(gentle music) (tense music) (gunshot blasting) (gentle piano music) I discovered Father Coyle when I first moved to Birmingham, Alabama.

It was 40 years ago.

I was a lapsed Catholic, actually, and serving as an Episcopal priest, doing the work of racial reconciliation in particular.

But I had heard when I came here about this Father Coyle and I heard it from a Protestant minister that this Catholic priest years back, 1921, had been assassinated by another minister of another denomination.

He said for performing this, what they thought was an interracial marriage between this Catholic, he's really a dark-skinned Puerto Rican fellow, and this convert girl from Catholicism.

Father Coyle was, and not just an important historical figure, he was really a champion of poor people.

He was champion of minorities who had come to the Birmingham area to live and work in this booming steel town.

He was a champion for immigrants and he was a champion for his religious faith.

(upbeat music) [Narrator] James Coyle was born in 1873 to Owen and Margaret Coyle.

Both are educators who had high expectations for their son.

(upbeat music) James grew up in County Roscommon, Ireland.

(upbeat music) He attended Mungret College in Limerick and after graduating went to the Pontifical North American College in Rome.

He was ordained a priest at age 23 in May of 1896.

(upbeat music) And then something happened that had a powerful impact on Father James E. Coyle's life and ministry.

(upbeat music) He was sent to the United States as a missionary priest for the diocese of Alabama.

So just in the late 1800s he came as a missionary priest with his sister, Marcella, who would take care of him.

A little teenage girl.

[Narrator] He was assigned to the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception.

He later became rector and director of the McGill Institute, a Catholic school for boys from Mobile.

And so he ministered there for several years at McGill Institute for boys.

Had real heart for young people.

He was an educator just like his dad and like his mom.

[Narrator] During his eight years in Mobile Father Coyle had become comfortable with his ministry and found his involvement with the school to be very fulfilling.

(upbeat music) And then, as often happens, another unexpected change came for Father Coyle.

Father O'Reilly was the pastor here before Father Coyle.

Father O'Reilly died tragically.

So he was involved with the reserve troops here in the state of Alabama.

He was the chaplain to them.

Then he was thrown from his horse and broke his neck.

Great, great Irish priest.

Thank God for the Irish missionary priest that came to the South.

So he died tragically.

He was a renowned man.

He was part of this large parish here.

And so then Father Coyle was called to come as the pastor.

[Narrator] In the fall of 1904, Bishop Edward Allen appointed Father Coyle Pastor of St. Paul's Catholic Church in Birmingham, Alabama.

(upbeat music) This altar was one of the first things that Father Coyle did when he came to St. Paul's.

It wasn't the cathedral at that time.

It was just St. Paul's Church.

So he came here in 1904 and he ministered here in 1904 to 1921.

And for whatever reason, he says, "I want to commission an altar.

I want a special altar built for this place."

And as you can see, it's a beautiful altar and it's Carrara marble and Mexican onyx for the pillars that are here, the columns, that are here.

Just beautifully done, it's exquisite.

Not overly done, but a beautiful, beautiful alter.

The altar is that place that's associated with sacrifice.

And so this is the place for the Catholic people, where the one sacrifice of Christ is made present again to us in our worship.

We think of the Eucharist, or the Lord's Supper, which takes place here at the altar as the source and summit of our faith, the source and the summit.

(gentle music) And so he was here.

He was here on that fateful day, August 11th, 1921.

And he was here with this young couple, Pedro Gussman and Ruth Stephenson.

So who's doing a wedding the day of his assassination.

And so it is a story that involves centrally a family, the Stephenson family, in Birmingham, Alabama, Edwin Stephenson, his wife, Mary, and his daughter, Ruth Stephenson, who was 18 at the time that she decided as a young woman, that she was gonna make decisions on her own.

And one day she came on her own to visit with Father Coyle and came to the porch of Father Coyle, the very porch he would be assassinated on six years later.

And she had a conversation with him, "What are you about?

What's the Catholic church about?"

She said in grand jury testimony, six years later after Father Coyle was assassinated, that she became convinced that she needed to become Catholic.

She had a fear that she might go to hell if she didn't become Catholic, because what she had heard she really believed.

It wasn't Father Coyle going after her to proselytize her.

She came to him and really became convinced.

"I believe what this man's saying."

And old man Stephenson said, "If you ever go back, there'll be violence."

That was not the kind of free thinking that the households in Birmingham were used to, according young women.

(tense music) [Narrator] This is the 1920s.

The nation is in throws of great change.

Prohibition is in force.

Women are pushing new boundaries.

Communism is on the rise in parts of the world, causing a Red Scare.

And you've got the Ku Klux Klan.

These are your neighbors.

Some are your friends.

Many were pillars of Birmingham society.

The Klan was an organization that attacked and terrorized the black community in the South, but it was much more than that.

And the Klan was a terrorist organization toward Catholics too, toward immigrants.

[Narrator] Edwin Stephenson was a member of the Klan.

As an itinerate Methodist preacher, he used his credentials not to serve as pastor of a church, but to allow him to perform marriages.

Birmingham City Hall at the time was next door to St. Paul's and Stephenson could be found wandering the halls, offering his services to couples with newly acquired marriage license.

(tense music) Father Coyle, I think was meeting with a number of priests for a lunch or something, and they said, "Hey, somebody's here.

They want you to do the wedding."

"Well, who, who is it?"

And so they said, "Well, it's Ruth Stephenson and Pedro."

And so Father Coyle said, "Ruth Stephenson?"

He says to the other priest there, "Old man Stephenson's daughter wants me to do her wedding."

He says, "I guess the man's gonna kill me."

(tense music) So he's doing the wedding of Pedro and Ruth.

He feels like they're of age.

He's not violating any laws, although people were gonna see this wedding as a black man and a white woman, which was illegal.

But Pedro was a Puerto Rican, Father Coyle wasn't violating any law.

They were of age and she's a convert girl, she's Catholic.

And so he's gonna do the wedding because he's a man that believes in their freedom and their liberty as adults to come together and to take their vows if that's what they're going to do.

And so he gets ready to exchange those vows with them and to witness that, there's two witnesses to the wedding.

His sister, Marcella, who came with him from Ireland, and another priest.

And he says to them, "Move away from here, go into the sacristy while I do this wedding."

He says that because he knows that violence can come his way.

He knows he might be killed.

It's so important to understand that Father Coyle knew for years his life was under threat.

(tense music) [Sharon Davies] When Stephenson found out that his daughter had run away in the middle of the day and gotten married to Pedro Gussman, he was absolutely enraged.

(tense music) Father Coyle does what he always does.

He goes out on the porch to say his prayers.

Stephenson was pacing up and down, waiting, waiting, waiting.

And then Coyle is saying his prayers and as best we understand it, he came through a gate, walked up at point blank range, and shot three times.

(gunshots blasting) (tense music) [Narrator] He receives the last rights before he dies, and at 7:43 he's pronounced dead.

He dies at the hospital that the priest before him began, St. Vincent's hospital.

(somber music) It was said to be the most people to ever attend a funeral in Birmingham.

(somber music) The killing took place in broad daylight on the porch of the priest's home in front of a street full of witnesses.

When Stephenson shot Father Coyle, he had the smoking gun in his hand and he walked up to the courthouse, which was right next door, where he was a marrying parson.

The window was open at the courthouse.

He went through the window with a gun in his hand and he said, "I just killed the priest."

So there's never any mystery that Reverend Stephenson had just shot an unarmed priest on the porch of his home.

Yet it took the prosecutor, Joe Tate, two weeks to get them even to indict the case.

Two weeks!

But it wasn't the open and shut case you might think it should have been.

Hugo Black, the lead defense lawyer, the brilliant mastermind of what was truly an unjust trial, would later join the Ku Klux Klan, run for the United States Senate and would eventually obtain a seat on the Supreme Court of the United States.

[Narrator] But Joe Tate went head to head with Hugo Black, in spite pressure from the community and the Ku Klux Klan.

You have to admire Joe Tate, his decision to prosecute this case, to present it to a grand jury first, his dedication to his duty as a prosecutor was exemplary.

This is what we should expect from a minister of justice.

As the circuit solicitor for Birmingham, Alabama, Joe Tate could have passed on this case.

It would've been easier for him to not take the case.

He could have just let it die in the grand jury.

He could have not pressed for the charge to come outta the grand jury as hard as he did.

But instead he wanted to do the right thing for the law, for Ruth Stephenson, and for Father Coyle.

He wanted justice.

[Sharon Davies] Justice had to be done for Father Coyle.

(gentle music) The defendant, Edwin Stephenson, was Klan.

You had an all white, all male jury.

You had a number of Klansmen sitting on that jury.

The Klan circled the wagons.

And from the start, this very powerful organization in town, the Ku Klux Klan, was behind the defense of Reverend Stephenson, beloved him as a member, and had every intention of doing whatever they could to make sure that he wasn't held to account for the murder of Father Coyle.

When Ruth decided to become a Catholic and marry a Catholic, this was kind of shocking impudence, a shocking display of lack of respect or disrespect of her parents.

Many thought that what Stephenson did was entirely defensible.

Stephenson says that he feared that Father Coyle was going for a gun and that they tussled that he had to shoot him.

There was no gun.

There was no tussle, as far as we know.

And there was a witness in a car who saw the whole thing and described it the way I'm describing it, that he just came up point blank range and shot Father Coyle.

They wouldn't allow him to testify.

They wouldn't take his testimony.

It's remarkable to think that this trial, which occurred about a a hundred years ago, was so unjust.

This was an injustice.

And so it was real travesty and it was covered by the "New York Times," it was covered all over the country.

This was also a very famous legal event.

This was the OJ Simpson trial, really, of a hundred years ago.

It was like one of the trials of the century to see if a man would be prosecuted for killing a Catholic priest in the Deep South, in Birmingham, with the bigotry that was there.

And the answer was, yeah, they would get away with it.

So Joe Tate had a lot to lose here, and yet he ignored all those signs.

And it was very clear up until the very last minute, his closing argument, that he was intent upon bringing Reverend Stephenson to justice.

And he also clearly knew that this was a community and the jurors in that jury box might have very different feelings than his.

And he spoke directly to them.

[Joe] If you go into the jury room and throw out the evidence and render a not guilty verdict, gentlemen of the jury, you will have all the narrow minded, redneck people come out and pat you on the back.

But for the remainder of your lives, you will have your conscience to prick and sting you.

(gavel pounding) Hugo Black's trial tactics in the Stephenson trial were despicable.

His appeals to racial and religious bigotry in that trial were not the tactics of a noble lawyer.

They were dishonorable.

The trial was a real farce, what took place.

But he got Stephenson off on temporary kind of insanity thing.

And they gave him his gun back.

After the thing, just gave him his gun and he's a free man.

(tense music) [Narrator] As could be expected, the reaction to this verdict was divided.

In the Birmingham community and beyond people of faith were in disbelief that such a heinous crime was committed, and that Edwin Stephenson was released of any responsibility for his actions.

On the other side, there was celebration.

There was vindication.

Reverend Stephenson was paraded around the state at Klan rallies, was viewed as a hero.

(somber music) My first realization that there was violence in the world happened when I was about nine.

And I was in a department store with my mother, and we were walking around just looking at the things and feeling them and touching them and shopping.

And she stopped very cold and she pulled me next to her.

And she said, "See that man?

That man killed Father Coyle."

And I really didn't know Father Coyle.

I had not known him because he had been dead for a while.

Even at that stage, that was a real shock to me.

And that, first of all, that anyone would kill anybody, but that anyone one would kill a priest.

It's an important story in American history.

One that we have largely lost.

I think the intensity of the anti-Catholicism that existed in this country.

I think mostly we've forgotten that.

We're seeing in our time of persecution of the church in other ways, but that are still real, just like they were in his time.

In his time there was the discrimination against Catholics and the exclusion of Catholics from certain areas of life, and even violence against Catholics, as in his own case being murdered.

So maybe there's not acts of physical violence as much now, but we do have of legal challenges against the church.

We have the changing social morays that have us feeling as if we're kind of on the outs of society in some ways.

And that we're maybe no longer relevant.

That's a temptation at least that we can sometimes feel.

These issues don't go away.

We still have to learn how to live with the strangers among us.

We still have to know how to live in a pluralistic society where people have different religious beliefs.

We still have conflicts about race and religion, and economic class that divide us.

The issues that Father Coyle was grappling with were not only the issues of his day, they're the issues of today as well.

What happened to Father Coyle, to say the least, as relates to civil rights, was a tragedy, devastation.

He rose up as a martyr fighting for what is right for all people.

It's important that we remember where we came from in Birmingham and in Alabama.

And that today we're in the middle of that journey.

And I hope that when my great-grandchildren are born, that we've completed that journey successfully.

That we are all living together in a state of peace and understanding and goodwill towards each other.

This is history everybody needs to know about, that we need to make sure is not forgotten, that our children will know about.

Not to not to scare them, but to make them aware of the mistakes of the past so that we don't repeat them.

Goodness is not something that you'd run away from.

Being good was why Father Coyle was actually attacked, for doing what he was supposed to do.

That was the purpose.

So you just keep going and going and going.

And if you're good at what you do, you'll be blessed as he's blessed and remembered.

[Narrator] Father Coyle was a zealous and devoted missionary.

He labored and preached the word of God in season and out of season, visiting the sick, instructing the little ones of the poor, needy, and afflicted.

During that tense and threatening period for Catholics, Father Coyle was courageous and unwavering and publicly defending the church and what Catholics believe.

He brought a dynamic spirit to the parish, emphasizing faithful attendance at Sunday Mass, love of the Eucharist, and the Blessed Mother, and a deep belief that all people should be treated equally, regardless of social status, race, and religious preference.

In addition to his parish duties, he was active in many community organizations, and served as chaplain of the Birmingham Chapter of the Knights of Columbus.

His tragic death underscored the simple gospel he was always expounding by the word and example.

Catholics in Birmingham have never forgotten the outrage.

Father James E. Coyle remains a model of faithful and courageous priestly service today.

(upbeat music) Father Coyle knew what he believed.

Father Coyle lived what he believed.

And Father Coyle laid his life down.

(gentle music) [Narrator] In celebration of Father Coyle's life and legacy, St. Paul's Cathedral held a Mass on August 11th, 2021, 100 years to the day after his death.

(gentle music) The events of 100 years ago brought together people of different faiths.

Many throughout the Birmingham community came to pay respects.

Ministers of other faiths lauded the ministry of Father Coyle and expressed their horror at what occurred.

Reverend HH Bowen of the Methodist Episcopal Church, Reverend Stevens Pastor, also noted, "Our entire church is horrified by this terrible tragic occurrence.

We believe in constituted authority as the means by which to settle differences."

Father Coyle's legacy is that he lived his word.

Our Lord reminds us through St. John's Gospel, "Greater love no one has than to lay down his life for his friends."

(upbeat music) [Father Jerabek] Father Coyle's last words we wrote shortly before his death, "Give, give, until it hurts.

Then, only then, is there sacrifice."

(somber music) [Narrator] For more information visit www.fathercoyle.org.

(gentle music) (upbeat music)