Patrick William Riordan (August 27, 1841 – December 27, 1914) was a Canadian-born American prelate of the Catholic Church who served as Archbishop of San Francisco from 1884 until his death in 1914.

[3] However, the privations in Ireland of the Great Famine soon forced the Riordan family to return to New Brunswick, They finally immigrated to Chicago, Illinois, in 1848.

[4][5] As a boy in Chicago, Riordan established a lifelong friendship with John Ireland, the future Archbishop of Saint Paul.

[7] Riordan received his early education at the University of Saint Mary of the Lake, which functioned as a parochial school as well as a seminary at the time.

The bishops in the United States established the college to serve as a residence for American seminarians studying at the pontifical universities in that city.

[1] On his return to Chicago the same year, he was appointed to the faculty of the seminary department at the University of St. Mary of the Lake, first as professor of canon law and Church history before filling the chair of dogmatic theology.

[15] Following Dunne's death in December 1868,[16] Duggan's refusal to attend the funeral drew sharp criticism from Catholics across the city and he appointed Riordan as pastor of St. Patrick's "in order to make some reparation.

[12] He received his episcopal consecration on September 16, 1883, from Archbishop Patrick Feehan, with Bishops William George McCloskey and Silas Chatard serving as co-consecrators, at St. James in Chicago.

[12] Riordan arrived in San Francisco in November 1883 and began to relieve the elderly Archbishop Alemany of his administrative duties.

[1] During the council, Riordan brought his brother Dennis to serve as his theological consultant and chaired the committee overseeing the Bureau of Catholic Indian Missions.

[12] In 1884, Riordan's first full year in San Francisco, the archdiocese contained 175 priests, 128 churches, and 25 chapels and stations to serve a Catholic population of 200,000.

Biographer James P. Gaffey noted that Riordan's "closest friends were numbered among the so-called progressives or 'Americanizers,' such as Gibbons, Ireland, Keane, and Spalding.

In writing to Cardinal Camillo Mazzella in Rome, Corrigan said: "In the ultra-Americanism of these prelates, I foresee dangers and sound the alarm.

"[35] [36] The textbook controversy and the growing presence of the anti-Catholic American Protective Association in San Fran led Riordan to appoint his chancellor, Reverend Peter Yorke, as editor of the archdiocesan newspaper The Monitor to respond to Protestant attacks.

"[39] Riordana later elaborated: "[T]he right must be accorded to [Yorke] as to every other citizen to make public his views on the rostrum or in the newspapers of the country...The Catholic Church does not dictate to its priests or its people the policy which they should adopt in political matters.

"[40]Riordan played a significant role in the first case that came before the Permanent Court of Arbitration at The Hague, which centered on the Pious Fund of the Californias.

Senator William Morris Stewart of Nevada to seek diplomatic intervention by the U.S. government to obtain payment for the fund's interest since 1869.

In 1899, Secretary of State John Hay directed Powell Clayton, the American ambassador to Mexico, to reopen negotiations on the interest payments.

[44] The case opened on September 15, 1902, and concluded on October 14th, when the court announced its unanimous verdict in favor of the United States.

[46] In 1902, Pope Leo XIII named Bishop George Thomas Montgomery of the Diocese of Monterey-Los Angeles as coadjutor archbishop of San Francisco.

[47][48] Riordan was in Omaha, Nebraska, while traveling to an event in Baltimore when a devastating earthquake struck San Francisco on April 18, 1906.

[49] Before he left for San Francisco on April 21st, Riordan telegraphed an appeal for donations to every Catholic bishop in the country: "The work of fifty years is blotted out.

To replace him, Riordan wanted the Vatican to appoint Reverend Edward Hanna, a theology professor at Saint Bernard's Seminary in Rochester, New York.

[55] However Reverend Andrew Breen, another theologian at Saint Bernards, wrote to Cardinal Girolamo Maria Gotti in Rome, challenging Hanna's orthodoxy and accusing him of Modernism.

[56][57] On December 24, 1908, Pope Pius X appointed Denis J. O'Connell, then rector of the Catholic University of America, as an auxiliary bishop in San Francisco.