Humphrey J. Desmond, the Catholic Citizen, and Americanism

Humphrey J. Desmond, the Catholic Citizen, and Americanism Robert L. Anello, M.S.A. M ilwaukee, Wisconsin, known as one of the three points that form the “German triangle” of the Midwestern United States, is usually considered in its German-American context. Indeed, the archbishops of Milwaukee in the lead-up to and during the heart of the Americanist controversy were immigrants from German-speaking areas of Europe.1 Humphrey J. Desmond, however, was an Irish-American.2 Desmond’s family emigrated to the U.S. from Ireland in the early nineteenth century, and in 1842 relocated to Wisconsin.3 The family had established themselves in Wisconsin prior to the emigration to the U.S. associated with the Irish potato famine, which began in the mid-1840s and peaked in the 1850s. The audience Desmond wrote for was, at least in his early years as a writer, mostly of Irish ancestry . Therefore, the preconceived Germanic context of Milwaukee must expand to consider both Desmond’s ancestry and the predominately Irish-American readership of the Catholic Citizen (hereafter cited as the Citizen), the Milwaukee-based newspaper of which he was the editor and publisher at the time of the Americanist controversy. A major trigger for the Germanic emigration was the series of economic, political and religious disruptions throughout the Germanic areas of Europe during the mid- to late-nineteenth century. Many German Catholics in the 1870s emigrated to escape from the German Kulturkampf, a political and religious campaign directed against Catholics. By the 1880s, Wisconsin had more German-Americans than any other state, and many of them were Catholic. The challenges of dealing with antiCatholicism in their homeland had impressed upon German-American Catholics the necessity of defending their faith. That, and the challenges of learning a new lan25 1. For additional information regarding the history of the Milwaukee Archdiocese and Catholicism in Wisconsin, see Steven M. Avella, In the Richness of the Earth (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 2002). 2. For more information on the Desmond family see Ellis Baker Usher, Wisconsin, Its Story and Biography 1848-1913, Vol. 6 (Chicago and New York: Lewis, 1914), 1621-1623. 3. See Colman J. Barry, The Catholic Church and German Americans (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1953), Table II, 6. guage, contributed to a cultural isolation among Catholic German Americans and to their belief that “language saves faith.”4 To avoid the risk of compromising their beliefs, they discouraged interaction with Protestants. They established German-language parishes and these language-oriented churches also limited German-American Catholic interactions with the English-speaking Catholics in the areas in which they settled. Many German-American Catholic parishes also built parochial schools for their children, who received their lessons in German. The second wave of German Catholics arriving in Milwaukee during the 1870s encountered an established Irish-American Catholic community of some size. IrishAmerican Catholics also had experienced anti-Catholicism in their homeland, and they learned from those experiences that their Catholic faith could survive, even during long periods of repression. As a result, while Irish-American Catholics also build parochial schools, some were less fearful of interactions with Protestants. Furthermore, the Irish arrived in the U.S. speaking English, and by the time the German immigrants of the 1870s had arrived, a second generation of English-speaking Irish-Americans was already attaining adulthood. Concerns about living their faith in the pluralistic society of the U.S. were not limited to German-American Catholics. Many Catholics feared that interaction with Protestants would breed indifferentism, a conviction that one Christian religion was as good as another. In part to address this concern, the 1884 Third Plenary Council of Baltimore exhorted Catholics to send their children to a parochial school. At that same council, the U.S. bishops determined to open a Catholic university in order to conduct “postgraduate theological studies” for U.S. priests, thus bypassing the Jesuit-operated Georgetown University.5 These two decisions—parochial schools and a Catholic university—helped to highlight differences between Catholic liberals and conservatives during the last decade of the nineteenth century. Bishops weighed the costs of constructing parochial schools versus the impact of interaction. Different perspectives were...