November 6, 2006
Making Congregation out of Segregation, Irish Catholic Style Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 02:35 PM EST In his informative feature on anti-immigrant nativism in the 1850s, Jon Grinspan notes that in the aftermath of the Civil War, “Irish and Catholic citizens began to gain wider acceptance in American society. Catholicism is now America’s largest religious denomination. A majority of the current Supreme Court justices are Catholic.”
Mr. Grinspan can certainly be forgiven for leaping 140 years in just one sentence. His AmericanHeritage.com feature was, after all, about the 1850s, not current-day ethnic politics, and he was just trying to wrap up an otherwise excellent piece. Still, it’s worth noting that nativism persisted well into the twentieth century. From the burning of Boston’s Charlestown Convent in 1834 and the Know Nothing upheavals of the 1850s to the ever-present “No Irish Need Apply Signs” of the 1890s and the Ku Klux Klan revival of the 1920s, immigrant Catholics faced the brunt of Protestant rage and anxiety, and they reacted accordingly.
One of the key ways American Catholics protected themselves against nativism was by creating an enormous network of parallel institutions. As late as the 1960s, in cities like New York the parochial school system still served about two-thirds of all Catholic children; its national network encompassed almost 11,000 schools and served one half of the Catholic elementary school population.
The Catholic school system was merely the most conspicuous component of a larger social and cultural network. By the early 1960s at least 350,000 children from metropolitan New York belonged to the Catholic Youth Organization (CYO) and participated in its broad range of after-school and weekend activities: summer camps, boxing leagues, football teams, art classes, swimming lessons—virtually every imaginable activity. By 1960 the Archdiocese of New York estimated that 40,000 Catholic teens were attending parish and diocesan dances each week. Amazingly, that figure excluded Brooklyn and Queens.
The upside of nativism, then, was the creation of a distinct subculture that is increasingly lost to fifth- and sixth-generation Irish and German Catholics, who grew up not knowing the full effect of ethnic and religious intolerance. Just as African-Americans made “congregation” out of “segregation,” American Catholics forged a rich culture out of exclusion.
|
