Francis Beckman

Francis Joseph Beckman (October 25, 1875 – October 17, 1948) was an American Catholic prelate who served as Bishop of Lincoln from 1924 to 1930 and as Archbishop of Dubuque from 1930 to 1946.

Biography

Early life Francis Beckman was born on October 25, 1875, in Cincinnati, Ohio, to Francis and Elizabeth (née Fenker) Beckman. He studied at St. Gregory Seminary and Mount St. Mary's Seminary in Cincinnati. He then attended the University of Louvain in Leuven, Belgium, and the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome. Following his ordination, Beckman received a Licentiate of Sacred Theology (1907) and later a Doctor of Sacred Theology (1908) from the Gregorian. In 1939, Beckman renamed Columbia College in Dubuque as Loras College in honor of Dubuque's first bishop, Mathias Loras.

Impressed with the Catholic culture he had seen in Europe, Beckman began to collect fine art pieces. He started with a small collection of artifacts belonging to Reverend William Kessler at Columbia Academy in Dubuque. Beckman placed several art pieces in a museum at Columbia College. The Beckman collection, including works of Winslow Homer, Rembrandt, Rubens, and Van Dyck, was valued in 1938 at $1.5 million.

As a result of all of Beckman's problems, on June 15, 1944, Pope Pius XII appointed Bishop Henry Rohlman of Davenport as coadjutor archbishop and apostolic administrator. Beckman remained archbishop of Dubuque, but the Vatican gave actual authority to Rohlman.

Foreign policy Beckman adopted a non-interventionist stance in the years before World War II. He wrote an open letter to Senator William Borah of Idaho encouraging him in his efforts to maintain American neutrality.

At a rally on October 20, 1939, after the start of World War II in Europe, Beckman praised the antisemitic radio priest Reverend Charles Coughlin in his stand for non-intervention by the United States. The next week, Beckman went on the radio with Coughlin and said that the Communists wanted the U.S. to enter the war so that, worn out by the war, Americans would become more susceptible to communist thought.

At an America First rally at Loras College in June 1941, Beckman denounced the repeal of the arms embargo provision of the Neutrality Acts of the 1930s, allowing the sale of arms by the United States to France and the United Kingdom. In October 1931, he made a speech that suggested wealthy Jewish financiers were responsible for the war:This war is nothing more nor less than a struggle to re-establish the shattered boundaries of international finance. The entrenched internationalists had their day; they financed the world into eternal debt and milked whole peoples, grinding them down into the dust of poverty. In November 1941, just weeks before the attack on Pearl Harbor, Beckman denounced American military aid to the Soviet Union, which had been invaded by Germany in June 1941.