Polish-American Catholicism: A Case Study in Cultural Determinism

Abstract

is lamented Bishop Ignatius F. Horstmann of Cleveland, only the Poles cause trouble?1 The bishop's exasperated query reflected the frustration of many in the Roman Catholic hierarchy in America who were weary from years of disagreement, dispute, and dissent within not only the Polish ethnic laity but their clergy as well. To many in the hierarchy the fractious Poles were at best a constant nuisance, at worst a seriously insubordinate group of insurgents who refused to accept legitimate ecclesiastic authority. But why was it, as the bishop asked, that the Poles caused so much trouble? Why not the Italians, the Irish, or the many other peoples who maintained the Roman Catholic faith in their adopted land? Why the Poles? Historians long ago identified many reasons why people chose to migrate, dividing these into push and pull factors those that caused the immigrants to decide to leave their native land and those that beckoned them to a particular place as their new home. Among the push factors that motivated people to leave their original lands were a spectrum of negative issues such as wars, crop failures, famines, epidemics, unemployment, lack of religious or personal freedom, political or cultural repression, and forced military conscription. Perhaps because these reasons are considered negative, as motivations that force people to migrate rather than opportunities that summon them to a better life, historians long believed that the experience of immigrants in America was largely shaped by the traumatic upheaval in their lives occasioned by leaving all that was familiar behind them to move to a land that was foreign in nearly every sense. Oscar Handlin, a leading exponent of this interpretation, titled his pioneering work The Uprooted, a perfect description of the work's focus on the social disorganization that he saw attending people torn from their traditions and values, thrust into a land whose culture was as alien as its language, and