Farley, John Murphy (1842–1918), cardinal and fourth archbishop of New York, was born 20 April 1842 in Newtown Hamilton, Co. Armagh, son of Philip Farrelly, a prosperous farmer, and Catherine Farrelly (née Murphy). He changed the spelling of his family name in 1872. His parents died when he was a child, but an uncle enabled him to attend St Macartan's College, Monaghan. He emigrated to the USA in 1864, completed his college education the following year at St John's College, Fordham, NY, and then entered St Joseph's provincial seminary, in Troy, NY, as a student for the archdiocese of New York. In 1867 he was sent to Rome to complete his theological studies, and was ordained a priest there on 11 June 1870. As a student in Rome in the autumn of 1869, Farley first met his bishop and future patron, Archbishop John McCloskey, when McCloskey came to Rome to attend the first Vatican council.
On his return to the US, Farley spent two years as a country curate in St Peter's church, New Brighton, Staten Island. In 1872 he was appointed secretary to Archbishop McCloskey, a post which he held until 1884, when he was named pastor of St Gabriel's church in Manhattan, a large working-class Irish immigrant parish. While remaining pastor of St Gabriel's for the next eighteen years, Farley was appointed vicar general of the archdiocese by Archbishop Michael Corrigan in 1891, a domestic prelate in 1892, and on 21 December 1895 he was consecrated titular bishop of Zeugma and New York's first auxiliary bishop. On 15 September 1902, at the age of 60, he succeeded his 63-year-old predecessor as archbishop of New York, and was made a cardinal on 28 October 1911.
Throughout Farley's sixteen years as archbishop, New York remained the most populous and most influential diocese in the American catholic church. However, the catholic population registered only a modest growth from 1,200,000 to 1,325,000 between 1902 and 1918, because of the beginning of the exodus of middle-class catholics to the suburbs outside the archdiocese. None the less, the number of churches in the archdiocese of New York increased from 276 to 388, and the number of priests from 716 to 1,117. Even more impressive was the growth in the number of parish schools, which almost doubled from 96 to 188. Farley's greatest pastoral challenge was to care for the massive influx of Italian immigrants, many of them poor and religiously ignorant, who numbered about 400,000 by 1918. Like his predecessor, Archbishop Corrigan, Farley took an active interest in their welfare, increasing the number of Italian national parishes from 18 in 1903 to 44 in 1918.
Farley was the first archbishop of New York who had an oversupply of priests. One reason for this windfall was the effectiveness of Cathedral College, the minor seminary planned by Archbishop Corrigan and opened by Farley in 1903. It was a daring American innovation in seminary education, a day school consisting of four years of high school and two years of college. Farley showed considerably less boldness, however, in defending the interests of his major seminary, St Joseph's seminary, Dunwoodie, which, for a brief period, had become one of the rare centres of American catholic intellectual life in the early twentieth century. When Dunwoodie came under suspicion of modernism in the wake of the encyclical Pascendi (1907), Farley forced the resignation of the rector and engineered the suppression of the New York Review, the leading American catholic theological journal, which was sponsored by the seminary.
Catholic higher education also made notable strides in New York during Farley's administration. St John's College became Fordham University, and three women's colleges were founded: the College of New Rochelle (1904), the College of Mount St Vincent (1910), and Manhattanville College of the Sacred Heart (1917). Unlike Corrigan, Farley was a staunch supporter of the Catholic University of America in Washington, DC, earning the gratitude of James, Cardinal Gibbons. Farley also provided indispensable financial support for the Catholic encyclopedia (1907–14).
Farley had to confront a major crisis in the years 1910–16 when a series of state and city investigations revealed numerous shortcomings in some catholic charitable institutions. The situation was remedied in 1920 under Farley's former secretary and successor, Archbishop Patrick J. Hayes, who amalgamated the numerous catholic charitable institutions and services into the Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of New York. Perhaps Farley's proudest moment as archbishop was the celebration of the centenary of the diocese in 1908, which became a demonstration of catholic political power in New York City. The celebration also underscored the strongly Irish character of New York catholicism, epitomised by the presence of Michael, Cardinal Logue (qv), archbishop of Armagh.
Farley was a genial man, short of stature but dignified, who never lost the trace of his soft Irish accent. He was a methodical administrator, diligent in the performance of his pastoral duties, with an encyclopedic knowledge of the archdiocese. He was fluent in Italian and French and had a working knowledge of Spanish. He was the author of two books, History of St Patrick's cathedral (1908) and The life of John Cardinal McCloskey (1918), the latter ghost-written by Mgr Peter Guilday of the Catholic University of America.
Like his first patron, Cardinal McCloskey, Farley was a peace-loving man who instinctively avoided confrontation. On his appointment as archbishop, he immediately sought to unify a clergy who had been polarised into liberal and conservative factions under Archbishop Corrigan. In that effort he was largely successful. ‘There is not a clique or a faction in the diocese,‘ boasted his vicar general, Mgr Michael J. Lavelle, at the time of Farley's death. He died at Orienta Point in suburban Long Island of pneumonia on 17 September 1918 and was buried beneath the high altar of St Patrick's cathedral. His papers are in the archives of the archdiocese of New York.