1. Charles Coughlin was the founding priest of the National Shrine of the Little Flower.
62 Facts About Charles Coughlin
1. 2.
Charles Coughlin was ordained to the priesthood in 1916, and in 1923 he was assigned to the National Shrine of the Little Flower in Royal Oak, Michigan.
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Charles Coughlin began broadcasting his sermons during a time of increasing anti-Catholic sentiment across the globe.
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Charles Coughlin vanished from the public arena, working as a parish pastor until retiring in 1966.
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Charles Coughlin was born on October 25,1891, in Hamilton, Ontario, the only child of Irish Catholic Amelia and Thomas Coughlin.
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Charles Coughlin prepared for the priesthood at St Basil's Seminary and was ordained in Toronto in 1916.
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Unwilling to accept the monastic life, Charles Coughlin applied for incardination, or transfer, out of the Basilians to the Archdiocese of Detroit.
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Charles Coughlin was accepted in 1923 and moved to Detroit.
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In 1925, when Charles Coughlin was exiting a building in Detroit, he saw a man stealing a trunk from the back of his car.
10.
When Charles Coughlin confronted the thief, he dropped the trunk and swung at him.
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In 1926, Charles Coughlin began broadcasting his Sunday sermons from local radio station WJR.
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Charles Coughlin later said that he started his radio show in response to the Ku Klux Klan burning a cross at the shrine and wanted to provide support to local Catholics.
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Charles Coughlin started on WJR with a weekly, hour-long radio program.
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Richards encouraged Charles Coughlin to focus his program more on politics than religion.
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Charles Coughlin then started attacking income inequality, blaming the American banking system and the Jews for the poverty of American workers.
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When Charles Coughlin's contract ended with CBS, the network decided not to renew it.
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Charles Coughlin's show became the Golden Hour of the Shrine of the Little Flower, with WJR and WGAR in Cleveland serving as core stations.
18.
Charles Coughlin was invited to attend the June 1932 Democratic National Convention in Chicago.
19.
An early supporter of Roosevelt's New Deal reforms, Charles Coughlin coined the popular phrase "Roosevelt or Ruin".
20.
In 1934, Charles Coughlin founded the National Union for Social Justice, a nationalistic workers' rights organization.
21.
In 1934, Roosevelt sent Kennedy and Detroit Mayor Frank Murphy to visit Charles Coughlin and try to temper his attacks.
22.
Charles Coughlin visited Roosevelt several times at his estate in Hyde Park, New York.
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Charles Coughlin began denouncing him as a tool of Wall Street.
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Charles Coughlin opposed the New Deal with growing vehemence, attacking Roosevelt, capitalists and alleged Jewish conspirators.
25.
Charles Coughlin encouraged the third-party candidacy of Louisiana Governor Huey Long for president in the 1936 election, but that was cut short by Long's assassination in 1935.
26.
Gallagher was a strong supporter of Charles Coughlin and refused to stop him.
27.
Charles Coughlin opened a new church building at the Shrine of the Little Flower in 1936, an octagonal structure shaped like a tent.
28.
At a NUSJ rally at Cleveland Municipal Stadium on May 11,1936, Charles Coughlin predicted that NUSF would "take half of Ohio" in the upcoming primary election, citing multiple congressional candidates with NUSJ backing.
29.
Charles Coughlin promised his radio audience that he would retire from broadcasting if he failed to deliver nine million votes for Lemke; he only received 850,000 votes.
30.
Charles Coughlin then left retirement to return to the Golden Hour, in honor of Gallagher's memory.
31.
In October 1937, Mooney rebuked Charles Coughlin for casting aspersions on Roosevelt's sanity over his nomination of US Senator Hugo Black to the US Supreme Court.
32.
In May 1938, Charles Coughlin called for a "crusade against the anti-Christian forces of the Red Revolution" in Social Justice.
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Charles Coughlin referred to 'millions' of Christians who had allegedly been murdered in the Soviet Union by its government.
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When Charles Coughlin failed to deliver them, all three stations canceled it.
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Charles Coughlin then pulled all the future broadcasts from the three stations, accusing them of being under "Jewish ownership".
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When Charles Coughlin's operating permit was denied, he was temporarily silenced.
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Charles Coughlin worked around the new restrictions by purchasing air time and playing his speeches via transcription.
38.
Charles Coughlin was praised in January 1939 by Regime Fascista, an Italian newspaper aligned with the fascist government of Italy.
39.
Charles Coughlin's aim was to stop the repeal by Congress of the Neutrality Acts, a series of arms embargoes passed during the 1930s to ensure American neutrality in a European conflict.
40.
Charles Coughlin then issued a statement, saying that while he was not a member of the Christian Front and disavowed violence, he did not disassociate himself from the group.
41.
Charles Coughlin called the Front "pro-American, pro-Christian, anti-Communist and anti-Nazi".
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Charles Coughlin now had to rely on Social Justice to reach his followers.
43.
Unable to mail Social Justice to its subscribers, Charles Coughlin was confined to distributing it by private delivery trucks only in the Boston area.
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Charles Coughlin complied with Mooney's order and Social Justice ceased publication.
45.
Charles Coughlin served as pastor of the Shrine of the Little Flower until his retirement in 1966.
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Charles Coughlin died in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, in 1979 at age 88.
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Charles Coughlin was buried in the Holy Sepulchre Cemetery in Southfield, Michigan.
48.
Charles Coughlin believed Jewish bankers were behind the 1917 October Revolution in Russia that brought the Bolsheviks into power, backing the Jewish Bolshevism conspiracy theory.
49.
In January 1930, Charles Coughlin began attacking socialism and Soviet Communism, both ideologies strongly opposed by the Catholic Church.
50.
In 1933, Charles Coughlin criticized Roosevelt's decision to extend diplomatic recognition by the United States of the Soviet Union.
51.
Charles Coughlin criticized American capitalists, stating that their greed was making communist ideologies attractive to workers.
52.
The historian Michael Kazin wrote that Charles Coughlin's followers saw capitalism and communism as equally evil.
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One of Charles Coughlin's slogans was "Less care for internationalism and more concern for national prosperity", which appealed to isolationists and many Irish Catholics.
54.
Charles Coughlin spoke about the negative influence of what he termed as "money changers".
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Charles Coughlin said that the Great Depression was a "cash famine" and proposed the nationalization of the Federal Reserve System as the solution.
56.
In January 1934, Charles Coughlin testified before the US Congress, saying,.
57.
Charles Coughlin urged Roosevelt to use the unlimited coinage of silver to inflate the money supply and reorganize the financial system.
58.
Charles Coughlin said that Congress had the authority under Article I of the US Constitution to coin money and regulate its value.
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Charles Coughlin's views mirrored those of Richards, who held reactionary conservative beliefs.
60.
In 1936, Charles Coughlin expressed sympathy for the fascist governments of Adolf Hitler in Germany and Benito Mussolini in Italy, terming them as an antidote to Communism.
61.
However, in February 1939, when the American Nazi organization the German American Bund held a large rally in New York City, Charles Coughlin immediately distanced himself from them.
62.
Charles Coughlin was critical of Prohibitionism, which he said was the work of "fanatics".