Francis McCullagh

McCullagh was born in Bridge Street, Omagh, County Tyrone, in 1874, the son of James McCullagh, a publican originally from the Gortin area, and Bridget McCullagh.[2][3]

He began his journalism career as a staff reporter at the Glasgow Observer (later Scottish Catholic Observer), and would continue writing for the newspaper through 1906–1937.[4] From 1898, he was a correspondent for the New York Herald. In 1903, he was living in Japan, working for the English-language newspaper The Japan Times. Observing the growing tension between the Empire of Japan and the Russian Empire, he studied the Russian language. In 1904, he moved to Port Arthur, the major Russian military base in Manchuria, obtaining a post as a correspondent for the Novi Kraï (New Land) newspaper of Port Arthur. At the start of the Russo-Japanese War, he became a non-military observer embedded within the Imperial Russian Army.[5] In March 1905, he was evacuated as a prisoner of war, traveling from Dalny to Ujina on the Nippon Yusen liner Awa Maru.[6] His experiences were published in 1906 as With the Cossacks: Being the Story of an Irishman Who Rode With the Cossacks Throughout the Russo-Japanese War.

He subsequently returned to Russia to cover the 1918-1922 Siberian Intervention to assist the anti-communist White Army of Admiral Alexander Kolchak during the Russian Civil War. At one point, the Bolshevik Red Army captured him. While a prisoner, he managed to interview Patriarch Tikhon of Moscow. His book about the experience, A Prisoner of the Reds, was first published in 1921.

During the Soviet anti-religious persecution taking place under the cover of the Russian famine of 1921, McCullagh served as a correspondent for the New York Herald. Along with those of Fr. Edmund A. Walsh, McCullagh's detailed reports about the 1923 Moscow show trial prosecution by Nikolai Krylenko of Archbishop Jan Cieplak, Exarch Leonid Feodorov, Monsignor Konstanty Budkiewicz, and other Catholic clergy and laity reached a worldwide audience, much to the shock of the Soviet State.[7] McCullagh's detailed account of his visit and of the Cieplak show trial were published in the 1924 volume The Bolshevik Persecution of Christianity, which was immediately translated into French, German and Spanish.

On 10 April 1923, People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs Georgy Chicherin wrote a letter to fellow Politburo member Joseph Stalin, which described the political fallout from Fr. Walsh and Captain McCullagh's successful efforts to globally publicize both the Cieplak show trial and the execution of Monsignor Konstanty Budkiewicz on Easter Sunday, 1923. In America, France, and the United Kingdom, efforts to gain diplomatic recognition for the USSR had suffered a major setback. In Westminster, Labour MPs had been flooded by petitions "demanding the defense of Cieplak and Budkiewicz", by "worker's organizations", "dying socialists", and "professionalists". In the United States, Republican Senator William Borah had been about to discuss possible recognition of the USSR with U.S. Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes. Due to both the trial and Monsignor Budkiewicz's subsequent execution, the meeting had been cancelled and the senator had been forced to indefinitely postpone the founding of a committee to press for diplomatic negotiations. Chicherin explained that the outside world saw the continuing anti-religious campaign "as nothing other than naked religious persecution." Chicherin expressed fear that, if Russian Orthodox Patriarch Tikhon were similarly tried and sentenced to death, the news would, "worsen much further our international position in all our relations." He concluded by proposing "the rejection in advance of the death sentence on Tikhon".[8]

Soviet Foreign Commissar Georgy Chicherin very likely once again had both Fr. Walsh and Captain McCullagh in mind when he confided years later in Bishop Michel d'Herbigny, "We Communists feel sure we can triumph over London Capitalism. But Rome will prove a harder nut to crack... Without Rome, religion would die. But Rome sends out, for the service of her religion, propagandists of every nationality. They are more effective than guns. It is certain it will be a long struggle."[9]

In 1927, Father Wilfrid Parsons arranged payment from the Knights of Columbus to "smuggle" McCullagh into Mexico to cover the Cristero War for an American audience.[10]

In 1937, he covered the Spanish Civil War.[11]

McCullagh died in White Plains, New York in 1956.

• (1906). With the Cossacks; Being the Story of an Irishman who Rode with the Cossacks Throughout the Russo-Japanese War. London: Eveleigh Nash. OCLC 777525 [Reprinted by Naval and Military Press, 2009].
• (1910). The Fall of Abdul-Hamid, Methuen & Co., Ltd.
• (1912). Italy's War for a Desert, Being Some Experiences of a War-Correspondent with the Italians in Tripoli. London, Herbert and Daniel.
• (1921). A Prisoner of the Reds, the Story of a British Officer Captured in Siberia. London. John Murray.
• (1924). The Bolshevik Persecution of Christianity. New York, E. P. Dutton [1st Pub. London, John Murray, 1924].
• (1928). Red Mexico; A Reign of Terror in America. New York, L. Carrier & Co.
• (1937). In Franco's Spain: Being the Experiences of an Irish War Correspondent During the Great Civil War. London, Burns, Oates & Washbourne, Ltd.

• Horgan, John (2009). "Journalism, Catholicism and Anti-Communism in an Era of Revolution: Francis McCullagh, War Correspondent, 1874-1956," Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review, Vol. 98, No. 390, pp. 169–184.
• Horgan, John (2009). "The Great War Correspondent: Francis McCullagh, 1874-1956," Irish Historical Studies, XXXVI (44), pp. 542–563.
• McNamara, Patrick J. (2006). "Russia, Rome, and Recognition: American Catholics and Anticommunism in the 1920s," U.S. Catholic Historian, Vol. 24, No. 2, pp. 71–88.

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