Roman
Catholics and Immigration in Nineteenth-Century America
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Julie Byrne
Dept. of Religion, Duke University
©National Humanities Center
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The story of Roman
Catholicism in the nineteenth century IS the story of immigration. Until about
1845, the Roman Catholic population of the United States was a small minority
of mostly English Catholics, who were often quite socially accomplished. But
when several years of devastating potato famine led millions of Irish Catholics
to flee to the United States
in the mid 1840s, the face of American Catholicism began to change drastically
and permanently. In the space of fifty years, the Catholic population in the United States
suddenly transformed from a tight-knit group of landowning, educated
aristocrats into an incredibly diverse mass of urban and rural immigrants who
came from many different countries, spoke different languages, held different
social statuses, and emphasized different parts of their Catholic heritage.
Many members of other
faiths—Jews, Protestants, and even some Muslims, Hindus and Buddhists—arrived
in the successive waves of massive immigration to the United States between the 1840s and
1920s. But Catholics from various countries were the most numerous—and the most
noticed. In 1850 Catholics made up only five percent of the total U.S.
population. By 1906, they made up seventeen percent of the total population (14
million out of 82 million people)—and constituted the single largest religious
denomination in the country.
When your students hear
the enormity of the demographic and religious shift caused by immigration, they
will start to understand why so many American citizens became uneasy about the
so-called "Catholic hordes." Change is always difficult, and this was
a huge change. Why did things change? Why did so many Catholics come to the United States
at this time? Why did the country take them? To answer these questions, you
might paint for your students a scene or two of the broad Western-hemisphere
trend towards economic and social "modernization." The newly
centralized states of Europe and the New World
were promoting capital investment in urban industries that disturbed ancient
customs of farming, craft labor, and land inheritance. A new managerial
"middle class" of clerks and bureaucrats was prospering in the
cities, but thousands of peasants were displaced from their land and labor by
new farming techniques. The Catholic citizens of Italy,
Poland, parts of Germany, and the Eastern European kingdoms of
what are now Slovakia and
the Czech Repuclic began to cast their eyes towards America. The country had a growing
world reputation for democratic ideals and work opportunity. For these peoples,
as well as for French Canadian Catholics to the north of the United States and Mexican Catholics
to the south, the chance for a new life free of poverty and oppression was too
good to pass up. Millions of sons, fathers, and later whole families left
behind their former lives and possessions and boarded crowded ships sailing for
New York.
America, for its part, docked
ship after ship at Ellis Island for both
idealistic and practical reasons. It was the American ideal to welcome the
foreigner; all the country's founding groups and many of its leading citizens
had been, after all, immigrants. The motto on the Statue of Liberty, "Give
Me Your Tired, Your Poor," exemplified the strong tie between immigration
and freedom in the national imagination. But more practically speaking, America's
new industries and booming frontier towns demanded large quantities of cheap
labor. So immigration was a benefit to both sides—at least in theory.
To Think
But theory doesn't
always translate into the feelings and experiences of real people in real
situations. Immigration was supposed to be beneficial to the immigrant and to
the country, but it also unleashed many fears, insecurities, and troubles on
both sides. It might be a good idea to brainstorm with your students about the
positive and negative FEELINGS that both natives and immigrants could have
experienced at the time. Let the students imagine and talk about what it might
have felt like for the immigrants, who didn't know "the ropes" or in
many cases the language. Let them also imagine what it might have felt like for
those already living in America,
who saw their cities change so quickly: suddenly there was a Catholic church in
every neighborhood. Immigration is, of course, still very much a part of the
American reality and public debate. Some of your students may be Catholic
themselves and may be surprised to hear of the former low status of the
"assimilated" religion they know. Some of your students may know of
immigration from firsthand experience, being immigrants or children of
immigrants themselves. Others may know about immigration from news reports or
experiences with neighbors. Don't hesitate to make the connections between the
realities and perceptions of Catholicism and immigration then and now. Their
experience of the present realities can help them understand the past, and vice
versa.
Then, refocus the
discussion to make the point that in the nineteenth century, the immigrants'
RELIGION, Catholicism, became a focal point for these feelings
about immigration on both sides. The immigrants held onto Catholicism for
spiritual comfort and group identity. The older Americans blamed Catholicism
for the immigrants' "foreign ways." Both sides used Catholicism as a
way of resisting the other. How did the immigrants express their feelings
through their faith? How did Protestant Americans use Catholicism as a
"substitute" for immigration issues?
After several years in America,
many Catholic immigrants became sorely disillusioned. "American
Dreams" of rich farmland and easy money evaporated in the run-down,
neglected quarters of big cities and died during long hours working lowpaying,
backbreaking jobs. Yet sooner or later, many families managed to improve their
economic situations, through luck, ingenuity, hard work, and—they strongly
believed—help from God, the saints, and the Church.
For it was the Catholic
Church, more than any other organization, that made a concerted effort to
welcome the new Catholic immigrants. Catholic citizens helped them find jobs
and homes; sisters (nuns) taught their children English in Catholic schools;
priests tried to protect their political interests and shield them from a
sometimes hostile Protestant environment; the local church held religious
festivals and social events. It is important to stress that for the immigrants,
the neighborhood Catholic church was not just a church; it was the focal point
of a whole community, a whole way of life. Even if the relationship between the
Church and Catholic immigrants was often far from perfect, local parishes
provided millions of heartbroken, homesick immigrant men and women the familiar
comforts of ritual and belief that gave their world meaning.
Students should know
what parts of Catholic ritual and belief set it apart from Protestant
Christianity, although it should also be emphasized that there is much more
continuity than difference between the two forms of Christianity. Catholic tradition had held for centuries
- that the institutional Church, with its
highly organized hierarchy topped by the pope in Rome, was the sole source of spiritual
nurture, divine authority, and final salvation;
- that the sacraments—religious rituals like
the Mass and confession—were the main means of human contact with the
divine; and
- that the saints—who, like Mary, the mother
of Jesus, were holy people held up as examples by the Church—could be called
upon in prayer to "intercede" for Catholics with the Father and
the Son.
The
reformers of the Protestant Reformation objected vehemently to these emphases,
insisting instead on
- less hierarchy in church structure,
- the Bible rather than sacraments as the
source of revelation from God, and
- Jesus himself as the only necessary
intercessor with God the Father.
For
four centuries Catholics and Protestants had waged real and polemical wars
against each other about these and other issues that calcified their mutually
antagonistic positions. In the context of nineteenth-century America, where Bible-believing,
evangelical Protestants constituted the clear majority, the Catholic minority
faith, with its elaborate rituals and statues of the saints, seemed to most
people very strange, even "wrong." Of course, for Catholics these
were natural and familiar ways to express their faith in God. There was nothing
strange about them at all. In fact, they thought Protestants were strange and
"wrong."
To Protestants, the immigrants'
religion was cause for great consternation. Protestants prided themselves on
living in a country founded as a Protestant "light unto the world,"
as the Puritans put it. They felt threatened that America
might soon become a "Catholic" country; they worried that the
Catholic religion, with its hierarchies and traditions, had made the immigrants
unsuitable for democratic and individualistic America. They even mused whether
the Catholics were coming in droves in order to colonize America for the pope! The churches
could try to protect the immigrants, but they could do little to counter the
prejudice Catholic immigrants faced in "mainstream" America every day. Neighbors called
Catholics names, employers refused to promote them, landlords rented them their
worst apartments, newspapers blamed them for rising crime rates, and banks
refused them loans. A popular national organization, the American Protective
Association, was founded specifically to promote anti-Catholicism and other
prejudices.
All this because
Catholics believed a different Christianity than Protestants? Partly no, and
partly yes. On the one hand, anti-Catholicism wasn't all about
Catholicism; it was partly about class, too. Many people of the upper classes
didn't particularly pay attention to Catholics' religion, but assumed that
because the immigrants were poor, foreign, and different, that meant they were
also dirty, dangerous, and lazy. Many people of the lower classes assumed the
immigrants represented competition for jobs, homes, and social prestige that
rightly belonged to them. On the other hand, anti-Catholic prejudice was
about religion. For Catholics did become good American citizens—winning
political races, organizing labor unions, opening businesses, and founding
schools and hospitals. But no matter how hard Catholics strived to prove they
were good, upstanding, patriotic American citizens, some Protestants would
never accept them, simply because they were Catholic. This instance of naked
prejudice may be a hard thing for students concerned about "equality"
and "tolerance" to hear. Others may feel more sympathetic towards the
Protestants' religious conviction. Again, pointing out the continuities with
present-day instances of prejudice would only help to illuminate both.
Given the social stigma
of being Catholic, students might naturally wonder why most Catholic people who
came to this country remained Catholic. There are several reasons, all of which
speak to the very teen-accessible issue of "identity"—how people have
it, create it, or change it. One reason Catholics stayed Catholic is that they
truly believed that Catholicism was the "right" religion, and
converting to Protestantism was simply not an option. Another is that
Catholicism was an "alternative," "different" religion in
America at the time, and some Catholics wore that "differentness" as
a badge of pride or a marker of identity in an unfamiliar environment. Finally,
some stayed out of habit and culture. They were Catholics in the Old World, therefore they were Catholics in the New, and
that was that.
The American public's resistance to
immigration culminated in a series of immigration restriction laws passed in
the early 1920s that placed quotas
on the numbers of people allowed from each
foreign country. Quotas for Catholic countries were set so low that Catholic
immigration virtually halted by 1924.
Historians Debate
In some ways, the
Catholic immigrants of the nineteenth century faced as much conflict within
their churches as without. The debate raged between Church leaders about the
best strategy to deal with the immigrants—"Americanize" them as
quickly as possible, or encourage them to retain their own national language
and faith customs as long as they could. The proponents of the first view,
called "Americanists," tended to be theological liberals and social
progressives who were quite optimistic, in the spirit of the "Gilded
Age," about the compatibility between America and the Catholic religion.
The advocates of the second view, considered "conservatives," tended
to be traditionalists who regarded America's infatuation with the new
technology, "materialism," and social reform as a dangerous context
for preserving the troubled immigrants' faith. Often the immigrants themselves
had their own opinions in the matter, but were caught between warring bishops.
Over the long term, both the Americanists and the conservatives
"won": the pope pronounced in favor of the conservatives in 1891, but
as new generations were born, of course, Catholics became quite
"Americanized" as aspects of the Old World
devotional culture and theology were gradually left behind and shades of a new,
more individualistic and democratic Catholicism appeared.
Scholars of American
Catholic history have universally considered immigration by far the most
dynamic force in the nineteenth-century American Church,
but they continue to debate the issue of "Americanization." The
magisterial histories of American Catholicism written successively by John
Gilmary Shea, Peter Guilday, and John Tracy Ellis from the 1890s to the 1950s
considered "Americanization" a good thing and countered popular
perceptions of Catholics' unfitness for America with numerous examples of
American Catholic achievement. More recent histories by Jay Dolan and Patrick
Carey (1990s) reconsider the merits of "Americanization" in light of
contemporary discussions of "Catholic difference" and
"multiculturalism." Their work suggests that traditional immigrant
Catholicism contributed to changing the definition of "America"
from a nation of Anglo-Saxon Protestants to a culture of diversified regions
and peoples. They also carefully distinguish between religious styles,
political leanings, and social status associated with different ethnic groups
within Catholicism; for example, the Irish Catholic political machines in New York were much different than German Catholic
sodalities in the Midwest, though both kinds
of groups grew out of the immigrant Catholic experience.
Other historians have
pointed out that concepts like "Americanization" and
"assimilation" assume there was a coherent "American"
population, when in fact immigration itself was overshadowed and
interimplicated with the great social debates over slavery and, after the Civil
War, the so-called "Negro problem"—issues whose very existence proves
that a homogeneous "American" population could not be taken for
granted (Jenny Franchot, Roads to Rome).
Other studies have taken
up the history of African Americans who were themselves Catholics; this
minority within a minority persevered with little attention from their Church
throughout the period of European immigration (Stephen Ochs, Cyprian Davis).
Some historians have found the "differences" between Catholics and
Protestants in this period overplayed; both groups, for example, were
implicated in a broad cultural concern to establish a "domestic"
religion alongside church attendance that emphasized religious commodities in
the home and family prayer (Colleen Mcdannell, Ann Taves). Still other historians
have painted in great detail the complex social worlds of the immigrant
neighborhoods, raising the question whether ordinary immigrant Catholics really
noticed or cared about the "mainstream" Protestant world much at all
(Robert Orsi).
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