Section 3. The External and Internal Growth of Roman Catholicism (Cont.) (2)

But the success of the Irish mission, as the chosen people of the Roman Catholic Church, is undermined by their disadvantageous social position in America. Arriving in America in extreme poverty, they flood the cities and find themselves in the position of a landless proletariat, victims of the changing vicissitudes of the industrial market. At the present time, there is no factory, dock, and mining operation that is not crowded with Irish workers, and the entire service personnel in the cities consists largely of Irish.[1] Such a position is disadvantageous for them in many respects. It places them in the eyes of American society in the position of some kind of inferior race, new pariahs, an ignorant and superstitious people, and this view is transferred to the Roman Catholic faith professed by them. Crowded urban life injures their morality and health, and besides makes them victims of ambitious political agitators, who, exploiting their low political development, use them as material for agitations of all kinds, especially during presidential elections, demoralizing them through bribery and all sorts of fantastic promises.[2] Such a condition of the Irish people is a matter of strong concern to representatives of the Roman Catholic Church, who are aware that if the Irish people is the principal reason for the church’s greatness, then a moral decline of the Irish would inevitably bring harmful consequences for the church. Therefore, they strive in every way to draw them away from cities and to settle them in the Far West on farms. For this purpose, a special “society for Irish Catholic colonization” was formed, the principal actors in which are Roman Catholic hierarchs. The society purchases land in the territories of the Far West and at a low price, with installment payments, gives it to the Irish. Particularly prominent and zealous in this endeavor is the bishop Ireland, whose diocese embraces the territory of Minnesota, the principal wheat granary of the country. He began his activity five years ago, and in 1876 founded the first colony. “His plan is very simple,” says another enthusiast for Irish farmer colonization, the bishop Spalding. “He selects a tract of land of fifty or one hundred thousand acres, to which the exclusive right of disposition is granted to him by the railroad company[3] for three years. By means of a special bureau he organized, he brings all the details and conditions of sale to the attention of Catholics who wish to secure a home for themselves. He selects a priest most familiar with farming and farm life to guide the new colony, and sends him to the site to receive the settlers, who, upon arrival, find in him a father and a friend. The first building erected is a church, and around it the settlers select their land parcels. The settlements are arranged at proper distances along the railroad line. Within a few weeks of the colony’s opening, a post office and a store are opened in it, but a tavern is not permitted.”[4] Such colonies at the present time number a hundred, and they fully achieve the aims of their founders, namely to remove the Irish population from the corrupting influence of urban industrial life and to give them independent rural life based on strict religious and moral principles. “The power of religion,” says Spalding, “in these primitive settlements and in the presence of wild nature is almost incredibly great. There are no taverns, no idle halls where the lazy or discontented can gather for the production of public disturbances. On Sundays the entire community gathers in church. Soon a new world grows up here. The first arrivals notice that they have creative power, that instead of being wage slaves, they become founders of an independent community. Their self-consciousness rises and the whole of their moral and religious character is elevated.”[5] “The duty of the church in America from now on,” remarks a Catholic publicist, “should be to ensure that not one Catholic family arriving at our shores and seeking a new homeland in our western states and territories shall go out of its control, but should be directed to places where its priests are already prepared to receive it and where its fellow citizens will be bound to it by ties of faith. Catholics in this country now constitute one-sixth of the population. We are daily making acquisitions from the ranks of Protestant sects; few, if any, are lost to us; the emigration of the future will, in substantial measure, be in our hands. Thus, the church in America, where at the present time our holy father, by his own expression, is the “more actual pope than in any other country,” will increase in strength and beauty, and thus will prepare, when the hour comes, to save the republic, for which his sons, from the hour of its birth to the present time, have shed their blood, labored, and prayed in boundless measure.”[6]

From other nationalities entering into the Roman Catholic Church in the United States are the Spanish, who established the first settlements in the southern limits of the country; the Italians, who constitute a later stratum; the Czechs, who form a fairly populous colony with several churches in New York and other cities; and the Poles, of whom there are about forty thousand in New York, about one hundred thousand in Chicago, and in the territory of Texas there are entire settlements speaking exclusively Polish. Then also entering into the Roman Catholic Church are about 106,000 Indians[7] and about 25,000 Blacks.[8] The total number of these smaller Catholic nationalities amounts to half a million souls.

The chief source of numerical growth in the Roman Catholic population is, as evident from what has been set forth above, the emigration of European Catholic peoples. But there have also been some other causes influencing its increase, although of secondary importance. Thus, during the present century, several territories with more or less significant Catholic populations were added to the United States. In 1803, Louisiana was added with a population of about thirty-five thousand, consisting almost exclusively of Catholics. In 1819, Florida was purchased with a population of 18,000; in 1845, Texas was acquired, and in 1848—California and New Mexico, which together had a population of about 160 thousand, almost exclusively Catholic.[9] But besides this purely external addition and stratification, the numerical growth of the Roman Catholic population is also caused by intensive natural increase through the natural process of births. A general remarkable fact has been noted that the natural increase of the immigrant population in America is much greater proportionally than the increase of the native element. This can best be seen from statistical data concerning the states of Massachusetts and Rhode Island. They show that in the native American population, the number of deaths exceeds the number of births. Yet in Massachusetts there is still an increase in population—from where does it come? “Wherever increase occurs,” says the learned statistician Dr. Allen, “it is found upon investigation to be occurring from the immigrant element, and depends either upon emigration or upon a greater number of births in it. It is now well established that the immigrant population on average has three times as many children as the native American population.”[10] In Rhode Island, the census of population for 1875 shows that “in the past ten years, the native American population through natural increase increased only by 12.89 percent, whereas the immigrant population through the same process increased by 80.11 percent during the same time.”[11] The causes of this phenomenon lie partly in the fact that emigration gives predominantly adults, so that among them the percentage of people of the age when children are born is almost twice as great as in the native population;[12] furthermore, emigration gives predominantly laboring people, which also promotes greater fertility. Finally, religious and moral causes are of very important significance, especially with regard to Roman Catholics. The native American population, with the broad freedom of divorce and the prevalence of civil marriage, has weakened the bonds of marital life and thus reduced its fruits; meanwhile, the Roman Catholic immigrant population, holding marriage to be a sacrament and a sacred union, preserves the purity and strength of its bonds and likewise preserves all its productivity. “Bitter experience,” remarks a Catholic author, “will teach statesmen that there is no other means to preserve the state from certain fall than to bring its legislation into accord with Christian morality, as it is taught only by the Catholic Church. If the Catholic Church of the United States,” he adds, “had been left to only the law of natural increase, then it is evident that this alone would be sufficient for its speedier growth compared to the population of the country.”[13]

All these causes, taken together, produced the result that the Roman Catholic population during the course of one century, and especially beginning with the 1840s of the present century, grew and increased with incredible rapidity, rising from the insignificant figure of 25,000 in 1776 to 7,000,000 in 1880. By decades, it increased in the following manner: in the year of the declaration of independence of the United States, namely in 1776, the Catholic population, by the ordinary assumption of historians, consisted of 25,000 souls;[14] fourteen years later, namely in 1790, when the first national census was taken, the Catholics, according to the calculation of the first bishop Carroll, numbered 30,000.[15] In the next decade, the Catholic population tripled, and in 1800, it numbered 100,000; in 1810 – 150,000; in 1820 – 300,000; in 1830 – 500,000. From this time begins a phenomenal growth due to the beginning of the great immigration of European peoples and especially from Ireland. In 1840, the Catholic population figure rose to 1,500,000 souls; in the following decade, this considerable figure more than doubled, and in 1850, it was estimated at 3,500,000 souls. Over the next decade, another million souls was added, so that in 1860, the total was 4,500,000; in 1870, it grew to 5,500,000, and finally, over the past decade, it increased by another million and a half, so that now its number is determined to be seven million souls, which constitutes about one-seventh of the entire population of the United States. Impressive as these figures are in themselves, they become even more striking when compared to the proportional growth of the Roman Catholic population with the growth of the entire population of the States. In 1776, with a total population of three million, Catholics constituted only 1/120 of it; in 1790, with a population of 8,200,000, they constituted 1/107; in 1800, with a population of 5,300,000, Catholics already constituted 1/53; in 1810, with a population of 7,200,000, they constituted 1/48 of it; in 1820, with a population of 9,600,000, they constituted 1/32; in 1830, with a population of thirteen million, Catholics constituted 1/26; in 1840, with a population of seventeen million, they constituted 1/11; in 1850, with a population of 23,200,000, they constituted 1/7, and then in the following decades, the proportional growth of the entire population kept pace with the growth of the Roman Catholic population, so that the proportional share of the latter advanced no further than the seventh part,[16] which it still constitutes now. The cause of this can be attributed in part to a change in the composition of European emigration, in which in recent times a weakening of emigrants from Catholic countries and a strengthening from Protestant countries, especially from northern Germany and the Scandinavian states, have been noted.[17]

Thus, the Roman Catholic population of the United States during the past century since the declaration of independence and the proclamation of freedom of conscience to all faiths grew and increased almost literally not by days but by hours. But in itself, it did not yet constitute the Roman Catholic Church. It arrived in scattered form and without any church organization. Dispersing throughout a foreign country, among a hostile Protestant population, it could easily have been lost and destroyed. If, on the contrary, it has been preserved and almost in its entirety entered into the organism of the Roman Catholic Church, then it owes this to the church itself, in the person of its hierarchy. The growth of the latter proceeded proportionally with the growth of the Catholic population, and its efforts in organizing church life present a new remarkable page in the history of Roman Catholicism in America.

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