Catholic Caucus: The True Account of Prisoner Claude Newman (1944)

The following true story of Claude Newman took place in Mississippi in 1944. The account was told by Father O’Leary, a priest from Mississippi, who was directly involved with the events. He has left for posterity an audio recording it.

Claude Newman was a negro man who worked the fields for a landowner. He had married when he was 17 years old to a woman of the same age. One day, two years later, he was out plowing the fields. Another worker ran to tell Claude that his wife was screaming from the house. Immediately Claude ran into his house and found a man attacking his wife. Claude saw red, grabbed an axe and split the man’s head open. When they rolled the man over, they discovered that it was the favorite employee of the landowner for whom Claude worked. Claude was arrested. He was later sentenced for murder and condemned to die in the electric chair.

While he was in jail awaiting execution, he shared a cell-block of some sort with four other prisoners. One night, the five men were sitting around talking and they ran out of conversation. Claude noticed a medal on a string around another prisoner’s neck...

I had my doubts about some aspects of the story, so I did a little searching. I wondered why he was being executed if he acted in defense of his own wife. Granted, under Jim Crow laws, blacks were often the victims of grave injustice, but still, I wondered.

As it turns out, the Newman was not entirely innocent in the killing of the other man. This does not change the significance of the apparitions of Our Lady or of Newman’s conversion or the conversion of the other prisoner about to be executed. But in the name of truth, it’s good to be aware that the version being circulated is inaccurate. He killed a man who had been abusive toward his grandmother who had raised him and his brother, but not when the man was in the act of abusing his grandmother. Moreover, he then robbed the house and fled. At least that’s the best information that the Benedictine monk and icon painter of Mount Angel Abbey in Oregon, who has painted an icon of Our Lady with Claude Newman, has been able to find out. It is, of course, possible, that this account of the crime is not the full story, given the nature of law enforcement and treatment of blacks in Mississippi at that time. So take it all with a grain of salt.

The miracles, however, remain as significant as ever. It’s just the precipitating crime that differs in these two accounts.

http://seanhyland.wordpress.com/2009/01/21/503/

and scroll down to the chronology near the end.

Correction: he took money from the man he killed, not from the house. He probably did not get a fair trial—that the man he killed had abused his foster-mother apparently was not properly factored into his defense. It would seem that manslaughter rather than murder would have been the most he was guilty of, but from this account, it’s impossible to say how much evidence there is of the abuse of his foster-mother.

The whole story of the crime is murky, though I’m sure there is information not summarized in the story I linked to. Newman does not appear to have been married at the time he killed the other man.

That he did not get a fair trial seems likely, but the man he killed appears to have been another black, not a white man.

Again, I emphasize that I am not suggesting that the apparitions or the miraculous conversions are insignificant. They are very significant. I’m just saying that the version of the story most commonly circulating has been significantly altered—going back, apparently (though this isn’t entirely clear) to the initial radio broadcast account by the priest, Fr. O’Leary.

Yes, and the point is that Fr. O’Leary modified the story when he told it in his radio talk. In the link I posted, there’s some speculation as to why he changed things, but he did change things. People should know. This is not the first time that stories of saints and of miracles have been modified to “make a better story” (for whatever reasons people thought were “better.”) This helps to explain why some of the stories of the lives of saints have historically untrue material in them.

It does not change the religious value of the stories. But we need to be aware that these sorts of changes take place so that we do not feel like we, as Catholics, have to vouch for the historicity of every detail in the lives of the saints that have been handed down to us. The Church does not require that. History was part of literature until the early 1800s—telling history was not assumed to involve the utmost veracity of every detail. Thucydides, one of the first great Greek historians, inserted his own words as speeches in the mouths of his heroes. Everyone knew he did and people expected that.

Today people expect that every detail of what someone says is “historical truth” actually happened the way the account says it did. We have to be aware that this is a new idea, that it was not assumed by the great saints and bishops and popes of the Church.

Here’s a good example of how a good story, one that ought to be known and told, was already modified in some of its details already by one of the eyewitnesses and chief actors in the story, 20 years after the events happened.

We need to know that this happened in order to know how better to defend our faith. I have no doubt that Our Lady appeared to Claude Newman and that Claude Newman appeared to the other prisoner as he was about to die. But people who are skeptics about Marian devotion and Marian miracles, if they were to pursue this story (because some of the details don’t quite seem right) and discover that the version circulating is contradicted by readily available evidence, would understandably be inclined to doubt that Our Lady appeared, would understandably think that the whole Marian business is a fraud.

We need to know what happened with this story so that we are prepared to give account for our faith as St. Peter told us to be prepared to do.

That’s why I posted what I posted. I will be using the differing versions of this story when I teach the lives of saints, when I teach about the work of hagiologists who study the different versions of the lives of saints.

If we don’t pay attention to these matters, we do Our Lady and Our Lord a disservice because in today’s world, people have an understanding of “historical truth” that no one had before the 1700s and 1800s. That itself is a historical truth—that assumptions about historical truth changed over time, historically. We need to know this so we don’t get backed into a corner defending details in lives of saints stories that are patently absurd.

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