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The American Catholic |
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Chapter Three |
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The Rise of Anti-Catholicism Foreigners & Catholics Go Home In 1834 in a little town called Charleston Massachusetts the Unitarians were in control and were the elite. North of Charleston was a hill called Mt. Benedict and there lived a cloister of nuns, Ursalines, that ran a girls finishing school. It had about sixty students, mostly Unitarian rich kids and twelve nuns. The Mother Superior was Sister Edmond St. George and she ran the school with a iron fist. She wined and dined with the wealthiest classes in Charleston and she made no attempt at converting the Unitarians and in fact catered liturgical services more in a Protestant fashion than a Catholic one. In 1834 a young woman of Charleston wrote a book entitled Six Months in a convent. She had been a servant at the convent and the book was dull and full of execrations that would shock only a fundamentalist preacher. She was fired for dishonesty and was angry at Sister Edmond. Later that year another girl made a real escape. She was a nun and mentally disordered. She made it to her brother’s house and the next day voluntarily returned to the convent and the infirmary where she was being treated for her nervous breakdown. The news spread quickly that she had been returned to the convent kicking and screaming all the way. It was reported in the newspaper and the local elite and Congregationalist ministers began to stir up the people to storm the convent and rescue the girl. Homilies were delivered on that Sunday about the evils of the Ursalines and Catholicism to large numbers of people. And a mob planned to storm the convent the next night. Sister Edmond met the mob at the convent gates and stood her ground and dismissed them. They surprisingly went away. A second mob was not as easily swayed. Sister Edmond threatened them with a thousand Irishmen who would whip them "into the sea". Someone shot at her with a gun and she and the other girls and nuns escaped out the back way while the mob stormed the convent burning and destroying the convent. Numerous books were written in the next few years claiming that the Ursalines were really a satanic cult that murdered babies were fathered by priests and brothers of the order. The nuns were sex slaves to the clerics and the sordidness that went on behind the walls of the convent could not even be printed in the newspapers. The numerous books and newspaper articles proliferated throughout New England and though most were unfounded and even refuted, it did little to change the public’s mind. Anti-Catholicism spread to other major cities; i.e., New York, Philadelphia, Detroit and Boston. Irish and Germans clashed. The Irish were a tough lot and would not be bullied by anyone. They roamed the streets clashing with Protestant groups and especially in the railroad yards. For the next 20 years the fighting would escalate into armed battles with people dead on both sides. Not even the armed militia was immune from being killed. Have you ever looked at the Washington monument? About a fourth of the way up the color changes dramatically from gray-white to brown-white. The Pope sent a 2000 year old inscribed stone from the Temple of Concord in Rome as a gift to the American people honoring George Washington. The nativists were so horrified that they stole the stone and smashed it or threw it into the Potomac river. And the monument funding from Congress stopped for another thirty years or so. America in the 1830-60's looked much like the America in the 1960's with the race riots in major cities across the land. Followed shortly thereafter in the 70's with the Anti-Vietnam movement. America was economically swinging from prosperous to depression era times when the first big waves of immigrants hit the shores. They were mostly Irishmen and women trying to escape the devastation of the famine in Ireland. Anti-immigration sentiment flourished and for good reason. In all fairness to the nativists, the Irish overwhelmed the major cities by the thousands and caused cities enormous amounts of money in public costs. Water supply, sewage problems, police and sanitary services that couldn’t keep up with the influx people could be directly traced back to the Irish explosion in the cities. This led to anger on the part of the nativists and that led to Anti-Catholicism. The German immigrants far out numbered the Irish in the 1850's, but unlike the Irish they spread out over the lands into the mid west and resumed their typical lifestyle of farming. They were mostly Catholic and appeared to pose no threat because they were spread out so thinly across the land. |
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| Dictatorship verses Democracy
For two thousand years the popes have ruled over lands and peoples in order to uphold the moral and sometimes temporal goods of society. Imagine now a country who proclaims liberty for all: Freedom of religion; freedom of the press; freedom of speech; and free from search and arrest without a warrant. From the pope’s point of view all of this was the work of Satan. Was it not up to the Church to govern morality through the only true religion? Did America really think that people could govern themselves morally without strong direction from the church? Imagine trying to change 2000 years of thinking over night! Did America not know that men and women are naturally depraved and must be kept under constant vigilance lest they bring the whole world down with them. Surely America did not think the pope had been doing badly all of these years? Pope Pius IX went so far as to write a "Syllabus of Errors" and in it he publicly condemns the American Bill of Rights, freedom of speech, press and religion. He ends this writing with a final declaration that the Pope would never reconcile himself to this modern civilization and it's liberalism. This was not a good time to write this document for American Catholics trying to fit into a new country and culture. Even several American bishops wrote the pope wondering if this were a dogmatic document and how obliged are they to follow it. Guess what the answer was? Pope Pius IX again put the pressure on all Catholics by calling an ecumenical council in 1869. It had been three centuries since a council had been held when the Council of Trent took an official hard line against Protestantism. Now this pope would do something so dramatic it would shake the world. Pope Pius IX declared that all that he said in faith and morals would be infallible words of God and that all Catholics would be bound by his declarations. The ramifications of this pronouncement was profound. It would mean that the commonly held belief that the Church was infallible with the pope in union with his bishops around the world, would no longer be valid. That the pope, by this one sweeping move, would invalidate any further councils, and consultation with bishops would become superfluous. With 750 bishops attending the council, the first vote came in 451 yes, 88 no, 62 yes with reservations, 76 abstentions. The final vote came in at 535 yes, 2 no. The rest of the bishops went home without voting as a silent protest. Pope Pius wanted a clear unanimous vote, but that didn’t happen. The 1st Vatican Council was never closed because war broke out in Europe, Rome was sacked and Pope Pius died an old man locked behind the Vatican walls refusing to acknowledge the loss of his papal states and the Italian government. He became a worldwide symbol of resistance to anything that was new and not to his way of thinking. |
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American Politics By the 1850's Catholicism was the fastest growing religion in America. The Irish bishops brought uniformity to the dioceses because of their close contact with each other. They were brothers in the seminary together and so they came together frequently to make sure that all were saying and doing the same thing across the land. There were two issues that became important in early American politics: religious education in schools; and control over church property by lay people called Trusteeism. Bishop John Hughes loved a good fight and once he set his mind on an issue he forced others to take sides. With a friend as the governor, not Catholic, Hughes documented the Bible based schooling done in public schools and demanded that religion be left to the Churches and that schools teach the three R’s. He almost succeeded, but faced an unparalleled attack from a Fundamentalist lawyer who defeated Hughes at the city council and state legislature. Bishop Hughes was not finished. He gathered the Irish democrats together through oratory harangues that were both humorous and serious and turned the next election into a single political campaign over the school issue. It won and public schools had to fall in to line. The Catholic vote scared people and it came at a time when Catholics were still arriving by the thousands. In the end Bishop Hughes and other bishops began organizing and building the Catholic education system we have today and rejected the public school system. State laws demanded that churches be ruled by trustees that handled the property and the money and Catholic churches were run that way for a long time. The lay people controlled the churches and hired and fired their own priests just as the Protestants did in that day. As Bishop John Hughes gained more power and churches were becoming more and more desperate for money, he slowly wrestled the control of churches away from the trustees, but he was clearly in charge. Over the years he single handedly built churches, schools, orphanages and hospitals keeping their titles in his name. New York nativists pushed a strong Trustee bill through congress, but Hughes ignored in and it was quietly repealed a few years later. Other bishops took their cue from Hughes. Anti-Catholicism produced another anti-Catholic tract detailing the property holdings of the Church in New York and that people should be worried about Catholics proselytizing. Hughes responded by saying they had good cause to worry.
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| Catholics Earn their place in America The Civil War and vast numbers of Irish Catholics coming to America made them in New York city the largest single ethnic group there. Two stereotypes emerged about the Irish; i.e., they were racist and they were exceptionally patriotic and loyal Americans. They were not interested in freeing slavery, but they were of one mind when it came to holding the United States together as one nation under God. The worst riot in American history was precipitated by the conscription law of 1863. You could buy your way out of the draft for $300, a year’s wages. Black people were exempt from being drafted and were put to work where the Irish were working that had been sent off to war. Bishop Hughes believed that the conscription law was being used to break local craft unions. He was right. The war had been going badly and conscription was badly needed if the North was going to win the war. But resistance to the draft led to the riots that started out as just resistance, but soon turned into a race riot against blacks. Blacks were lynched, drug through the streets, beaten and killed. Was the American Irish Church racist? Well during this time the semiofficial Catholic journal called the Freeman’s Journal routinely printed articles about "ugly black niggers"! More reprehensible was the Vatican’s position on slavery, while slavery was an evil, it was not an unmitigated(completely such, without qualification or exception) evil, for it allowed slaves to be Christianized. Pope Pius IX made no secret that he favored the South because they had not been infected by the liberalism of the North. The only American Bishop that was an abolitionist was Cincinnati’s John Purcell. The other bishops held the Vatican’s line except Bishop Hughes who boldly proclaimed support for Lincoln’s war efforts. He privately told Lincoln that Catholics would fight to the death to preserve the union, but would never fight in a war to free slaves. He personally believed slavery to be justified. Now Archbishop John Hughes of New York was the first bishop to be treated as a political figure to be dealt with in his own right. He had been friends with Presidents Pierce, Buchanan and Lincoln. Lincoln even lobbied the Vatican to give him the Cardinal’s hat. He died in 1864, but he set a precedent for all the American bishops that would carry over into the next century. It would be the next generation of bishops to work out the conflicts between Catholics and America over the next century, but the days of being ashamed of who you are as a Catholic was coming to a close.
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| Go to Chapter Four | ||||
