Monday, Feb. 25, 1929

Penitent Daignault

"Elphege Daignault, the excommunicate, will repent. He will come back into the Church."

Last week in Providence, R. I., and in the half-dozen towns surrounding, the whisper softly passed around. In smart houses it caused slight comment. But in little houses where shirt-sleeved fathers read the papers every night by the centre table, the whisper was tense, freighted with excitement. "Elphege Daignault will repent. The neighbors told me."

Good Catholic wives glanced at the crucifix on the wall, tried not to think of excommunicates.

Elphege Daignault is an attorney-at-law with offices in the Longley Building, Woonsocket. Like most of the 290,540 Catholics who live in and near Providence he is a French-Canadian. And, like most of Providence's French-Canadians, he gave money in 1925 for a school fund which was to be distributed by the Rt. Rev. William A. Hickey, Bishop of the Diocese of Providence. Attorney Daignault and many another donor wanted strictly French-speaking schools. In the schools that Bishop Hickey built, English was spoken, though French was taught. Attorney Daignault and a few of his comrades were so vexed that they determined to sue Bishop Hickey for misuse of their good money.

They appealed to His Excellency, Most Rev. Pietro Fumasoni-Biondi, apostolic delegate at Washington, and then to the Holy See, where their suit was denied. Then they went to a secular Rhode Island court and then to the State Supreme Court.

In the U. S., the civil law respects canon law as it applies to the internal affairs of a church.* Therefore since the Catholic court had ruled against Attorney Daignault and friends, the Rhode Island courts did likewise. Attorney Daignault lost his case. Worse, he had been responsible for the appearance in a secular court of a Catholic Bishop as defendant.

Came a letter addressed to Elphege Daignault: ". . . the Sacred Congregation of the Council has ordered me to notify you that . . . you have incurred the penalty of excommunication. ... In communicating this to you I pray that, by the Grace of God, you may realize the gravity of your fault, and hasten to liberate yourself from the penalty which it has brought upon you. "Yours very sincerely, "P. Fumasoni-Biondi." Attorney Daignault became an outcast from his Church. To get reinstated he had humbly, sincerely to repent. Last week in Rhode Island they whispered that Dainault had at last repented, begged forgiveness, that Mother Church would once more take him as a son.

*In the U.S., for instance, Gen. Bramwell Booth (see col. 3) could expect no hearing from secular courts because the Salvation Army's High Council deposed him justly according to the Army's own canons.