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Rev. William Corby
“Memoirs of Chaplain Life” by very Rev. W.
Corby of Notre Dame University, Indiana. Three Years Chaplain in the Famous Irish
Brigade, ”Army of Potomac.” Notre Dame, Indiana, “Scholastic” Press,
1894.
William
Corby was born in Detroit on
Daniel
became a prominent real estate dealer and one of the wealthiest landed
proprietors in the country. He helped to found many Detroit parishes and aided
in the building of many churches. The Michigan Catholic reported that there was
no worthy charity which he did not support.
His
son William was educated in the common schools until he was sixteen and then
joined his father's business for four years. Realizing that William had a
calling to the priesthood and a desire to go to college, Daniel sent him and
his two younger brothers to the ten year old "university" of Notre
Dame in South Bend, Indiana. The school was staffed then as now by the
Congregation of the Holy Cross, a religious community first organized in Le
Mans, France.
In
1853 when Corby arrived at Notre Dame, it was a small school for boys of all
ages managed along the lines of a French boarding school. In 1860 when the
American Civil War began, Notre Dame had only 213 students, the majority of
whom were in the primary and preparatory school divisions. Since discipline and
order were paramount, parents used Notre Dame as a school of last resort for
rowdy sons. As the school was always in financial trouble, it conducted a brick
making business to make the extra money needed to put food on the boarding
school table.
Within
a year of his arrival at Notre Dame William committed himself to the religious
life. He entered the novitiate in 1856 and took final vows three years later.
By 1859 Father Corby was Prefect of Discipline at Notre Dame and in 1861 he
became the Director of the Manual Labor School and pastor of a local church.
Corby's
steady progress at Notre Dame was interrupted by the outbreak of the Civil War
in the spring of 1861. The war would throw Notre Dame and the country into a
period of turmoil and uncertainty and turn Father William Corby's life in a new
direction.
The
Roman Catholic Church took no official stand on the war. Seeing itself as the
church of persecuted outsiders in Protestant America, the Church found itself
in a "no win" situation: If it chose a side in the conflict, it would
be branded as a traitor by the other side; if it remained neutral, it would be
attacked as disloyal by both sides. At Notre Dame, both faculty and students
were prohibited from discussions favoring either the Union or Confederate side.
Father Edward Sorin, founder of Notre Dame in 1843,
sympathized with the North but was able to maintain a neutral stance on campus, with the result that many Southerners continued to
attend Notre Dame along side northern sympathizers,
including the children of William Tecumsah Sherman.
Father Sorin did send seven C.S.C. priests to serve
as chaplains in Union regiments and more than eighty Sisters of the Holy Cross
to nurse the sick and wounded in Union hospitals.
Father
Corby joined the chaplains’ corps in 1861 and was assigned as chaplain to the
88th New York Volunteer Infantry in the famed Irish Brigade of Thomas Francis
Meagher. The Irish Brigade was constituted primarily of Irish Catholic
soldiers. Father Corby volunteered his services as a chaplain in the Union Army
at the request of Father Sorin, now the
Superior-General of the Congregation of the Holy Cross. Corby resigned his
professorship at Notre Dame, and, with a song on his lips, boarded the train
from Chicago:
I'll
hang my harp on a willow tree. I'll off to the wars again. A peaceful home has
no charm for me. The battlefield no pain.
For
nearly three years, Father Corby ministered to the needs of Catholic soldiers
in the Army of the Potomac. The editor of Corby's memoirs, L. F. Kohl, says
about Corby, "Chaplains, like officers, won the common soldiers' respect
with their bravery under fire. Father Corby's willingness to share the
hardships of the men with a light-hearted attitude and his calm heroism in
bringing spiritual and physical comfort to men in the thick of the fighting won
him the esteem and the friendship of the men he served.
Frequently
under fire, Corby moved among casualties on the field, giving assistance to the
wounded and absolution to the dying. For days after the battles, he inhabited
the field hospitals to bring comfort to men in pain." In the summer of
1863, the Irish Brigade was no longer the impressive force it had been. Nearly
two years of war had reduced its numbers from 3000 to 530 combat ready troops.
The Union forces had suffered severe losses in the early battles at Gettysburg.
Yet among the units sent to restore the Union lines was the battered Irish
Brigade led by Colonel Patrick Kelly.
Before
the Brigade engaged the Confederate soldiers at a wheat field just south of
Gettysburg, Father William Corby, in a singular event that lives in the history
of the Civil War, addressed the troops. Placing his purple stole around his
neck, Corby climbed atop a large boulder and offered absolution to the entire
unit, a ceremony never before performed in America. Kohl, editor of Corby's
memoirs, tells us that Father Corby sternly reminded the soldiers of their
duties, warning that the Church would deny Christian burial to any who wavered
and did not uphold the flag. The members of the Brigade were admonished to
confess their sins in the correct manner at their earliest opportunity.
Those
who witnessed this event would never forget it, for at a crisis point for the
young nation, Father Corby had married the Catholic faith and American
patriotism. Over the years, this event would become the subject of poems,
sculptures and an impressive painting, "Absolution Under
Fire" by Paul Henry Woods.
With
their sins forgiven, the Irish Brigade plunged into battle and were met with withering fire from the Confederate soldiers.
At the end of the day, 198 of the men whom Father Corby had blessed had been
killed. On
After
the war, in 1865, Father Corby returned to Notre Dame where he was made vice
president. Within a year, Corby was named president of Notre Dame upon the
untimely death of the university's president.
At the
end of his term at Notre Dame 1872, Father Corby was sent to Sacred Heart College in Watertown, Wisconsin, a
young, struggling college which Corby placed on firm financial footing, no
doubt as a result of his training in his father's business.
He
returned to Notre Dame as president in 1877 and took on the task of rebuilding
the college which was almost destroyed by fire on
At the
end of his second term as president of Notre Dame, Father Corby was assigned to
St. Bernard's parish in Watertown, Wisconsin.
In
1886, he was elected Provincial General of the Congregation of the Holy Cross
for the United States. Later he became Assistant General for the worldwide
order.
In
1888 Father Corby was invited to a reunion of the Irish Brigade to celebrate
the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg. At the meeting, the
veterans endorsed a campaign to have the Congressional Medal of Honor bestowed
on Father Corby. The deposition to the War Department called Father Corby "The
Fighting Chaplain," referred to his risking his life for his men, and
emphasized his "very gallant and most remarkable act in preaching a most
patriot sermon and administering the religious rite
of General Absolution on the battlefield of Gettysburg." The medal was not
granted.
Motivated
by a desire to remind Americans of the patriotic service that thousands of
Catholics had rendered to their country in the Civil War, Father Corby wrote a
book of his recollections, entitled Memoirs
of Chaplain Life, published in 1893. Readers of this book find it a vivid
account of the life of the ordinary soldier in the Civil War and it illustrates
the passionate style of Father Corby:
"Oh,
you of a younger generation, think of what it cost our forefathers to save our
glorious inheritance of union and liberty! If you let it slip from your hands
you will deserve to be branded as ungrateful cowards and undutiful sons. But,
no! You will not fail to cherish the prize-- it is too sacred a trust-- too
dearly purchased.”
Father
William Corby died of pneumonia on
1910 Program of Dedication of Corby Monument
10 28 The monument to be erected in honor of the
Very Rev. William Corby, C.S.C., at one time president of the University of Notre
Dame, and a former pastor of St. Bernard's Church, in this city, will be
dedicated October 29, on the battlefield of Gettysburg.
Following is the program of
exercises . . . WG
