Andrew Jackson Shipman was an American scholar and lawyer. He was the first to translate into English The Holy Mass According to the Greek Rite.
Background
Andrew was born on October 15, 1857 in Springvale, Fairfax County, Virginia, United States, and reared in the desperate days of the Civil War and Reconstruction. He was the son of John James and Priscilla (Carroll) Shipman.
With his father in the Confederate forces, the boy was dubbed a "little rebel Zouave" by Unionist soldiers who occupied the region. On his father's side his ancestry was English, while the Carrolls traced their descent from Thomas, an Irishman, who settled in Maryland in 1725.
Education
Taught by his learned grandfather, Bennett Carroll, and by a succession of stranded schoolmasters, the boy Andrew was amply prepared for Georgetown Academy, Washington, where he was sent upon the recommendation of one of his teachers, a Roman Catholic and a former officer in the Austrian army, from whom he had learned some German and considerable European history. He completed the preparatory course in 1874, and four years later was graduated from Georgetown College. He learnt Czech from Stefan Melzer. He acquired, in 1886, a degree in law from the University of the City of New York.
Career
In 1879, Shipman was back in Fairfax County, editing the Vienna Times. The following year Shipman found employment as a superintendent of the coal mines of W. P. Rend & Company in Hocking Valley, Ohio. Here he took a deep interest in the welfare of the foreign laborers and undertook to learn a number of the Slavic dialects. Among the miners were many Catholics of the Greek and Ruthenian rites, to whom the Roman Catholic service seemed as strange as that of another creed.
In 1884 he acquired a competitive clerkship in the New York Custom House, where he challenged attention as an investigator of the sugar frauds. In 1891 he became a law partner of Edmund Mooney and in 1893 the firm of Blandy, Mooney, & Shipman was formed.
He was president of the board of Mohansic State Hospital, a member of the Board of Regents of the University of the State of New York (1913), an associate manager of the Sevilla Home for Children, a member of the state constitutional convention of 1915, a leader in the Catholic Theatre movement, and a promoter of the Marquette League for Indian missionaries.
He wrote of the Eastern peoples and their religious forms in the Catholic Encyclopedia, the Century, McClure's Magazine, the Messenger, and Pravoslavny Viestnik, and he spoke of their problems from numerous platforms. In 1895, he was associated with Rev. Joseph Chaplinski in organizing a Ruthenian Greek Church in New York; he brought a stone from Jerusalem for the Church of St. Joachim which the Syrians were building.
On his sudden death in 1915, he was buried from St. Patrick's Cathedral.
Achievements
Andrew Jackson Shipman won recognition as a forceful, diligent advocate, and a respected counselor in labor cases, in the St. Stephen's Protestant Episcopal Church cases, and in the business of the Greek, Ruthenian, and Slavic peoples. His keenest interest remained - the problem of the Easternrites Catholic immigrants. He persistently labored to bring about a sympathetic union between Roman and Orthodox Greek Catholics and to Americanize these immigrants in a worthy sense. He helped in organizing of Ruthenian Greek Church in New York.
While a student, he joined the Roman Catholic Church, to which his mother returned. He exposed the attempts of Orthodox priests to proselytize by using Greek ceremonials; and he prevented the legislative sanction sought by the Russian Orthodox bishop for the use of the term Russian Greek Catholic Church.
Connections
He married Adair, sister of Edmund Mooney, his partner.
