Section 3. The External and Internal Growth of Roman Catholicism (Cont.)

Even more important than the French element in the composition of the Roman Catholic Church is the German element, although it constitutes a later stratum. Until the middle of the present century, the German population in the United States was insignificant; but from the end of the 1840s, when a storm of revolutionary disturbances broke over Germany, and then the system of iron militarism set in, German emigration suddenly poured into America in a mighty wave, and over the past thirty years has given more than two million immigrants. According to the latest calculation, the German Catholic population constitutes about one and a half million souls,[1] making up about a quarter of the entire Roman Catholic population in the United States. “In the Catholic Church of the United States,” says a Catholic publicist, “one cannot find a people more devoted, sincere, and better educated in their religion than the Germans. The number of their churches, schools, seminaries, hospitals, and orphanages compares favorably from both an intellectual and material standpoint with similar institutions of any other part of the Catholic population. No one better than the Germans is provided with priests for the people and teachers for the children. Among them flourish various religious orders, especially those that serve the cause of education. Among the higher hierarchy are one archbishop and several bishops—Germans by birth or descent.”[2]

But the significance of both these named nationalities recedes into the background compared with the significance that the Irish nationality has had for the development and growth of Roman Catholicism in the United States. If the French nationality was for it the primary ferment, and the German nationality gave it intellectual and quantitative strength, then the Irish nationality brought with it to America the entire organic essence of Roman Catholicism, its spirit and flesh in organic wholeness, its idea and traditions. This is the chosen people of the Roman Catholic Church, possessing, according to the views of Catholic historians, a supreme, providential mission—to create the kingdom of Roman Catholicism on the soil of the New World, to bear this historical treasure of the Romanic-Celtic peoples from beneath the European yoke to a new promised land, just as the ancient chosen people transferred the treasure of divine promise from the land of Egyptian slavery to the promised land of antiquity. “When considering the gratifying success of the church in the United States,” says a Catholic historian, “justice requires us to declare that she is indebted for this in large measure to the faith, zeal, and generosity of the Irish people, who immigrated to these shores, and to their posterity. We are far from wishing to diminish the merits of other nationalities; but the tremendous influence, which the Irish people exerted on the spread of the dominion of the church, deserves especial notice, for it gives an edifying lesson. The wonderful history of the Irish nation has always convinced us that, like the chosen offspring of Abraham, it was in the designs of Providence destined for a special mission to preserve and spread the true faith. To its zeal and energy we must ascribe in very large measure the rapid growth in the number of churches and other institutions that arose in the United States, and to this same source the clergy is mainly indebted for its support in the performance of its pastoral ministry. One cannot deny that hundreds of clergymen who labor for the salvation of souls would have died of hunger, and their labors for religion would have been in vain, if only there had not been such generous aid furnished to them by the sons of Érin, who in the majority know how to appreciate the benefits of religion, and therefore willingly bring from their earthly means to purchase the spiritual goods dispensed by the church.”[3] “The Irish,” says a Catholic publicist, “were preserved by Providence and destined to be a missionary people, especially for the English-speaking world of our time, and he thus blesses those who cursed him, and benefits those who despised him.”[4] “If we turn,” says the Catholic bishop-publicist Spalding, “to an explanation of the revival of Catholicism among English-speaking peoples, we must at once recognize that the Irish people is the providential instrument through which God brought about this wonderful revival. If not for Ireland, Catholicism would now be weak and unsuccessful in America, England, and Australia. The force of this assertion is not weakened by the weight and importance that should be given to what the converts in England and the Germans and French in the United States have done for the church. The Irish made possible and actual the very work of converts, and they gave Catholicism in this country the force and attractiveness which enable it to assimilate the most heterogeneous elements, and without which it is not improbable that the vast majority of Catholics immigrating here from other countries would have been lost to the church. No people could have done for the Catholic faith of the United States what the Irish people has done for it. Its unwavering attachment to priests; its deep Catholic instincts, which no combination of circumstances was capable of bringing into collision with its love for the country; its worldly and spiritual temperament of national character; its indifference to ridicule and contempt, and its unfailing generosity—all this was as well adapted as could be for the work that lay before it to do, and gave it the ability, despite the strong prejudice against it, inherited by Americans from England, to accomplish what could not have been accomplished by Italian, French, or German Catholics. No people received such providential preparation for this work, and from no people did God require such proofs of love. Like the children of Israel, the Irish bore the yoke of slavery, were delivered from a sea of blood, and wandered the weary years in the wilderness without home or country, and were saved from despair and death only by the presence of the pillar of fire, which is the Catholic Church.”[5] Thus, the primary role in building the Roman Catholic Church in the United States belongs to the Irish people. They constitute its soul and body, and if the future of America belongs to Roman Catholicism, as Catholic publicists openly proclaim,[6] then it will owe this to the religious energy of the Irish people. They, as the chosen people, have a high religious mission to recreate the kingdom of Roman Catholicism in the new promised land, and this mission of theirs finds remarkable confirmation in the fact that this very promised land, America, owes its initial discovery to none other than the Irish themselves. Catholic historians of the Irish people maintain that the first white people that America ever saw were Irish missionaries of the early centuries of Christianity. Thus, already in the sixth century, the Irish monk St. Brendan visited the shores of America, penetrated into the interior of the continent as far as the present state of Ohio, and after spending seven years there returned to Ireland, by the command of “a certain man of respectable bearing who accompanied him, who told him that he had already gone far enough, and that further discoveries should be left for other people of a later time, who would come and Christianize this glorious land.”[7] This legend in the eyes of Catholic historians has the significance of an actual historical fact, and on the basis of it they predict that the future of America belongs to these faithful sons of the Roman Catholic Church, serving as a cornerstone for it.[8] Despite such legendary antiquity of the Irish immigration to America and the preeminent significance of the Irish people in the composition of the Roman Catholic Church on the soil of the New World, the Irish people became a real force for Roman Catholicism only very recently. Although Irish emigration began with the very declaration of independence by the United States and the proclamation of freedom of conscience for Roman Catholics, and gradually increased, especially from the beginning of the present century, yet it became a truly vast source of numerical strength for the Roman Catholic Church only from the middle of the 1840s of the present century, when a successive series of crop failures in potatoes (in 1846, 1847, and 1848) plunged the people into the abyss of poverty and the horrors of starvation. “The destruction of potato crops in Ireland was undoubtedly an act of inscrutable Providence,” says a Catholic publicist; “the calamity, suffering, and sacrifice of human lives that followed it were already an act of man. In the worst times of hunger in the country, there was always more than enough cattle and grain to feed the population. Under a wise or just government, a sufficient quantity would have been retained to satisfy the primary needs of the people; but all of it was exported and sold in foreign markets, to satisfy the most insatiable of all human beings—the Irish landlord. Struck by the unexpectedness and enormous scale of the calamity, the peasantry at first stood in shock, and before help could arrive, entire hundreds perished from hunger. Then, when private and public charity was exhausted, when epidemic was added to want, when nothing but death or the almshouse faced even the best people of the middle class, the people resolved to leave their homeland and, like a routed army, rushed to the nearest ports and left the country, apparently doomed to destruction. Many fled to England and Scotland, but the majority sought refuge in the United States. From that time, each day was witness to the arrival of overcrowded ships in our harbors, while the streets of our great cities were literally packed with crowds of strange and emaciated figures. From 1840 to 1850, more than a million such Irish emigrants arrived in the United States.”[9] Since this great immigration of the Irish people, Irish emigration has occupied the most honorable place in the list of emigrating peoples, and as we saw above, during the period from 1820 to 1880, it gave a figure of more than three million souls. From the beginning of the 1870s until 1876, a gradual weakening of it was noticeable, but from that year it again became noticeably lively, and in the last year, when Ireland was again visited by its formidable scourge—famine—Irish emigration again reached the substantial figure of more than sixty-five thousand souls. At the present time, the entire Irish Catholic population amounts to 4,250,000 souls.[10] The Irish nationality gave the church a succession of famous hierarchs, who greatly contributed to the organization of church life, and as if in justification of the high religious mission assumed by Catholic historians for them, these hierarchs have constituted and constitute the foundation stones of the entire hierarchical structure of Roman Catholicism in the United States. The first bishop of the Roman Catholic Church of this country, Carroll, so-called the “patriarch of the American church,”[11] was the son of Irish emigrants; he was also the first archbishop of the church.[12] The first hierarch raised to the rank of cardinal in the United States, the present archbishop of New York McClos­key, is also a son of Irish parents.[13] And this same nationality gave a succession of other hierarchs, who by their energy for the benefit of the church occupy the most prominent position in the history of the church. Such are the bishop England, the “Chrysostom of the American church,”[14] and the archbishop Hughes, to whom, according to the expression of a Catholic historian, “Catholicism in America owes a debt of gratitude which cannot be expressed in numbers.”[15]