Catholics in America

One hundred percent Americanism also manifested itself in the rigorous immigrant restriction quotas enacted by Congress in 1921 and 1924, which were clearly prejudiced against southern and eastern Europeans, many of whom since the 1880s were Catholic. The Catholic press again opposed these measures, interpreting them as disguised prejudice against Catholics in America. John A. Ryan and others in the labor movement, however, saw the restriction laws as necessary legislative enactments to provide better wages for working-class Americans. Ryan also believed that Catholics generally were too quick to raise the anti-Catholic complaint.

Following their northern Irish cousins in the peace accord of Good Friday, 1988, evangelicals and Catholics in America may have the like of a Good Friday treaty staring them in the face. Like their Irish cousins, they may reach an agreement that will catch hold, slowly and perhaps painfully. Like the treaty of their Irish cousins, the prospective truce is controversial, provoking both suspicion and opposition, and the outcome is uncertain. The notion of American conservative Presbyterians conversing with American Catholics is no more unlikely than that of northern Irish Presbyterians conversing with Irish Catholics, for the historic bitterness between the communities, although less bloody, has been as corrosive and pervasive here as there.

John Hughes (1797 - 1864), Irish-born and American-educated bishop of New York, added to his twenty-five-year record of outspoken criticism of the no-popery campaign a provocative public address entitled "The Decline of Protestantism and Its Causes" (November 1850). He, as much or more than any Catholic leader in the nineteenth century, articulated the "present position of Catholics in America ." He was a man of "views,"” and in this lecture to raise money for the Sisters of Mercy and their hostel for women, he delivered, in the words of his biographer, "a ruthless account of what he saw as the failure of the Reformation" and did so on the eve of his departure for Rome to receive the lamb's wool pallium of an archbishop from Pope Pius IX.

When Catholics in America and France united in the war for independence against Great Britain , the strident anti-Catholicism of a decade before diminished, revealing the extent to which hostility toward the Roman religion had become nationalistic rather than sectarian. Although public celebrations in behalf of freedom preceding and during the Revolution often included diatribes against the Pope, the virtually unanimous support given by Catholic leaders to the cause of independence and the assistance of the French ally against England resulted in a marked decline in anti-Catholic attacks.

At the very time of Protestant renewal, Roman Catholic immigrants were beginning to arrive in the United States in substantially larger numbers than ever before. In 1790, eight years after Crevecoeur's prophecy, there were approximately 35,000 Catholics in America ministered to by 40 priests. Fifteen years later there were about 70,000 Catholics and 70 priests; at the end of the next fifteen years, in 1820, there were 200,000 Catholics in the United States ; and anti-Catholicism was beginning to rise again. By 1827, several religious newspapers appeared which were consistently anti-Catholic. Ministerial exhortations to read the Bible, discover the gospel of good news, and witness for Christ were frequently interlocked with attacks on the papacy as a symbol of tyrannical power.

Much has been written about the burning of churches, the stoning of homes, and crowds of ruffians thrashing in the streets, and the history of violence between Catholics and Protestants in this country often seems shocking to Americans in retrospect. But compared to bloodlettings between Hindus and Moslems in India or Catholics and Protestants in Europe, violence between Catholics and non-Catholics in America actually has been mild.