The Church in America: From Immigration Through Assimilation to Confusion/Opportunity

Abstract

ISS Robert B. Wellisch The Church in America: From ImmigrationThrough Assimilation to Confusion/Opportunity Charles R. Morris has given us a readable, interesting, illuminating, and at times infuriating book, but it is difficult to say to what genre his long essay belongs. As Morris himself makes clear in his preface and table of contents, the book is divided into three parts ofroughly equal length: "Rise," a history ofthe Catholic Church in America from the Irish Potato Famine (1 846+) to about the end of the 19th century; "Triumph," a descriptive and anecdotal reminiscence about the American Church from the turn of the century till Vatican II (1962-65); and "Crisis," an analysis of the changes since the Council and the state ofthe Church in the United States today. To a certain extent, Morris' essay is thesis-driven, and in the next five paragraphs I will try to summarize his thesis. According to Morris, the Church in the United States developed the way it did A review-essay of Charles R. Morris, American Catholic, The Saints and Sinners who Built Americas Most Powerful Church. NewYork: Random House (Times Books). 1997. 431 pages + 80 pages of notes and index. $27.50. Logos 1:3 1997 156 Logos because ofthe massive immigration ofIrish Catholics following the potato famine. The post-famine Irish influence on the American Church was greater than that of any other group partly because of four factors : 1)before the 1840s no Catiiolic immigrant group, not even the Irish, was large or strong enough to influence Ae rest ofthe nation, even the Catiiolic part; 2)also before the 1840s the U.S. was a mostly agricultural country, but in the 1 840s enough urban industries were springing up in the Nortiieast for die new Irish immigrants to remain in that part of the country, and mostly in cities; this made their cultural cohesiveness stronger and quickly led to considerable political influence; 3)under die leadership of Cardinal Cullen, the Church in Ireland went dirough a tough shaping-up during die 18SOs and later; Cullen turned Ireland into a priest-factory for die whole anglophone world, and most of these late-nineteenth-century Irish priests were of a certain mold: tough, a bit narrow, but forceful—just what was needed to strengthen die Catholic Church in America and help it to grow; 4)when die Germans, Poles, Italians, and odier European Catiiolic immigrants arrived in tiiis country a little later, they had the disadvantage of a foreign language, they were slower to assimilate to American ways, and diey were never as numerous, nationally speaking, as the Irish. This last point was especially true of the clergy, and most especially of the hierarchy. The Irish-Americans created a massive, fortress-like state-within -a-state in the United States, duplicating the services offered by the United States government with parallel services oftheir own: a separate school system, separate hospitals, various fraternal and professional associations. One accident that may have stabilized this development is that some of the leaders of some of the most important archdioceses enjoyed extraordinarily long reigns, such as The Church in America Archbishop Hughes in NewYork (1839-64), Archbishop Ireland in St. Paul (1884-1918), Cardinal O'Connell in Boston (1907-44) and Cardinal Dougherty in Philadelphia (1918-51). This separate Catholic culture dominated the lives not only of American Catholics of non-Irish background, but also the lives of non-Catholic Americans, especially during the middle decades of the twentieth century, when most of the old-fashioned anti-Irish, anti-Catholic biases were in abeyance and when Catholic culture and the culture of conservative, Cold-War America seemed to coincide as never before. Moreover, ever since World War I, the mainstream Protestants had been in full retreat, and only the Catholics and the fundamentalists were growing, but the fundamentalist growth was mostly in the rural South, whereas the Catholic growth was in the urban Northeast, which continued to dominateAmerican culture. The Catholic censorship (and self-censorship ) ofthe movie industry during the 1940s and '50s is a good example ofthis Catholic-American cultural synthesis. But then, in the 1960s, the synthesis rapidly fell apart. Perhaps it already was a...