Immigration, Persecution, and Divisiveness

Like Judaism, Catholicism was not seen as a threat to the Protestant project in the early years of the nineteenth century. In 1790, there were only 30,000 Catholics in the entire country, but 40 years latter that number had grown to 600,000. When the first Provincial Council of Catholic Bishops was held in Baltimore in 1829, it served to reveal to non-Catholic Americans that the church was, to use Sydney Ahlstrom's description, a "substantial, growing, and well organized reality."

As Catholicism grew steadily (primarily, but not exclusively through immigration), it began to threaten Protestant hopes for the future of America. (For a film of immigrants arrriving at Ellis Island in the late 19th Century, Click here. Americans proved ill-equipped to welcome so many strangers into their midst. If that were not enough, few Protestants bothered to understand Catholic life in a Protestant America, and many saw Catholicism through the lens of the Reformation and Puritanism. (Although Puritanism was long gone, it had left behind a legacy of anti-Catholicism. You may recall, Puritans came to America to flee the wrath that was about to come down on England because it had chosen the wrong side in the Thirty Years War.)

As Robert T. Handy has pointed out, while many Protestant leaders opposed mob actions, "in their effort to keep under control those who were not persuaded by their vision of a Christian America," Protestants created "an atmosphere in which unpleasant and unjust things happened." In 1820, the first wave of Irish settlement began that would eventually swell to four and one half million Irish before a century was over. Life in Ireland had become intolerable due to poverty, hunger, and want. During the 1830's, 200,000 Irish arrived in America, and with the Potato blight of 1845, and 1.5 million Irish died. The exodus from Ireland took became desperate, and by 1850, there were 962,000 Irish in the United States, and that number nearly doubled over the next ten years.

This wave of immigration left Protestants deeply fearful. Such prominent Protestant leaders as Lyman Beecher and Horace Bushnell incited anti-Irish and anti-Catholic mobs in the 1830's and 1840's. In the 1840's, when there was a major influx of Irish immigrants, the number of Catholics in America had soared to 1.75 million, leading to the formation of the inter-denominational American Protestant Association was formed to coordinate the various anti-Catholic groups. Many of the Protestant voluntary societies also participated in the anti-catholic agitation. As far as Protestants were concerned, any group that threatened their efforts to build a Christian America was not deserving of the protections of religious freedom, and they did not receive them.

In the post-war period as Catholic immigration continued to grow exponentially (new Catholics came from many of the same Eastern European countries as did the Jews), opposition to Catholicism grew along with it. Josiah Strong in his widely read book Our Country listed immigration as one of seven perils facing America, the others being Romanism, Mormonism, intemperance, socialism, wealth, and the city. He wrote: "during the last four years we have suffered a peaceful invasion by an army, more than twice as vast as the estimated number of Goths and Vandals that swept over Southern Europe and overwhelmed Rome." What was of particular concern to the Protestants was the number of Catholics coming to America. From 1880-1900, two and a half million Catholics arrived, threatening the Protestant vision of America.

A focal point of the conflict between Protestants and Catholics was the education system. For their part Protestants distrusted the alleged subservience of Catholics to their priests, and many echoed Daniel Dorchester of the Evangelical Alliance who stated: "We believe the Roman Catholic Church is inimical to the best progress of society, and in direct antagonism to the historic religion of the nation--the religion of the Holy Scriptures." Catholics, concerned about the increasing Protestant tone of many public schools (public education was seen by most Protestants as a way to inculcate the next generation with the generic "Christian" values shared by all Protestants). The Catholic decision to build a parochial school system was seen as a threat to the effort to build a Christian commonwealth through a system of public education.

Immigration proved to be a mixed blessing for American Catholics. It greatly increased their numbers, but it also provoked nativist sentiments. But perhaps the greatest challenge concerned the tensions it created in the church.

American Catholics were not exactly happy to see the new immigrants. Not only did they set off nativist alarms among Protestants, they presented problems for the existing Catholic parishes. The wave of immigration from Ireland led to tension between the Irish and the French dominated American Catholic Church. French Catholics looked down on the Irish, and one of the forces driving lay trusteeism was Irish parishioners clashing with French Bishops. Later the process repeated itself in the post-Civil War period with the Irish in positions of power, and the new immigrants coming from places like Naples and Sicily. These new immigrants shared little in common with their Irish Catholic co-religionists other than their faith.

Another major challenge was reaching all these immigrants with the sacraments of the faith. Although frontier church history is largely seen as a Protestant phenomenon, Catholics did a remarkable job reaching these new Americans, organizing new sees and new Bishops to meet the needs of the rapidly expanding church.

Conversions

For all of its trouble, the American Catholic Church managed to grow--not just by immigration--but by conversion. During the 19th century, converts to Catholicism numbered 700,00. Many of these came from the ranks of Episcopalians who were so compelled by their High Church beliefs, that they carried them through to their logical conclusion. In 1852, 50 priests and one Bishop (Levi S. Ives) of the Episcopal Church had converted to Roman Catholicism.

One of the most famous converts to Catholicism was Orestes Brownson. Brownson was a spiritual seeker from much of his life. As a youth, he was a Presbyterian, but in three years he became an Universalist preacher. Two years latter, he became a Unitarian. Within just a few more years, he became a leading Transcendentalist. Four years further down the road, he became a Roman Catholic. When he did so, he publicly consigned his former friends to hell. They in turn struck him from their list of Transcendentalist heros. No doubt, had Brownson lived long enough he would have left the Catholic Church, but before his death he had already begun to make waves. Brownson came to be known as one of the leading lights of "Americanism" within the Catholic Church (see below), and as a result offended many in the church hierarchy.

Papal Infallibility

Not only did Catholics in America face attacks from Protestants, and the challenging task of ministering to millions of new immigrants, and new converts, they were also the target of their own Church hierarchy. The curia in Rome seems to have been unable to understand the American Catholic Church until well into the twentieth century. As Catholics in America labored to stave off the persecution of Protestants to minister to ever expanding numbers, and carry the sacraments of the church into the rapidly expanding frontier, they were forced to be flexible, and to perhaps even cut a corner or two. In so doing, however, they did not realize that they were revolutionaries. But, unfortunately, that is how the Vatican came to view them.

The genesis of the Vatican's attacks on the American Catholic Church was rooted in the effort to adjust the faith to deal with the tectonic shifts occurring in the broader society, and the American Church's opposition to the measures put forward by the Vatican. Like the Protestants, the Catholic church was not exempt from the many changes taking place in society. At a time when there was great doubt and uncertainty, the Roman Catholic insistence on the Church's authority appealed to many. This authoritarianism reached a peak in 1870 when the First Vatican Council promulgated the doctrine of papal infallibility. The Council declared that: "When the Roman pontiff speaks ex cathedra, that is when discharging the office of the Shepherd and Doctor of all Christians, in virtue of his supreme apostolic authority [he] defines a doctrine to be held by the Universal Church concerning faith or morals, he enjoys (by divine assistance promised to him in the blessed Peter) that infallibility by which the Divine Redeemer wished his Church to be instructed in the definition of doctrine concerning faith or morals; and therefore such definitions of the Roman Pontiff are irreformable of themselves, and not by virtue of the consent of the Church." Prior to this only Church Councils had exercised this kind of power. Now, as some scholars have pointed out, they were made "superfluous or at least reduced to an advisory role."

The Vatican Council also asserted the Pope's universal episcopate, that is, his direct authority over every diocese. This meant, in effect, that the Pope had become the absolute monarch of the church. But when the vote was taken to expand the Pope's authority, the American delegates opposed these measures, but they were outvoted by the Italians, Spaniards, and South Americans.

The American delegates voiced strong opposition, and believed that if these changes in doctrine and polity were adopted, in the words of Bishop John McQuaid, "the damage to the church will be immense. In some countries there will be large schisms...if some decrees are passed as they have been presented to us, we can look for hard times in all countries in which Catholics and protestants are expected to live together." The day before the final vote, he wrote, "They have ended by making the definition [of infallibility] as absolute and strict as it was possible to make it. As a consequence a large non placet vote will be recorded against it. What will be the consequences...God only knows."

Americanism

Such resistance to Church dogma among American Catholics was of great concern in the Vatican. From the very earliest years of the republic, some American Catholics had maintained a high degree of autonomy from the Vatican, in part because of accusations leveled against them that they were under the control of a "foreign potentate." Shortly after the American Revolution, Bishop John Carroll asked that an American Episcopate be created as soon as possible, and Bishop John England in the early years of the 19th century, focused on building a truly American Church with an American clergy. Archbishop Gibbons and Ireland labored tirelessly to get the Church to recognize and take into account distinctive American ways and ideals.

As Americans suggested a variety of changes in the life of the church, the Vatican became increasingly threatened. The final straw seems to have been when the American church was cited by French liberal Catholics as an example of a rapidly growing church in a free, liberal society. The French Catholics were laboring under an exaggerated view of American Catholic divergences because of an inaccurate French translation of The Life of Father Hecker which had been published in the United States in 1891. The author, Isaac Thomas Hecker had been reared a Methodist, had been a Transcendentalist for a time, and became a Roman Catholic in 1844. He was ordained to the priesthood five years latter, and founded the Paulist Fathers who were successful in their principle object which was to convert Protestants to the Catholic faith. Hecker's opponents charged that he sought to stress beliefs which Catholics and Protestants held in common rather that the distinctive beliefs of Catholics. This approach became known as "Americanism," and became the subject of heated debate among Catholics.

Pope Leo XIII felt that he had to condemn "Americanism," and he did so in the encyclical Testem benevolentiae on January 22, 1899. Among the errors he named was the adaption of the faith to non-Catholics and modern civilization, the muting of certain aspects of Catholicism; and the "distorted emphasis on the operation of the Holy Spirit on individuals as an accommodation to American revivalism. The Pope went out of his way to be certain that he did not condemn American Catholics of actually holding to the views he had made anathema, saying that these views had only been attributed to American Catholics by a foreign source. Nor did the Pope condemn America or American society. This careful minuet managed to please both sides. The conservatives in Rome believed "Americanism" was dead, and Cardinal Gibbons in America who supported change could say American Catholics held no such views.

Modernism

Perhaps the one development during this time period to have the greatest impact on the atmosphere in the American Catholic Church was the attack on what the Vatican called Modernism. The roots of Modernism were Protestant, but Catholic Biblical scholars in America quickly accepted the results of the Higher Criticism of Scripture that had developed in European Protestant circles. At first this was encouraged by the Vatican. But as questions began to be raised about the development (or evolution of Scripture), and some cherished beliefs began to be questioned, the Pope began to put distance between himself and some of the more controversial results arising out of his encouragement of theological scholarship.

In 1893, the Pope issued the encyclical Providentissimus Deus which set down a rigid view of biblical inspiration. His successor, Pope Pius X was even more resolute in his attacks on the new tendencies, and in 1907 issued the encyclical Pascendi Dominici Gregis which attacked Modernism. In this encyclical, the modernism of the American Church was attacked as a conspiracy. Whereas those who viewed themselves to be part of the modernist movement had a variety of differed widely in their doctrinal views, the Pope took the most extreme views from this spectrum of viewpoints and used them as straw men to attack the movement. The remedy for dealing with those who held to any modernist view was vigorous ecclesiastical prosecution. While this strategy was successful in driving modernists from the church, it also had a profound impact on the theological atmosphere of the Catholic Church in the United States.

Slowly, but surely, the Vatican began to exercise increasing control over independent minded American Catholics. Ideas held by modernists (abandonment of clerical celibacy, harmonizing of "dogmas and their evolution" with "science and history," democracy within the church governance, a return of the clergy to "their primitive humility and poverty") could no longer be entertained by good Catholics publicly or privately. (Unfortunately, the Pope was not familiar with Roger Williams and his views concerning the first table of the law). It would be some time before the winds of change would again stir the waters of American Catholicism.