The Irish Parish

The Irish Parish Jay P. Dolan T he decade of the 1960s was a formative period for David O’Brien. This was a time when, as a young history professor at Loyola College in Montreal, Canada, he began, as he put it, “to reconsider the nature of the scholarly enterprise and my personal responsibilities as a Christian intellectual.”1 The political involvement of colleagues at Loyola persuaded him that scholarship and political involvement were not only compatible, but could also be personally enriching. This marked the beginning of a long career in which O’Brien has sought to blend the personal with the political in an attempt to bring about reform and renewal in the Catholic Church in America. One of the first organizations that he became involved with after he arrived at the College of the Holy Cross in 1969 was the Catholic Committee on Urban Ministry (CCUM). Founded by Monsignor Jack Egan, it was a loosely organized group of clergy and lay people who were engaged in some aspect of urban ministry. In CCUM O’Brien found a community of people who shared his passion for reform in the Church. As a board member and staff member in its summer program in pastoral and social ministry at the University of Notre Dame where CCUM and Egan were based, he worked with a diverse group of unforgettable activists who deepened his commitment to reform in the Church and in society. During my years of graduate study I had been working as a priest in urban parishes in Chicago and New York where I became quite interested in the challenges facing the Church in the city. In a serendipitous manner this led me to focus my research on the urban Church in the nineteenth century. This academic interest attracted me to the work of CCUM. While attending a CCUM conference at Notre Dame in the spring of 1971, I was offered a position in the history department. When I arrived at Notre Dame that fall, I met my future wife, Patricia McNeal, who was also on the board of CCUM along with O’Brien. At Notre Dame I also began a lifelong friendship with Jack Egan. It was this connection with Egan and CCUM that brought O’Brien and me 13 1. David. J. O’Brien, “The Historian as Believer,” in Gregory Baum, ed., Journeys: The Impact of Personal Experience on Religious Thought (New York: Paulist Press, 1975), 69. together. As a newcomer to the historical profession, I was an admirer of Dave’s work and envious of his ability to blend social activism with his scholarship. At many CCUM conferences and on countless other occasions, O’Brien and I bonded, forming a friendship that has endured for more than thirty years. * * * * * My academic interest in the Church in the city took place at a time when there was a great deal of interest in urban affairs. I wanted to explore the history of the urban Catholic Church by focusing on the people rather than the prelates. To achieve this I chose the parish as the window to view the Catholic community. Throughout my entire academic career the parish has remained the focal point of much of my work. Recently I have been working on a history of Irish America where once again the parish has provided a key to understanding what Irish Catholicism was like during the nineteenth century Over the course of the nineteenth century, Catholicism in the United States acquired a very ethnically diverse character. In some cities sermons were preached in as many as twenty-eight different languages. But it was the Irish who arrived first, in such large numbers and with their own priests and women religious following close behind, that by the middle of the nineteenth century they had gained control over the church in the United States. Such dominance increased over time, so much so that the Irish would soon define what it meant to be Catholic in America. In New York, the Rome of American Catholicism, twenty-three of the city’s thirty-two parishes were Irish by 1865. For every German Catholic there were as many as seven Irish Catholics in...