Catholicism

Origins of American Catholicism

Great Britain's Calvert (Lord Baltimore) family envisioned Maryland as a 17th-century haven for persecuted Roman Catholics. When it became apparent that an explicitly Catholic colony was not politically possible, the Calverts pledged religious toleration for all. By the eve of the Revolution, Maryland, and what became its chief city, Baltimore, served as a center of American Catholicism.

In 1789 Baltimore became the first Roman Catholic diocese in the United States. Although Catholics, even in colonial Maryland, had experienced some discrimination, they participated in the drafting of the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution. Then again, Catholics accounted for just 1 percent of the U.S. population in 1790, and that may have lessened Protestant fears of religious subversion.

Urban Catholicism and the First Immigrant Wave

Protestant toleration of Catholics declined in the early 19th century as millions of Irish and German immigrants poured into the United States. Eighty percent of Irish Catholic immigrants settled in cities—chiefly [Page 122]the ports where they had disembarked. By the 1850s, more than half the residents of Boston were foreignborn, while 60 percent of New York City's 500,000 residents claimed foreign—most frequently, Irish Catholic—origins.

In the 1850s, New York City's Irish Catholics, although representing 30 percent of the population, accounted for 60 percent of the poor and 50 percent of the criminals. Irish Catholics led New York in child abandonment and filled the ranks of criminal gangs.

Nativists argued that Catholics had brought crime and poverty to America's hitherto pristine cities. A few Catholic leaders, notably New York Archbishop John Hughes (1797–1864), recognized that their Church had to deal with the urban immigrant crisis. Archbishop Hughes exhorted Catholic immigrants to embrace the Church and reject gang membership. He hoped that parochial schools would strengthen urban Catholic morality.

Urban Catholics fully engaged the secular political process. Many historians regard New York's Tammany Hall as the first urban political machine. Established in 1787 as a social club, Tammany evolved into a powerful arm of the Democratic Party in New York. Although Tammany's initial Democratic leaders were Protestant, they quickly saw the political potential in organizing Irish Catholic immigrants into a voting bloc. Tammany forever became associated in the public mind with corrupt bigcity Catholic politicians.

The Challenges of the Second Immigrant Wave

By 1890 the American Catholic Church had achieved some reduction in urban crime among its members, built a religious and educational infrastructure, and rejoiced when a select few attained political power as mayors of Boston (Hugh O'Brien, 1882) and New York (William Grace, 1880). Whatever satisfaction church leaders could take in these achievements, however, was shortlived. A new and much larger Catholic (and Jewish) immigrant wave was beginning to flow over American cities.

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