Expanding the Research: Michael Finnegan Discusses the Evolution of ACHS and the Barry Award Dinner

The American Catholic Historical Society is a national organization headquartered in Philadelphia devoted to research and educational endeavors pertaining to Catholic history and happenings. Founded in 1884, the society has revamped its mission to deliver information to the public through new avenues of communication and partnerships that will allow for deeper research into its archives and external works.

The ACHS hosts an annual fundraiser, The Commodore Barry Award Dinner, to commemorate another year of the society’s work and recognize leaders in the Catholic community. GPA had the opportunity to interview Michael Finnegan, President of ACHS, to discuss the award dinner and other society initiatives.

Madi Costigan: You have been on the American Catholic Historical Society’s board for almost 20 years, and you have been the president for almost 12 years. What does this organization mean to you and how have you seen its mission come to life over the years?

Michael Finnegan: I'm involved in a number of nonprofit boards that have been in existence since the late 1800s. In any organization of that longevity, it’s important for the current members to not allow the works of the people in the past 150 years or so to be misused or forgotten. So, when I became president in 2014, I was the youngest on the board at the time and the mission was pretty limited to maintaining their headquarters and publishing the Quarterly Journal.

We have spent my time as President refocusing on education and dissemination of the information. We expanded our board for more diversity in age, gender, race, talent, and geographical location, so we now have an energetic society that's become better known across the country and the world. We provide the programs, research, lectures, and the award-winning journal, and we want to honor and do justice to the work of what's come before us.

MC: What is your professional background and how did you get involved with ACHS?

Michael Finnegan: When the board made me president, it was full of clergy and academics, and they said they wanted someone being the president that came with a different perspective. I'm an engineer by education and I'm a director at a Laboratory Informatics company. I've just always been involved in Catholic organizations. I've been on the Board of Directors at Roman Catholic High School for decades, I’m involved in my parish.

I got pulled into that and the Catholic Church and its history. I wasn't much of a history fan in high school, but I have loved learning the history and digging back through our own archives. The society needed to still keep up what it was doing, but it needed to be run as a business as well, and I think that's why they pulled me in.

MC: ACHS is headquartered in Philadelphia, houses its historical collections at the Catholic Historical Research Center of the Archdiocese of Philadelphia, and awards a research travel grant each year that allows scholars to conduct research in the Philadelphia area. How is Philadelphia a valuable location to position and research American Catholic History, and for you personally?

Michael Finnegan: I was born and raised in Philadelphia. Even though I haven't lived in the city for 20-some years now, I am still a Philadelphia guy. I went to college at Drexel, and I lived at Broad and Erie.

It's where the United States officially started. We have the 2026 celebrations coming up, which we are going to be a part of in some ways, working with a few different groups. Independence Hall is a few blocks away and we can go there any time. Philadelphia was the first diocese in the country. We're a block away from Old St. Joseph's, which houses the first seminary and Catholic University. Old St. Mary's is right across the street, which was the first cathedral and many prominent Philadelphia Catholics are buried there, like Commodore John Barry and Thomas Fitzsimons, one of the two Catholic signers of the U.S. Constitution. We actually have some of his desk and a bust of him in our headquarters. It pretty much all started in Philadelphia and in this neighborhood.

We also have university partnerships; our quarterly journal is published out of Villanova Press. We have an office space right there, and that's where our editor sits and they work on the journal, so we have a really close relationship with Villanova. 

MC: You mentioned that ACHS has been expanding its reach across the country, how do you scale your efforts nationally?

Michael Finnegan: It's a national society. Our Vice President is in Dayton and our Barry Award winner this year is not from Philadelphia. We've made connections with other universities so that through using MUSE and JSTOR, our quarterly journal now gets picked up by those universities' libraries, and that's where we get the worldwide attention. They can subscribe to them, and they can get them electronically and research all of our journals and records. It's about modernizing and going to where people can get things electronically and that has really expanded our footprint.

We're also providing grants through the connections with universities for future historians to travel here or to where they need to go to do their research, in the hopes that they can write an article that will get in the journal. We're not telling them to become members, but we are trying to foster and grow the next generation of people interested in researching Catholic history.

MC: What are some challenges that you face in making sure that people have that accessibility or getting your messages out to the public?

Michael Finnegan: It's about not being the best kept secret. It's about getting information out there. There are no more print newspapers, so we've had to dive pretty deeply into social media, which is the way you get a hold of people these days. The social media committee publishes interesting stories about Catholic individuals in general or those that are more location driven, we have YouTube videos, the Facebook page, and Instagram.

We have to provide the information the way people will consume it these days. Even though we do have the print journal, many people still read it online anyway. Once we get them interested in us and drive them to our webpage to see what else it is that we may do, they'll find out about our events and socials in the Philadelphia area.

We've been digitizing our records, but we also recently started scanning about a million and a half pages of Catholic newspapers from across the country, because we found that we had probably the largest collection and some of the things in our collection exist nowhere else. That's a partnership we have recently started with Boston University and as they are scanned, they will become available.

There's just so much stuff out there to read. I go back and read our old records as well. During COVID, I went back and read the minutes of what the society and its president was doing during the Spanish flu, trying to make some connections and see what they did to maybe guide me into what I should be saying and doing. It's interesting to go back and read over the history of the society to see what the world was like at that point in time, how it was communicated, how it affected things, and how they handled it to give you a little more perspective of how to do it now.

I always tell people that we don't make judgments or determinations, we just report what's there. It's not right to give our interpretation of anything. In 100 years, someone can look back at what we did and they can make an interpretation if they want. We just put out the facts and let people make their own determinations. It's not just for academics to go back and do the research. It's normal people, you know, like myself, just going back and reading through the old records. It's fun and educational.

MC: The Society’s origins trace back to Pope Leo XIII’s action to increase public accessibility to Catholic historical documents. In a time when Pope Leo XIV—himself connected to Philadelphia’s Catholic community—leads the Church, do you see a “full circle” moment in how ACHS carries forward that original vision? What does it mean to you and ACHS that the new Pope comes from the United States?

Michael Finnegan: Everyone in the country is excited to have an American pope, let alone one that came from around here. The fact that he knew of Pope Leo XIII’s visions and what it meant to him to open up the archives, and he took on that name, means a lot.

One of our early presidents, Monsignor Henry, was the subject of an Eakins painting called “The Translator” and over the top of his shoulder in the background is actually Pope Leo XIII opening up books, so there was a close tie between them. In our archives we have a letter where Pope Leo XIII blessed our society to exist back in 1884. Every year, I talk about Pope Leo XIII, and how our society got started. Now we have Pope Leo XIV, and it's exciting that he's aware of us, what we’ve done, and our city.

MC: The ACHS hosts lectures, cultural events, and the annual Commodore Barry Award Dinner in Philadelphia. How do these gatherings further the Society’s mission to connect faith, history, and community?

Michael Finnegan: The Barry Award Dinner is our one and only fundraiser that we do. It honors great people, like Kerry Robinson this year, and we've honored all of our city archbishops. We've honored Justice Scalia. If you go to our website, you see the list of awardees. 1982 was the first award to Joe McLaughlin, Sr, and just last year, we gave the award to Joe McLaughlin, Jr., as the CEO of Harford Trust. So we even came full circle on that one.

I approached Kerry Robinson two years ago when she was with the Leadership Institute, and she was worthy of it then, but scheduling issues came up for her to receive the award. Then in the interim, she became CEO of Catholic Charities USA, so she is even more deserving to get this award. She's based down in Virginia, but her family is with the Raskob Foundation right down in Wilmington, so she has a lot of local ties and ties with Villanova.

We honor people and then we get some pretty good press and recognition out of that. That's our main event to get the word out to some new people. We see a definite uptick every year after the event of people who are joining the society, and that gets you the quarterly Journal and a discount to events. Then, once they become familiar with us and they see our scheduled events, they will come down to what I call our “friend-raisers.” We do St. Patrick's Day, Christmas, and a garden party.

We also do multiple lectures a month, some at the house and some also simulcast. Once travel opened up again after COVID, we found that we had so many people from across the country watching our lectures that we put some infrastructure in to continue simulcasting. We get a group of visitors at the house, and then we get another 50 to 100 people logging in online, watching the same lecture. We record those lectures, then we put them up on our YouTube page to watch later on.