The Growth of American Catholicism
Catholicism in Europe was under papal control, officially established in several countries, and, because tied to diverse national cultures, multiform. In the United States it grew (but at times suffered attrition) as the American church tried to adapt to Protestant dominance, republicanism, a secularizing culture, and expanding religious and ethnic pluralism.
At the start of the 19th century, the church’s American membership was only about 50,000, and its hierarchy, appointed by Rome and dominated by English and French Americans, was resisted on political grounds by democratically elected lay trustees of church property and on ethnic ones by minority Irish and German Catholics. Trustee conflicts erupted in many major cities, and Philadelphia Germans formed an independent church in 1787. The church resolved trustee problems by transferring church property to bishops, but ethnic tensions intensified, expanded, and assumed regional variation as the church and nation grew. Louisiana’s French- and Spanish-speaking Catholics resisted their new American authorities after the Louisiana Purchase (1803), while the French bishop appointed to New Mexico after it became an American possession in 1848 sought unsuccessfully to eradicate the Spanish-Mexican-Indian cultural blend of its Native American Catholics. Tensions similar to those in New Mexico simmered in formerly Mexican California.
John Ireland, Archbishop of St. Paul (1875–1918), was an advocate of Americanization and one of the nation’s foremost Roman Catholic leaders.
The phenomenal growth and increasing ethnic diversity of 19th-century American Catholicism were driven above all by massive waves of European immigration that lifted its numbers past 3 million by 1860—making it the nation’s largest denomination—and past 12 million by 1900.
The first wave brought Irish victims of the Potato Famine of the late 1840s. About 1.5 million reached America between 1845 and 1860 and another 1.5 million between 1870 and 1900. Settling in Northeastern cities—especially Boston, New York, and Philadelphia—they were confined by poverty and discrimination to slums and unskilled industrial jobs. But many sought opportunity and status in the priesthood, and Irish Catholics soon dominated the church hierarchy. German Catholics also arrived in the 19th century—several hundred thousand by 1850 and more than a million more by 1900—settling a Midwestern “German Triangle” defined by Cincinnati, Milwaukee, and St. Louis as well as the eastern Ozarks and the central Texas hill country. They formed tight ethnic communities and resisted the Irish American hierarchy.Meanwhile, the church expanded with the nation to the Pacific. In 1800 the only diocese was Baltimore, with other Northeastern cities following soon after. But Catholic migration from Maryland to Kentucky and western Pennsylvania prompted the formation of the Bardstown (Kentucky) diocese in 1808. As the church reached out to French Catholics in the Mississippi Valley and Great Lakes areas, to Germans in Texas and the Midwest, to Catholic Indians in the Southwest, and to white Americans moving to the Pacific region, it founded dioceses in Cincinnati (1821), St. Louis (1826), Detroit (1833), Vincennes (1834), Dubuque (1837), Nashville (1837), Milwaukee (1843), Chicago (1843), Walla Walla (1846), Galveston (1847), St. Paul (1850), Santa Fe (1853), and San Francisco (1853). The church now spanned the continent.
After 1880, a “new” immigration brought Catholics from southern, eastern, and central Europe to the agricultural areas of the Great Plains and, in far greater numbers, the industrial cities of the Northeast and Midwest. About 3.3 million southern Italians arrived by 1920, forming ethnic enclaves in Boston, Harlem, and Philadelphia, mistrusting the Irish-American hierarchy, and practicing a family-centered folk Catholicism.
Polish Catholic immigrants—some 3 million by 1920—formed “Polonias” in such Great Lakes cities as Chicago, Detroit, Milwaukee, Cleveland, and Buffalo. Protective of their culture, they unsuccessfully sought greater representation in the hierarchy and successfully formed enduring Polish dioceses. Some broke away to form the Polish National Catholic Church in Scranton, Pennsylvania, in 1897. Other Catholics arrived from Austro-Hungary, Lithuania, and other European countries. American church leaders responded to the growing diversity by encouraging Americanization—including English-language parochial instruction, attendance at public schools, and acceptance of religious pluralism—while disapproving German leaders in the Midwest unsuccessfully petitioned Rome for a multinational and multilingual American church with ethnically rather than geographically defined dioceses.Despite continuing ethnic tensions and a papal condemnation of perceived “Americanization,” a curbing of European immigration in the 1920s and the pope’s 1908 declaration that the United States was no longer a mission field heralded the American church’s growing consolidation and underscored its changing relationship with Rome. After World War II, Catholics became more fully integrated into American life, obtaining white-collar jobs, leaving their old neighborhoods, and joining the exodus to the suburbs and the Sunbelt. Rome remained—and remains—anxious about liberalizing trends in American Catholicism.
Twentieth-century migration and immigration posed new challenges of ethnic diversity. After 1890, Mexicans seeking agricultural employment moved northward with their folk Catholicism into Texas, the Southwest, and California, creating anew a Hispanic Catholic region in the United States. After the Spanish-American War of 1898, Filipinos joined a growing eastward-moving trans-Pacific Asian migration to Hawaii (annexed by the United States in 1898), the West Coast, and eventually the East. Other new pockets of Hispanic Catholicism developed after World War II, when Puerto Ricans increasingly settled in New York City and thousands of middle-class Cubans fleeing the 1959 revolution brought their brand of Catholicism to the Miami area.
Finally, Central Americans fleeing political and economic turmoil entered the United States during the 1970s and 1980s. By 1989, about 20 percent of Hispanic Catholics, alienated by the American hierarchy, had converted to evangelical and Pentecostal Protestantism—in cities, attending storefront churches. Others sought greater power within the church, as exemplified by the founding of the National Catholic Council for Hispanic Ministry in 1990. Most Latinos still consider themselves Catholic, but the percentage dropped from 90 percent in the late 1960s to about 70 percent in the 1990s.American Catholicism continues to grapple with challenges of Americanization and ethnic diversity. Encompassing one-quarter of the nation’s population, however, its established place in American life is clear.
