, has written a book about his experiences with the
bishop's spectre titled, Muldoon: A True Chicago Ghost Story; Tales of
a Forgotten Rectory. Facchini co-wrote the book with his son Daniel.
While Muldoon was released last September without much fanfare by
Chicago's Lake Claremont Press, a publishing house specializing in
Chicago history -- including its ghost stories -- it has since become
an "it" book among Chicago priests, some of whom had heard Muldoon
stories as children.
Others, such as Chicago's Auxiliary Bishop Raymond Goedert, have a
more personal interest.
Goedert, who was vicar general of the Chicago archdiocese until his
retirement last year, served as an assistant priest at St. Charles
Borromeo with Facchini in the late 1950s.
"I was there during that period, and we would hear these strange
noises -- doors slamming -- or the one especially was when we were
downstairs on the second floor and we heard on the third floor as if
someone was pushing a dresser or something across the floor and, of
course, there was no one doing that," Goedert said recently.
"I experienced it, there's no doubt in my mind about that. How to
explain it? I don't know," Goedert said. "The joke has always been
that Muldoon haunted the place. Maybe he did."
The Roman Catholic Church has no official doctrine or dogma about
ghosts, said the Rev. Jeffrey Grob, associate vicar for canonical
services in the Chicago archdiocese. The church does teach, however,
that after people die, their spirits go to heaven, hell or purgatory
-- a kind of in-between where souls work off leftover sins before
entering paradise.
The church also teaches that souls in the spirit realm can interact
with the physical realm, said Grob, who is writing his doctoral
dissertation on exorcism.
"We say that there have been apparitions of the saints, and if they're
declared saints the presumption is that they're in heaven," he said.
"Maybe the church has been cautious in not making some dogmatic
declaration [about ghosts], but the parts of it are all there, in
terms of faith is concerned."
Scripture certainly has something to say about ghosts. The biblical
Book of Deuteronomy warns against "consulting ghosts" or "oracles from
the dead." The Book of Isaiah talks about "ghosts and familiar spirits
that chirp and mutter," and the Book of I Samuel tells the story of
how King Saul got himself in trouble by asking the Witch of Endor to
conjure the ghost of the prophet Samuel.
So the idea that Muldoon's ghost could have haunted St. Charles parish
does not contradict any explicit Catholic teaching, Grob said.
"What causes [hauntings] to happen? Without having the benefit of
dying and coming back, we're pretty limited in our experience, apart
from faith," he said. "There is so much we don't know about the
spiritual realm, in terms of the interaction with our physical realm
and otherworldly things."
Peter J. Muldoon was born Oct. 10, 1862, to Irish immigrant parents in
California. He attended seminary in Kentucky and Maryland, and was
ordained a priest in 1886, just six years after the creation of the
Archdiocese of Chicago with Archbishop Patrick Feehan at the helm.
Feehan, Chicago's first archbishop, presided over the creation of
dozens of parishes, the stately cardinal's residence on North State
Parkway and Feehanville--the institution now known as Maryville
Academy. In August 1885, the archbishop established the parish of St.
Charles Borromeo near the intersection of Taylor and Wolcott. The
following year, construction on the fortresslike rectory at Hoyne and
Roosevelt began, and was completed in 1893.
Young Muldoon arrived in Chicago shortly after his ordination in
Brooklyn, N.Y., in 1886, and served St. Pius V parish at Ashland and
19th before becoming Feehan's chancellor of the archdiocese in 1888.
Feehan appointed Muldoon pastor of St. Charles Borromeo in 1895, where
the new arrival oversaw construction of a massive church complex built
of heavy Indiana limestone to accommodate 4,000 members and a
parochial school with more than 800 students.
Muldoon paid particular attention to construction of the altar of St.
Charles, which he adorned with white marble carved to resemble Irish
lace. Behind the altar, he had a mausoleum built for his own burial,
but Muldoon's corpse never made it back to St. Charles Borromeo after
his death in 1927. Instead, he was buried at St. Mary's Cemetery in
Rockford, where he had been named its first bishop in 1908 and served
until his death.
Facchini believes events that unfolded between the time Muldoon became
St. Charles' pastor and his appointment as bishop of Rockford, and not
the fact that his crypt at St. Charles went unused, caused his
disquiet ghost to haunt the Chicago rectory.
Toward the end of the 19th century, the Chicago archdiocese was
growing exponentially, and priests were being imported from Ireland in
large numbers to meet the needs of the booming Catholic population.
Over the years, a competitive rift grew between some of Chicago's
Irish-born priests and native-born priests of Irish descent.
When it came time for Feehan, who was born and educated in Ireland, to
appoint his first auxiliary bishop, the Irishman chose an
American-born priest, A.J. McGavick, sparking unrest among some
Irish-born priests. But when McGavick soon became too ill to serve and
Feehan chose Muldoon -- the Californian! -- as his successor, a
full-fledged rebellion erupted
The insurrection was led by Jeremiah Crowley, an Irish priest who
launched a very public campaign against Muldoon, sending letters to
Vatican officials claiming Muldoon was immoral and unfit to be a
priest -- never mind a bishop, according to Facchini's book and John
Treanor, archivist for the Chicago archdiocese.
Crowley, who fancied himself a reformer and called himself the "new
Luther," eventually broadened his vitriolic assault from Muldoon to
the broader church hierarchy. In the end, he aligned himself with
several anti-Catholic groups and was excommunicated.
While Crowley's allegations against Muldoon were never substantiated,
Facchini believes the public skirmish -- at one point Crowley
interrupted a mass at Holy Name Cathedral and had to be removed by
police -- cost Muldoon his chance to become archbishop of Chicago.
The first alleged "haunting" of St. Charles Borromeo by Muldoon was
reported in 1927, shortly after his death. Facchini first heard about
a bishop's ghost roaming the halls of an unspecified Chicago rectory
when he was a teenage student at Quigley Seminary.
By the time Facchini moved into that same rectory in the late 1950s,
St. Charles Borromeo parish was in serious decline. Only a few dozen
people attended services in the massive church sanctuary each week,
and the sacramental life of the parish was almost nonexistent,
Facchini says in Muldoon.
The author places blame for the parish's slow death squarely on the
shoulders of its pastor at the time. "Father Kane," the pseudonym
Facchini gives the real pastor, refused to adapt to the changing needs
of the increasingly African-American, impoverished community that
surrounded the church, taking interest only in the parish's thriving
Bingo operation, over which he obsessively presided, according to the
book.
Facchini believes Muldoon made his spectral presence known at the
rectory to show his displeasure with Kane.
In 1968, St. Charles Borromeo church and its grand rectory, which had
been built to last for centuries, were razed less than 85 years after
they were built. Today, a multilevel parking garage that serves nearby
Cook County Juvenile Court stands on the location of Muldoon's beloved
church.
Since the church and its rectory were leveled by the wrecking ball,
reportedly little has been heard from Muldoon's ghost.
"I feel that what he was looking for was exoneration, and I think in
writing the book, I feel he may have been liberated," Facchini said of
Muldoon. "I feel personally he's at peace. He's been vindicated."
However, in an epilogue she wrote for Muldoon, Sharon Woodhouse,
publisher of Lake Claremont Press, describes a few unexplainable
incidents that happened during the writing and publishing of the book
that she thinks are the old bishop's handiwork.
First there were the footsteps pacing the floorboards just outside
Woodhouse's bedroom door in the middle of the night when no one else
was awake. A few weeks later, she felt someone kick the back of her
chair at work, when the only other person in the office was yards
away, at the opposite side of the room.
Finally, months later, at 5:30 a.m. on the day the Facchinis were
scheduled to drop off the completed Muldoon manuscript in December
2002, Woodhouse was awakened by the sound of "O Holy Night" blaring
from the CD player in her kitchen. No one else was home.
"Perhaps ghosts are real manifestations from other dimensions,"
Woodhouse wrote. "I'm more inclined to consider them as metaphors for
the things that continue to haunt us, or the ephemera that creep under
our skin and influence our choices. Whatever the case, it's apparent
to me that early on I must have joined Rocco Facchini and his family
and tuned into the spirit of Muldoon."