CHAPTER TWO
Why the Famine Irish Became Catholic in America
The story of the Great Famine, which devastated Ireland in the late 1840s, is a story that has been told many times. While scholarly views of what caused the Famine, and who was or was not responsible, have shifted back and forth over time, what has remained constant—at least for anyone who reads the record with even minimal care—is a chilling sense of the death and devastation that swept over the Irish people. Although some scholars, like Donald Akenson (1993), rightly point out that other famines in other countries have killed larger numbers of people and that the Famine in Ireland only accelerated existing patterns of Irish emigration, there seems no denying the centrality of the Famine to modern Irish history and the ways we think about that history.
Between 1841 and 1851 Ireland’s population declined by at least one-fifth (and possibly a bit more, depending on how you regard the official statistics). Most commentaries suggest that about a million Irish died outright from the effects of the Famine and that more than half a million emigrated. Emigration did not necessarily mean survival, of course. Already weakened by the Famine, a great many emigrants fell prey to the typhoid fever and dysentery that spread easily in the crowded quarters of the ships that carried them across the ocean. To take the best-documented case: evidence suggests that in 1847 about 20,000 Irish men, women, and children died on the ships bringing them to the Canadian receiving station at Grosse Île (Quebec) or in the poorly equipped camp set up there to receive them (Quigley 1997). Fortunately for me, one of the people who survived both the Famine and the process of emigration was Margaret Fogarty (1812–1896), who would become my great-great-great-grandmother.
Margaret’s husband, John Larkin, was one of the casualties of the Famine, and in 1849 Margaret and her four young children left Ireland for America. After crossing the Atlantic, she made straight for Cincinnati. As unlikely as it may seem, I know something about Margaret’s very first day in Cincinnati, and it is something that is directly relevant to the concern of this chapter, namely, the relationship between the Famine Irish and Catholicism. My knowledge of that first day comes from a typewritten letter sent to my paternal grandmother, Mae Worthington, in January 1925 by one of her aunts, just after the death of Mae’s father. The purpose of the letter, as the writer explained, was to show that “God never gives heavier crosses than we could bear.” Mae had written them about her father’s death.
Kate read your letter to mother [Margaret Larkin, one of Margaret Fogarty’s four children]. Her eyesight is so dim now she can’t read. Poor thing she cried so hard. She then began to tell us how our Grandmother came to this country with four little children, the oldest nine years old, and how she managed. You know Mother is always witty. She told us about them coming up the Ohio, landing in Cincinnati on Sunday. Grandmother and another lady, they met on the journey, left the children on the steamer, and went up in the city to find a church, that they might hear Mass. Grandmother met one of the Fogarty’s, a cousin. He recognized her and asked for her husband. She told him he was dead. He then told her to get the children and he would take all of them to his home. He had only been married a very short time. Wasn’t that some bride who took in this gang of strangers to her? Well, the funny part of it was, they made some toddy for them. Mother says, she guesses they did not expect to give her any, as she was very young. But she got some anyway, and not knowing, she drank it all, and in few minutes, she fell off the chair “dead drunk.” This is how she spent her first day in Cincinnati. You see they got along alright.
Since Margaret Larkin, the woman who told this story to the writer of the letter, would only have been about nine at the time of the event, it’s entirely possible that her memory had been shaped and filtered by what others—her own mother in particular—had told her, and so by what these others had wanted to remember and what they had wanted to forget. Still, the one detail that rings true is this: one of the first things that Margaret Fogarty did upon arriving in the area where she wanted to settle in the United States was to search out a local Catholic church. The critical question is why? When I first read this story years ago, the answer seemed obvious: like most Irish Catholics, Margaret had been “a good Catholic” and so did the things, like going to Mass on Sunday, that good Catholics did. Now, however, I’m less certain.
Although my goal in this chapter is to suggest that the existing scholarly understanding of the Famine Irish and American Catholicism needs to be revised, the chapter will also explain why I have changed my thinking on the subject.
The Irish as the Gold Standard for American Catholicism
An account of Irish American Catholicism is almost always central to any discussion of American Catholicism generally. Part of the reason for this is purely demographic: Irish Americans, as compared to other national groups, have historically accounted for a disproportionate share of both the laity and the hierarchy in the American Catholic Church. Estimates indicate, for example, that in 1860 more than a third of the total Catholic population in the United States was Irish born (Taves 1986, 7); almost two-thirds were of Irish descent (Carey 2004, 30). Over the next few decades, Catholic immigration from continental Europe (mainly from German-speaking regions and Italy) would dilute Irish predominance among the laity a bit, but it would still remain considerable. David Doyle (1980, 178) estimated that by 1900 Irish Americans (both the Irish born and those of Irish descent) accounted for “close to half” of all American Catholics. More recent commentators (see, for example, Dolan 1992, 143; McCaffrey 1999, 138) consider Doyle’s “close to half” estimate too high, but everyone agrees that around the turn of the twentieth century Irish Americans were at the very least a plurality within the American Catholic Church.
That the Irish dominated the clergy and hierarchy of the American Church is more certain. In 1880, the percentages of the clergy who were Irish American was 69 percent in Boston, 60 percent in Baltimore; 47 percent in St. Louis; and 44 percent in Chicago (Doorley 1987, 72–77). Moreover, in 1886 thirty-five (51%) of the sixty-eight Catholic bishops in America were Irish born or of Irish descent (Doorley 2001, 37). In 1920, it was still the case that two-thirds of Catholic bishops were Irish American, and in New England that proportion was three-fourths (Barrett and Roediger 2005, 18). Of the twenty-six archdioceses in existence by the late 1950s, at least seventeen were headed by archbishops of Irish descent (Shannon 1960, 209); and as late as 1972, nearly half (48%) of American Catholic bishops were Irish American (Dolan 1992, 143–144). Furthermore, in some jurisdictions Irish dominance of the Catholic hierarchy has long been nearly absolute. Over the period 1808–2002, eleven bishops and archbishops oversaw the Diocese of New York (which became an archdiocese in 1851), and all but one have been Irish or of Irish descent (Shelley 2001, 2).
The disproportionate representation of Irish Americans among the laity and clergy of the American Catholic Church insured that the type of Catholicism favored by the Irish in America became normative. “Although the American Catholic Church,” wrote Roger Finke and Rodney Stark (1992, 136), “was an amazing mosaic, the fundamental characteristics of American Catholicism, as it was taught, preached and practiced, were Irish.” Lawrence McCaffrey (1999, 129) makes much the same point: while the Irish have influenced American life in many ways, “their most important impact was on the character and personality of American Catholicism.” The traits that have long distinguished Irish American Catholicism—the most important of which, as Michael Doorley (2001) notes, are “regular religious observance, unquestioning faith, respect for clerical authority, and support for parish schools”—became the standard by which the American church judged all Catholics. Italian American Catholics, in particular, were singled out for special condemnation by church authorities (especially those who were themselves Irish) for failing to meet the Irish standard (Orsi 1985, 55–56).
The Irish standard for judging Catholics generally was not used by church officials only; it also pervades the scholarly literature on American Catholicism. During the 1970s and 1980s, when studies of “white ethnics” came into fashion, the question whether other Catholics were or were not becoming more like the Irish was routinely raised. Rudolph Vecoli (1977, 37–38), for example, toward the end of what is still a widely cited article on Italian American Catholicism, concluded that
in terms of certain religious practices, the second- and even more the third-generation Italians do seem to be approaching the Irish Catholic norm (for instance, supporting the church financially, sending children to Catholic schools. … However, on the sacramental index, attendance at Mass, reception of Holy Communion, and confession, the significant discrepancy between Irish and Italian behavior is not only maintained in the second and third generations, but even increases.
Others writing in the same period reached the same conclusions (among them, Abrahamson 1975). More recently, Louis Gesualdi (2004) determined—contra Vecoli—that Italian American Catholics in white-collar occupations (but not those in blue-collar occupations) are quite similar to Irish Catholics with regard to religious participation and belief. The important point, however, is that, even now, scholars take the Irish as the gold standard against which other American Catholics are judged.
The Puzzle
But why did the Irish in America flock to the Catholic Church and become such good Catholics? For commentators writing prior to 1970, the answer seemed obvious: the Irish in Ireland had for centuries been strongly attached to the Catholic tradition and the Catholic Church. Some scholars were positively lyrical in making this claim. Carl Wittke (1956, 89), for example, described how “in times that were dark, priests and laymen had shared the miseries of their unhappy island … the attachment of the Irish people to their persecuted Church was never shaken.” Similarly, Thomas McAvoy, in his widely read A History of the Catholic Church in the United States (1969, 245), argued that dominance of American Catholicism by the Irish “was not exactly new because, wherever Roman Catholicism has flourished in the English-speaking world since the Reformation, the most faithful group had been the Irish.” McAvoy wrote that the deep attachment of the Famine Irish to Catholicism was “their chief consolation in their desperate condition” (p. 3) and that it was one of the very few Irish cultural traditions which survived the voyage across the Atlantic. Scholars like Wittke and McAvoy felt no obligation to present any evidence in support of their contentions, and they were always a little vague about what constituted attachment to Catholic traditions and to the Catholic Church, mainly because they regarded this as just something that everyone knew to be true.
It seems clear in retrospect that these claims by Wittke and McAvoy (a priest and chair of the history department at the University of Notre Dame from 1939–1960) were accepted at face value because they were so consistent with what leaders (especially Irish American leaders) of the American Catholic Church had been saying for quite some time. During the church’s Third Plenary Council, held in Baltimore in 1884, Bernard J. McQuaid, Bishop of Rochester (and the son of Irish emigrants from County Tyrone) declared:
The first immigrants coming in large numbers were from Ireland. Of all the people of Europe they were the best fitted for religion in a new country. Brave by nature, inured to poverty and hardship, just released from a struggle unto death for the faith, accustomed to the practice of religion in its simplest forms, cherishing dearly their priests whom they learned to support directly, actively engaged in building humble chapels on the sites of ruined churches and in replacing altars, they were not appalled by the wretchedness of religious equipments and surrounding in their new homes on this side of the Atlantic. (cited in Liptak 1989, 78)
A bit later, in 1907, the Irish-born John Cardinal Farley, Archbishop of New York, said that the Catholic Church in New York had “only one class of people to draw upon for the support of [its] churches and schools” and that Irish Americans were that class (cited in Shelley 2001, 1–2). A few years later, W. H. Agnew (1913, 258–259), a Jesuit priest, said of the earliest Irish immigrants:
[They] came to America heroically attached to their religion, well instructed in it, faithful in the use of its Sacraments, and ready to die for it. … The Church was the center of their infant world. … The priest of God was pointed out to them as the visible embodiment of God’s power and goodness [and] to think evil of God’s priest was for them an iniquity.
This very same view of the Famine Irish was shared by Protestant commentators in the nineteenth century, though they obviously gave it a different valuation.
As Robert Dunne (2002) has demonstrated, the complaint most characteristic of nativist Protestant tirades against the Famine Irish, at their worst in the 1840s and early 1850s, was that these immigrants were under the influence and control of Catholic priests, who owed their political allegiance to Rome. Such a view presupposes exactly what the church’s own view presupposes: that the Famine Irish embraced the church, in the person on their local Catholic priest, as soon as they stepped off the boats. Unfortunately, as most readers will already know, the claim that these Irish had been strongly attached to Catholicism and/or the Catholic Church in Ireland is more problematic than the remarks by scholars like Wittke and McAvoy, by church leaders, and by Protestant critics would suggest.
Some time ago, Emmet Larkin (1972) argued that, during the middle of the nineteenth century, Catholic leaders in Ireland, most notably Paul Cardinal Cullen, successfully promoted a “devotional revolution” that dramatically changed the texture of Catholic practice in Ireland. Several scholars have taken issue with Larkin’s use of the word revolution here, arguing either that Larkin’s “revolution” was just the final phase in a process of a Tridentine reform that had begun much earlier (McGrath 1991) or that participation in official Catholic rituals like the Mass had declined during the century before the Famine and so Larkin’s “revolution” was to some extent a return to earlier participation levels (D. Miller 2005). Still, no one writing after Larkin has challenged his basic point, that Catholic practice in Ireland in the decades immediately following the Famine was dramatically different from what it had been in the decades immediately preceding the Famime. Mass attendance rates, in particular, which had been high in some areas of Ireland but extremely low in others during the early 1800s, were high in all areas of Ireland after the devotional revolution (D. Miller 1975; 2000; 2005).
Although Larkin’s work produced a gestalt shift in scholarly thinking about Irish Catholicism in Ireland, its effect on the study of Irish American Catholicism has been minimal. Indeed, most American scholars have used Larkin’s argument to reinforce the traditional position, namely, that the Famine immigrants were devout Catholics when they stepped off the boat. Patricia Good (1975, 9), for example, in her case study of an Irish American parish in nineteenth-century Pittsburgh, concluded that the Irish driven by the Famine to emigrate had “gained comfort from the devotional revolution initiated by Cardinal Cullen [because it] provided the suffering Catholic masses with at least some sense of meaning and spiritual consolation to their dreary lives.” Jay Dolan (1975, 45–58) made the same claim, though perhaps more modestly: he estimated that about half (only half) of the Irish emigrants who arrived in New York after the Famine brought with them a commitment to Catholicism that had been shaped by the devotional revolution and for that reason took an active role in the affairs of their local parish. Dolan, however, is really in a minority. Most American scholars, like Good, make no attempt to qualify the suggestion that Irish Catholic immigrants to the United States had been shaped by the devotional revolution and so were “good Catholics” when they arrived in America. Roger Finke and Rodney Stark (1992, 136–138) make no bones about their uncritical acceptance of the claim: “Without pausing to explore the causes of the Irish devotional revolution here, we may note that this revolution spread to America with successive waves of immigrants (Larkin 1972). And in combination with the immense predominance of Irish clergy, the sect-like qualities of Irish Catholicism predominated as well.” And Finke and Stark’s conclusion here continues to be taken at face value in scholarly discussions of Irish American religion (for example, Quinlan 2005, 147–148). What is at least mildly puzzling about all versions of this commonly made argument—locating the source of Irish American Catholic piety in Ireland’s devotional revolution—is that they run directly counter to what Larkin himself said about the Famine emigrants.
In both his original (1972) article and in later work (e.g., 1984), Larkin is very clear in arguing that the devotional revolution in Ireland was associated most of all with the “respectable” (= well-off) farmer class among the Catholic population and not with the Catholic majority, which consisted of laborers, cottiers, and paupers. What happened during the Famine and ensured that the devotional revolution would affect Irish Catholicism in general in Ireland was that laborers, cottiers, and paupers were either killed off or driven to emigrate but the well-off farmer class was little affected by the Famine. For Larkin, these two intertwined demographic processes ensured that the variant of Catholicism associated with the well-off farmer class came to predominate in Ireland. A logical consequence of this argument, which Larkin notes explicitly, is that the vast majority of Irish Catholics who emigrated in the immediate wake of the Famine would have been little committed to the sort of Catholicism that Cardinal Cullen was promoting.
Last but not least … what was significant in the devotional revolution is its importance for understanding the Great Diaspora of the Irish in the nineteenth century. … Most of the two million Irish who emigrated between 1847 and 1860 were part of the pre-Famine generation of non-practicing Catholics. … What the famine Irish actually represented, therefore, was a culture of poverty that had been in the making in Ireland since the late eighteenth century. … The crucial point is that after the famine that culture of poverty was broken up in Ireland by emigration and the new circumstances created by that breakup allowed for the emergence of other values. (Larkin 1972, 651, emphasis added)
This part of Larkin’s argument is simply ignored by commentators like Finke and Stark and Dolan.
In other cases, commentators seem aware of Larkin’s argument but nevertheless continue to suggest that post-Famine Irish American religiosity was rooted in Ireland’s devotional revolution. For example, in an essay on the Irish in New York, Lawrence McCaffrey (1996, 218–219) notes—correctly, given the Larkin argument—that the devotional revolution can only reasonably be seen as having affected post-1877 Irish immigrants to that city. In a subsequent essay, however, McCaffrey (1997, 81) writes, “Post-Famine Irish emigrants, priests, nuns, and laity brought what Emmett Larkin has described as a Devotional Revolution with them to the New World.” McCaffrey thus associates the devotional revolution with all post-Famine immigrants, including that mass of Irish emigrants who settled in the U.S. in the immediate wake of the Famine.
David Gleeson (2001, 85), in his study of Irish Catholics in the American South, takes note of Larkin’s contention that Famine emigrants were not devotional revolution Catholics but dismisses it, saying, “The Irish in the South brought their devotion with them and sought the comfort of the church parish life. Even when they had not experienced Cullen’s reforms in Ireland, they provided similar raw material for zealous clerics in America.” His evidence for this, however, consists entirely in a number of anecdotal references to particular Irish Catholics in the South who contributed to the support of a local Catholic church. Even putting aside the fact that most of the people whom Gleeson mentions were well-off (and so not representative of the Famine Irish generally), the logical flaw in his argument seems evident. Thus, Gleeson starts with evidence of Irish Catholic religiosity in the United States (they supported their local church), assumes that this was caused by their deep attachment to the devotional life of the Catholic Church in Ireland, and then uses this (their deep attachment to Catholicism in Ireland) to explain his initial finding. The argument succeeds only by assuming what it sets out to prove.
In summary, then, investigators (at least American investigators) who cite Larkin’s work on the devotional revolution in Ireland as the source of Irish American Catholic piety either ignore entirely Larkin’s contention that the immigrants who came to the United States in the immediate wake of the Famine were not affected by that devotional revolution or they acknowledge Larkin’s argument but simply assert or imply the reverse. What thus becomes common to the work of all these commentators is the suggestion that the roots of the deep attachment of Irish Americans to the variant of Catholicism that shaped the American Church are to be found in Ireland. Ignored entirely is the possibility, suggested by Larkin’s work, that if Famine immigrants were not affected by the devotional revolution, their attachment to the variant of Catholicism they embraced in America was likely the result of their experiences in America. Indeed, if we accept Larkin’s argument about Famine emigrants, the question we really need to ask is “How and why did the Famine Irish become ‘good’ Catholics in America.”
How the Irish Became Catholic in America
Although the Irish in pre-Famine Ireland may not have been especially observant Catholics, using measures like mass attendance and the reception of the sacraments, a thriving tradition of popular Catholicism did exist at least from the time of the Counter Reformation. This form of popular Catholicism was centered on holy well cults, rounding rituals (the practice of walking around a well or stone cairn a precise number of times—usually three, seven, nine, or fifteen—in a clockwise direction) and patterns. Patterns (also called patrons) were communal events that drew people from all levels of Irish society, both males and females, both rural and urban. Patterns included a mix of religious and secular and religious activities. Rounding rituals were central to the religious experience at a pattern. Local priests attended these events and did say mass and preach the occasional sermon, but such activities were “add-ons.” Secular activities, usually held at the end of the day, after the religious activities, typically included drinking, dancing, and faction fights between rival groups of males.
Most commentators who discuss the Famine Irish in America, if they mention this form of popular Catholicism at all, say simply that it failed to cross the Atlantic with the emigrants because it was too closely tied to the conditions of life in Ireland and/or to particular sites there (see, for example, Clarke 1993, 46–47; Mannion 1991, 90–91). What these writers overlook, however, is the evidence that, in Ireland, attachment to these communal forms of popular Catholicism Ireland had been on the decline since the late 1700s, long before the increase in Irish migration to North America in the 1830s and (even more dramatically) the 1840s. Eugene Hynes (1978, 141–142) pointed out that evidence of a decades-old pre-Famine decline in the popularity of this form of Catholicism could be found in the written recollections of authors like William Wilde (1815–1876). The best evidence for a pre-Famine decline in the popularity of holy well cults and the associated rituals and celebrations, however, is to be found in the Ordnance Survey letters.
During the 1830s, John O’Donovan and other Ordnance Survey investigators (but mainly O’Donovan) scoured the Irish countryside asking questions about local holy wells, patterns, and other sites of “antiquarian” interest. Their reports (which are available in typescript at the Royal Irish Academy, Dublin, and elsewhere) are pervaded with informant comments about once-popular holy wells that had fallen into disuse and about once-popular patterns at some particular site that had not been celebrated for years. (For a discussion of the Ordnance Survey letters and their value in assessing holy well cults, as well as a discussion of the changing social conditions in pre-Famine Ireland that likely undermined the appeal of holy well cults and patterns, see Carroll 1999, 151–158.)
What all this means—to repeat the point that was made in passing in Chapter 1—is that the mass of Irish Catholic immigrants who swept across the Atlantic in the years immediately following the Famine to settle in the United States would have been little attached either to the official Catholic tradition (again, assuming for the moment that Larkin was right) or to the form of popular Catholicism that had previously prevailed in Ireland. They would, in other words, have been indifferent to the practice of Catholicism in any form, and it is against this baseline that we must explain their transformation into the mainstay of the American Catholic Church.
Kerby Miller (1985) is one of the few scholars who has discussed the religious transformation of the Famine Irish in America in a precise and extended manner. First, he takes explicit note of this tenuous attachment of most Famine Irish to official Catholicism, something commentators like Finke, Stark, Dolan, and others ignore. Miller writes (p. 327):
[N]on-practicing or “anonymous” Catholics from southern and western Ireland probably dominated the peasant exodus of 1845–55, and large numbers rarely or never observed formal religious obligations in the New World. Thus, during the 1850s and 1860s at least half the Irish in New York City’s Sixth Ward, including a great majority of the unskilled laborers, hardly ever attended mass; in Ohio, one priest lamented “scarcely one of ten of our Irish on the railroad goes to his duty, one half are grown up to 20–25 years and never made their first communion [and] know nothing of their catechism.”
Miller then goes on to argue that these religiously indifferent Irish were quickly pushed into the arms of the official church, most of all by nativist hostility. The appeal of the church, in other words, was that it was an institution which—along with the Democratic Party—“served to insulate emigrants and traditional Irish values from nativist hostility” (328).
While Miller’s argument might at first sight seem to fit the facts of the situation in cities like New York and Boston (i.e., anti-Catholic hostility was intense in those cities and the Irish there did become good Catholics), there are at least two problems with his argument.
First, there is the matter of what options were available to Irish Americans. Because the Famine Irish did become “good Catholics,” there has always been a historiographical predisposition to take that behavior as a given and so not to delve deeply into its explanation. Dolan and Stark/Finke explain it away by reference to Ireland’s devotional revolution, while others, like Miller, explain it away by reference to nativist hostility. Such explanations fail to consider the other logical possibility and to ask, Why didn’t large numbers of the Famine Irish slip easily into Protestantism of one sort or another? After all, that is precisely what large numbers of pre-Famine Irish of Catholic background did. This omission seems critical in the case of Miller’s argument, since becoming Protestant (conversion would be too strong a word here, assuming that the Famine Irish were religiously indifferent) would be an obvious way of blunting anti-Catholic hostility.
Only Donald Akenson (1993, 244–252), as far as I know, has addressed this question in an explicit way. His answer starts with two characteristics that distinguish the experience of the Famine Irish immigrants from those of the pre-Famine period: (1) whereas the Irish who immigrated in the pre-Famine period were overwhelmingly male, Famine immigrants were more evenly divided between males and females; and (2) as an institution, the American Catholic Church was far more accessible to Irish immigrants in the post-Famine period than it had been in the pre-Famine period. Consequently, Akenson argues, in the pre-Famine period the absence of Irish Catholic females forced Irish Catholic males to marry into Protestant families and so likely to be “pulled into” Protestantism by their wives and in-laws. Also, that there was typically no Catholic church in their local community made this more likely. But Famine and post-Famine immigrants were in a different situation. The gender ratio was more balanced among later immigrants, so they could more easily find an Irish mate with a Catholic background. The Catholic Church being more developed in America by then, they also were more likely to have a Catholic church in their local community. Marrying a Catholic spouse in a Catholic church, concludes Akenson, reinforced their Catholic identity.
For Akenson, this argument explains why the Irish became devout Catholics, but of course it doesn’t. After all, even taking his argument at face value, it would only explain why Famine immigrants would have maintained a Catholic identity, but we know that a Catholic identity did not always bring along with it a desire to participate in the sacramental life of the church. Similarly, later in the nineteenth century, most Italian immigrants thought of themselves as Catholic (that is, they had a Catholic identity), and yet the “Italian problem” that generated so much debate within the American Catholic Church (and which will be discussed in the next chapter) was precisely that in their religious practice Italian Americans came nowhere close to meeting the standards that by then had been set by the Irish.
Still, assuming that post-Famine marriage patterns indeed functioned to reinforce a Catholic identity among Famine immigrants gives us a basis for understanding why “converting to Protestantism” would not have been a viable response to anti-Catholic hostility for Famine immigrants. After all, during the last two-thirds of the nineteenth century, there was an increasing interconnection between “being Irish” and “being Catholic,” and so converting to Protestantism would have been a move away from one’s Irish identity—something that would not have been true for Irish immigrants in the pre-Famine period. So, if anti-Catholic hostility had an effect at all, it would have been more likely to drive Famine and post-Famine immigrants toward the Catholic Church than toward any form of Protestantism. Does that mean that, in the end, Kerby Miller is correct in seeing “nativist hostility” as most responsible for making Famine immigrants practicing Catholics? I still don’t think so, because there is another problem with Miller’s argument.
As Edward O’Donnell (1997) has pointed out, the Irish experience in cities on the Eastern Seaboard, like New York and Boston, was often quite different from the Irish experience in cities like Albany, Detroit, Cleveland, St. Louis, New Orleans, Denver, and San Francisco. Part of this difference, it happens, has to do with nativist hostility: in these other areas, Famine immigrants encountered far less hostility than was the case in cities like Boston and New York, and yet they still became “good Catholics.” Take the specific case of San Francisco, which at least one commentator has called “one of the most hospitable places on earth” for Famine immigrants (Meagher 2005, 85).
The San Francisco Irish
A great many Irish immigrants made their way to northern California during the 1850s and 1860s. Typically, as Malcolm Campbell (2002) points out, they were Famine emigrants who had first settled in either eastern U.S. cities or in Australia or New Zealand. It was almost certainly the discovery of gold at Sutter’s Mill in 1848 which first made California an attractive destination to Famine emigrants, but more Irish quickly settled and made a life for themselves in San Francisco and the San Francisco Bay area. By 1852 there were already 4,200 Irish-born individuals in San Francisco. By 1870, Irish immigrants were the largest foreign-born population in the state and accounted for almost 10 percent of its total population; 48 percent of the state’s Irish-born population lived in San Francisco itself and 14 percent lived in one of the five surrounding counties (Campbell 2002, 67–69). By 1880, 37 percent of the city’s white population was Irish by birth or descent and these were overwhelmingly Catholic (Burchell 1979, 3–4). By this time, the Irish community in San Francisco had become (in absolute numbers) the sixth largest Irish community in the United States, after New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago, and St. Louis (Walsh 1978, 12).
Although there is no denying that the San Francisco Irish encountered some nativist hostility (especially during the 1850s, when they were targeted by the Committee of Vigilance and by Know-Nothing politicians), the hostility they encountered was far less intense than that faced by the Irish in the East—something that Catholic commentators of the period were quick to point out. (For some of the comments made by contemporary observers in this regard, see Burchell 1979, 6–7.) Both Rischin (1978) and Walsh (1976) suggest that the lessened hostility faced by the Irish in San Francisco resulted from: the absence of a long-established Yankee elite, an established tradition of Catholicism inherited from the recent Spanish past, and the fact (itself a function of these first two things) that the Famine Irish and their children in San Francisco were able to move more quickly into positions of authority in local politics and the local police force than was true in eastern cities. And yet, despite the relative absence of hostility toward them in San Francisco, the Irish there very quickly became faithful Catholics, just like the Famine Irish elsewhere.
The best evidence of how quickly the San Francisco Irish became practicing Catholics is the number of churches built to serve congregations that were predominantly Irish. The very first parish church established by Bishop Joseph Sadoc Alemany after his arrival in late 1850, for example, was St. Patrick’s on Market Street (later relocated to Mission Street, see Figure 2), and it was established specifically for the benefit of the growing Irish population (McGloin 1978, 40). Almost immediately, however, it became apparent that St. Patrick’s was too small. Even as early as 1853, only two years after St. Patrick’s had been been built, contemporary observers noted that the congregation was increasing so rapidly that a new building was being planned (Soulé, Gihon, and Nisbet 1855, 697). Among the other churches built in San Francisco in this early period to serve mainly or entirely Irish congregations were St. Mary’s in 1854, St. Joseph’s in 1861, St. Brigid’s in 1863, and St. Peter’s in 1867 (Avella 2000, 263).
Fig. 2. St. Patrick’s Church, Mission Street, in 2005. St. Patrick’s parish was founded in 1851 to serve San Francisco’s Irish community. The church building was largely destroyed in the 1906 earthquake; its replacement, pictured here, was designed to resemble the original structure.
One of the things that made this spate of church building possible, and that is further evidence that the San Francisco Irish had embraced the church, is that much of the money that financed the construction of these new churches came from the Irish community. Moreover, as Burchell’s (1979, 87–92) careful study shows, this support came not simply from a few elites (though Irish elites did contribute handsomely to these projects) but rather from the broad spectrum of the Irish community in San Francisco. Given all this, it hardly seems surprising that by the 1860s church leaders, including Bishop Alemany, and leaders in the Irish community, were boasting about the flourishing state of Catholicism in the city and in particular about the high rates of church attendance (for some of the remarks, see Burchell 1979, 4–5; McGloin 1978, 31–41).
But, for a clearer picture, we need to look at Irish emigrants outside the United States. After all, as Donald Akenson has been telling us for years, although the Famine Irish likely encountered a certain amount of hostility in all contexts where they faced an English-speaking Protestant majority, the nativist hostility the Famine Irish encountered in the United States was far more intense than that which they encountered in places like Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. That is precisely why, as Akenson has also been telling us for years, we need to study the Irish outside the United States if we want to control for the effects of this intense nativist hostility as we think about the links between being Irish and behaviors like choice of occupation, settlement in a rural versus urban area, and upward mobility. When we do look at the Famine Irish who settled outside the United States, we find that they too became “good Catholics.”
The Irish in Toronto
The Irish Catholic community in Toronto, in particular, has been the subject of several excellent studies (Clarke 1988; 1993; McGowan 1999; Nicolson 1983; 1985), and collectively these studies establish three things. First, the Catholic community in nineteenth-century Toronto was overwhelmingly Irish. Nicolson’s estimate is that the Irish accounted for 90 percent of the Catholic population of the city in 1851 and 85 percent in 1880. Second, Larkin was quite correct in his assessment of Famine immigrants: upon their arrival in Canada, they did not attend mass, did not participate in the sacramental life of the church, and were generally ignorant of the Lord’s Prayer, the Apostle’s Creed, and the like (on this issue, see Clarke 1993, 48–50). But a third fact is most important, that the Famine Irish in Toronto very quickly—more or less between 1850 and 1880—became “good” practicing Catholics.
As in Ireland itself and in the United States during this same period, mass attendance jumped dramatically. An 1882 survey conducted by a Toronto newspaper found that 70 percent of the city’s Irish Catholics attended Sunday Mass (Clarke 1993, 61). As well, Irish Catholics in Toronto—like their counterparts in Ireland and America—increasingly embraced a range of extraliturgical devotions that included devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, devotion to the Immaculate Conception of Mary, dedication of the month of May to Mary, a variety of devotions centered on the Eucharist, and the increased use of scapulars and rosaries (Clarke 1993, 58–61; McGowan 1999, 92–93). There was also a rapid increase in the number of churches, convents, and aid societies associated with the Catholic community during the 1850s and 1860s (Nicolson 1985, 62–63).
The net result of what can only be called Toronto’s own devotional revolution is that, by the end of the century, the Irish in Toronto—who had arrived as lax Catholics in the aftermath of the Famine—were almost as devout as Catholics in Ireland and easily more devout than their Protestant neighbors. In 1901, the Canadian government collected data from various Christian denominations on a variety of issues, including the number of their members who were regular communicants or who attended Sunday school. That data (reported in McGowan 1999, 94) indicated that 86 percent of Toronto’s Catholics (who were still mainly Irish) were communicants or Sunday school attendees. The comparable figures reported for other denominations were: Anglicans, 37 percent; Presbyterians, 42 percent; Methodists, 57 percent; and Baptists, 66 percent.
Explaining Devotional Revolutions
At this point, four things should be reasonably clear. First, that the Famine Irish who settled in the United States were initially religiously indifferent; second, that over the course of a generation or two, they experienced what might be called an American devotional revolution, which transformed them into the mainstay of the American Catholic Church; third, that this transformation is somehow rooted in their experience in America, not in Ireland; fourth, that while nativist anti-Catholic hostility may have contributed to this transformation, there was something else going on as well.
And yet, although it seems likely that the devotional revolution among the Irish in America must be explained in terms of their experience in America, there is no denying that the type of Catholicism Irish American immigrants and their immediate descendants embraced was very similar to the type of Catholicism that the strong-farmer class in Ireland adopted (these were tenant farmers with large enough holdings to live comfortably). For this reason, I think, it will be useful to take a second and more detailed look at how Larkin and others have explained the appeal of that form of Catholicism.
In his original article Larkin (1972) suggested that the devotional revolution in Ireland had four causes: (1) Catholicism provided the Irish with a national identity during a period when their culture was being Anglicized. (2) Particular members of the hierarchy, notably Paul Cardinal Cullen, promoted increased adherence to Tridentine norms (like the need to attend mass regularly). (3) The population decline caused by the Famine substantially improved the ratio of priests to people (and so the degree to which the clergy could themselves encourage adherence to those norms). (4) While the Famine killed off or drove away those groups who were least committed to Tridentine Catholicism, it little affected the Catholic strong-farmer class, which was the one group that had embraced Tridentine Catholicism in the pre-Famine period. In his later work, Larkin, explaining why the strong-farmer class in Ireland had embraced Tridentine Catholicism in the pre-Famine period, made use of the national identity argument in point 1 above. Basically, what he suggested (1984, 8) was that “this farmer elite” was “the nation-forming class” and so they had turned to Catholicism as a way of building a distinct national identity.
Eugene Hynes pointed out that Larkin’s argument did not really explain why Irish Catholics adopted the particular sort of Catholicism being promoted by Cullen. In other words, even granting that “being Catholic” became increasingly central to the nationalist vision of “being Irish,” this doesn’t really explain why Irish Catholics embraced the particular values and devotions that constituted the devotional revolution. Hynes (1978; 1988; 1990) developed his own explanation of the devotional revolution, and Larkin (1984, 6) suggested that Hynes’s argument could easily be taken as supplementing his own.
Hynes argues that the living standards of the Catholic strong farmers in Ireland improved dramatically during the late eighteenth century as a result of the relaxation of the Penal Laws, the commercialization of Irish agriculture, and the increased demand for Irish foodstuffs in Britain. These changes, along with the rising expectations they engendered in the strong-farmer class, led members of that class to develop new means of maintaining control over their capital, and in particular, over the land and livestock they possessed. One outcome of this process, Hynes argues, was an increasing preference among strong farmers for the stem family. Under this family system, there was only one heir, almost always a son, and this son was typically married off to the daughter of a family of similar status. Land was thus kept under the family’s control through the practice of impartible inheritance and a family’s capital was augmented by the dowry that the son’s wife brought to the marriage. One consequence of the stem family system was that, in most cases, only one son and one daughter within each family married, which meant that there were many sons and daughters who never married.
Hynes suggests that increasing use of the stem family system by the strong-farmer class created two problems and that understanding these problems helps us understand why that class found the sort of Catholicism being promoted by the nineteenth-century church appealing. The first of these problems he calls “personnel management” (1988, 166), that is, getting everyone in the family to subordinate their personal interests to the goals of the family even though this often meant great personal sacrifice (especially for the non-marrying sons and daughters). This problem could only be solved by getting all family members to accept the authority of the father. The stem family, in other words, required a strong emphasis on paternal authority. The second problem faced by the stem family followed from the fact that most sons and daughters were required to forgo marriage. In this situation, sexual activity on the part of these sons and daughters would have resulted in illegitimate births that potentially could have resulted in a serious drain on a family’s wealth. As a result, it was very much in the interest of the strong-farmer class to promote an emphasis on sexual restraint.
It happens, Hynes argues, that the same two cultural emphases that worked to strengthen the stem family—an emphasis on paternal authority and an emphasis on sexual restraint—were central to the sort of Romanized Catholicism being promoted by the nineteenth-century church. An emphasis on paternal authority was evident in the church’s campaign to strengthen the authority of the pope, while an emphasis on sexual restraint was implicit in the church’s campaign to promote the Mary cult and its strong insistence on Mary’s virginity. For Hynes, in other words, the strong-farmer class in Ireland embraced the Catholicism promoted by Cardinal Cullen because it fit well with the cultural emphases necessary for the maintenance of the stem family.
Obviously the specifics of the argument advanced by Hynes to explain the devotional revolution in Ireland are of little or no use in explaining why the Famine Irish in America became good Catholics. The Famine Irish in the United States, after all, did not possess land that needed to be conserved; they were not characterized by the stem family and its cultural needs. But what is more promising, I suggest, is the type of argument that Hynes advances, namely, that a particular social group embraces a particular form of institutional religion because there is an affinity between the cultural values embraced by the group (for reasons that may have nothing to do with religion) and the religious values being promulgated by the religious institution. While this sort of affinity argument has typically not been applied to the study of Catholicism—Hynes being the notable exception—it has long been used quite successfully by scholars studying the Protestant tradition, and in particular, the American Protestant tradition.
Max Weber (1946), for example, used an affinity argument to explain the immense popularity of the Protestant sects (mainly Methodist and Baptist) that he encountered during his 1904 visit to the United States. Basically, Weber argued that these sects were popular with local businessmen because the traits needed both to get into these sects and to remain a member in good standing—traits like honesty, trustworthiness, an aversion to gambling—were the same traits that members of a community wanted in the people they did business with. Becoming a member in good standing of a Baptist or Methodist church, in other words, was a way that a local businessman could certify to the community that he was honest, could be trusted to pay his debts, and so on—which is precisely why, Weber argued, businessmen in the United States joined these particular churches in such large numbers.
A similar affinity argument has been used to explain why the Methodists and Baptists held a special appeal for white women in the early Republic. The argument in this case is that many of the qualities of ideal Christians in these evangelical sects were qualities stereotypically associated with women. Evangelical thought privileged orality over the written word, emotion and corporeal experience (as jointly evident most of all in the conversion experience) over formal doctrine and rational thought, and the need for an ordered and disciplined life that involved submissiveness to Christ (Leonard 2003, 161–162; Lindman 2000; Lobody 1993; Lyerly 1998, 94–118). This affinity did not translate into power sharing—men still retained most of the control in local congregations—but the fit between stereotypical female qualities and the qualities expected of the “ideal Christian” in these evangelical sects helps explain why these sects initially held a special appeal to women.
Rosemary Hopcroft (1997) is yet another investigator who has used an affinity argument to explain Protestant success, though her concern is with Protestant success in the rural areas of sixteenth-century Europe. Hopcroft’s central claim—which is supported by the historical data she presents—is that the best predictor of Protestant success in these rural areas was the presence of a local tradition of individualized property rights. She asserts that a tradition of individualized property rights (and a correspondingly low degree of communal control over property) promoted a generalized “spirit of individualism” (p. 172), which made the communities involved more receptive to religious sects that were, like most variants of Protestantism, pervaded with a strongly individualistic emphasis.
Although affinity arguments have often been used by scholars studying Protestantism, American Protestantism in particular, Hynes’s argument is the only example I can think of of their use in connection with the study of European Catholicism, and I know of no one who has developed an affinity argument to explain why certain groups in the United States embraced Catholicism. This is what I want to do in the remainder of this chapter. What I will be arguing is that the Famine Irish (or at least a subset of them), who arrived in the United States indifferent to the practice of Catholicism, very quickly became ardent Catholics because of a fit between the particular variant of Catholicism being promoted by the American Catholic Church and interests that emerged among these immigrants as a result of their experience in America. In developing this argument, it will be useful to proceed in steps, the first of which involves taking a closer look at the Catholicism being promoted by the American Catholic Church in the nineteenth century.
Romanized Catholicism in the Nineteenth Century
During the middle third of the nineteenth century, the Roman hierarchy of the Catholic Church engaged in a campaign to change the nature and texture of Catholic practice throughout the world. One of the primary goals of this campaign was to centralize authority within the church. Central to this campaign was what would come to be called the “ultramontanist” emphasis on the papacy and on the need for clerics and laity alike to obey papal directives unquestioningly. Generally, ultramontanists aimed at establishing a top-down chain of command in which the laity obeyed their local priests, priests obeyed their bishop, and bishops fell in line behind the pope. Tied to this emphasis on papal supremacy and on obedience to clerical superiors was the view that the church should be free to make decisions on matters of importance to Catholics (notably educational matters) with little or no interference from the state. This drive to centralize authority within the church was led by energetic church leaders—often cardinals with strong ties to the Roman Curia, almost always bishops—operating in a variety of national contexts. In Europe, these included Cardinal Wiseman in England; Cardinal von Geissel, Archbishop of Cologne; Cardinal Pie, Bishop of Poitiers; and, of course, Cardinal Cullen in Ireland, who figures so prominently in Larkin’s account of Ireland’s devotional revolution. (On all of these men as ultramontanists, see the various essays in von Arx 1998.) In North America, these leaders included Bishop Kendrick of Philadelphia (discussed in Light 1988), Archbishop Hughes of New York (Kenny 2000, 112–116), Bishop Charbonnel of Toronto (Clarke 1993, 62–96), and Bishop Bourget of Montreal (Cimechella 1986). The decision of the First Vatican Council (1869–1870) to affirm the doctrine of papal infallibility shortly after Garibaldi’s invasion of the Papal States in 1867 and only a few months before the fall of Rome to the forces of the new Italian government (in September 1870) can be seen as encapsulating both what these nineteenth-century ultramontanists wanted to achieve and what they wanted to avoid.
In selling an increased emphasis on obedience to ordinary Catholics, the ultramontanists did not depict it as something new. Quite the contrary, they sought legitimacy for this emphasis by suggesting that it had long been a part of the Catholic tradition—even if that meant tweaking the historical record here and there. A good example of how this was done, at least in regard to Irish Americans, involves the Profession of Faith, which was regularly included in the devotional guides, like St. Vincent’s Manual (1859, 44–48) and St. John’s Manual (1856, 22–25), that were marketed to Irish American Catholics in the mid-nineteenth century. In these two guides, the Profession of Faith starts with the following heading and introductory sentence:
A Profession of Catholic Faith
Extracted from the Council of Trent
By His Holiness, Pope Pius IV
I [Name], Believe and profess with a firm faith, all and every one of those things, which are contained in the Symbol of Faith used in the Holy Catholic (Roman) Church, viz …
The profession goes on to enunciate a number of Catholic beliefs relating to Christ, sacred scripture, the sacraments, the mass, the veneration of Mary and the saints, and so on. And, toward the end of the list, lies this statement about obedience:
I Acknowledge the Holy Catholic Apostolic Roman Church to be the Mother and Mistress of all Churches; and I promise true obedience to the Bishop of Rome [emphasis added], the Successor of St. Peter, Prince of the Apostles, Vicar of Jesus Christ on earth.
By saying (in the heading) that this “Profession of Faith” had been “extracted from the Council of Trent by Pius IV,” these guides were implying that lay Catholics’ pledging obedience to the pope had been a central part of the Catholic tradition for centuries. What was not acknowledged was that the Council of Trent did not intend this profession of faith for the laity at all.
It is true that the profession of faith reproduced in these nineteenth-century devotional guides was developed by Pius IV (elected pope in 1560 and so the pope who oversaw the final years of the Council of Trent), and the profession was largely derived from the doctrines and decrees passed at Trent. Pius IV, however, meant it only as an oath to be taken by anyone holding an ecclesiastical office (Loughlin 1913), and the intent was clearly to insure that office holders fell into line with the pope in promoting the Tridentine reforms. That the original profession of faith was intended for office holders is made clear by the wording of the decree passed at Trent that mandated this oath. That decree (in Chapter 2 of the “Decree concerning reform”) states that in light of “the distress of the times and the malice of increasing heresies” all clerics eligible to attend a provincial synod must publicly embrace all the doctrines and decrees passed at Trent and “profess true obedience to the supreme Roman pontiff” (see Schroeder 1950, 233–234). This mandate that clerics “profess true obedience” to the pope is the only decree passed at Trent that explicitly mentions obedience to the pope. There is nothing in any of the decrees passed at Trent that requires the laity to profess obedience to the pope. It seems that ultramontanists in the nineteenth century turned an oath that had been designed centuries earlier to insure the loyalty of bishops and other church officials into an oath that obligated ordinary lay Catholics to obey the pope.
As mentioned, it was the ultramontane emphasis on obedience that, according to Hynes, made ultramontane Catholicism appealing to a strong-farmer class in Ireland, because these same emphases were so crucial to the maintenance of the stem family system and thus to the preservation of the family’s land. Did this emphasis on obedience and discipline also have some appeal to Famine immigrants to the United States (who did not have land to preserve and who were not characterized by the stem family)? Answering that question requires that we shift from religion to demography.
The Demographic Distinctiveness of the Famine Irish
When they first arrived in the United States, the Famine Irish were different in at least two significant ways from other European immigrant streams. The first difference has to do with gender: while males predominated in most other European immigrant groups, the Irish were almost equally divided between males and females. Over the period 1852–1860, for example, 51 percent of immigrants from Ireland were male and 49 percent were female (Akenson 1993, 44; Fitzpatrick 1984, 7; Meagher 2005, 174). Moreover, in certain locales, females sometimes constituted the majority. For example, of the 204,000 Irish-born individuals living in New York at the time of the 1860 census, 117,000 (57%) were female (Steinberg 1989, 162). The second distinction of the Irish was their marital status. Most European immigrant streams were composed mainly of family groups and unmarried males, but Irish immigrants included many unmarried males and unmarried females. Nor was the presence of so many unmarried men and women in the Irish Catholic population a transitory experience; on the contrary, Famine immigrants who were unmarried when they arrived were less likely than other immigrants to ever marry and, if they did marry, more likely to delay marriage until a relatively late age (Diner 1983, 43–53).
This is not to say that kinship ties were unimportant to Irish immigrants. One need only look at the remittances that Famine immigrants sent back to Ireland to know that such ties did matter—greatly. Between 1846 and 1855, Irish immigrants in North America sent approximately £8,753,000 back to Ireland (Blessing 1977, 130). Given the poverty of the Famine immigrants in America—something much emphasized in contemporary accounts—this is a truly prodigious sum. And much of this money, it would appear, was intended to help relatives—siblings in particular—emigrate. One study showed that in 1848 more than three-quarters of those emigrating from Ireland paid their fares with remittance money (Blessing 1977, 135). Obviously, the reluctance of the Famine Irish to marry was not the result of a devaluation of family. But there’s more. Even once married, the high rates of unemployment among Irish males worked to destabilize Irish family life, mainly by promoting paternal absence (often simply because the fathers were away seeking work) or by weakening the father’s authority within the home, something that in itself likely promoted his absence (Diner 1983, 43–69).
Theoretically, these demographic patterns are important for at least two reasons. First, the high proportion of unmarried males and females and the frequent weakness of the paternal role in families indicate that the appeal of Romanized Catholicism to the Famine Irish was likely not family based, that is, did not result from a fit between the needs of the Irish American family and this variant of Catholicism, which, according to Hynes, explained the appeal of Romanized Catholicism in Ireland. A good explanation of why the Famine Irish became good Catholics must explain why Romanized Catholicism appealed to unmarried Irish Americans and Irish Americans living in families where fathers were weak or absent. Second, the ratio between males and females raises a cautionary flag. It suggests that we need to make gender a central element in our explanation of why the Famine Irish became Catholic. In fact, when we scan the literature on Irish American Catholicism during the decades immediately following the Famine through a gendered lens, an obvious pattern leaps to the eye.
Gender, Nationalism, and Catholicism
In the two decades or so following the Famine, male Irish American Catholics were very much involved in Irish nationalist associations but little involved with religion, while for female Irish American Catholics this pattern was reversed (see Braude 1997, 106; Diner 1983, 120–138; McCaffrey 1999, 130–131; Meagher 2005, 177–178; Taves 1986, 18–19). The same pattern was evident among the Irish Catholics in Canada (Clarke 1993, 62–96; Trigger 1997, 83–105). One interesting thing about this gendered behavior—but something that has been ignored by all earlier commentators—is that it provides support for Hynes’s critique of Larkin.
Larkin, remember, argued that the appeal of Romanized Catholicism to the strong-farmer class in Ireland derived from the fact that they were the “nation-building” class and because there was an increasing interconnection between “being Irish” and “being Catholic.” Hynes’s critique was that, while this argument might well explain why the strong-farmer class retained a Catholic identity, it did not explain why they embraced the particular variant of Catholicism then being promoted by Rome. The behavior of Famine Irish males in the U.S. bears out the point Hynes made. Irish American males in the two decades or so following the Famine were Irish nationalists, something that might reasonably have ensured (given the interconnection between Catholicism and nationalism at this point) that they would retain a Catholic identity and would explain why they didn’t embrace Protestantism. But this did not cause them to become good Catholics, that is, to participate actively in the life of the church.
The finding that Irish American Catholicism was initially gendered and that the women were more religious than the men is also important because it is a familiar pattern. It is now fairly conventional in studies of Western religion to talk about a “feminization of religion” which occurred in the nineteenth century. It is interesting, however, that in this case the usual explanations offered for the “feminization of religion” during the nineteenth century do not apply.
Accounting for the Feminization of Religion in the Nineteenth Century
Barbara Pope (1988, 52) points out that the phrase “feminization of religion” was first popularized by historians studying New England Protestant groups, and it refered to three things: an increase in the number and proportion of women participating in church life; their increasing influence as a result; and various changes in doctrine and symbolism that reflected women’s needs and experiences. Subsequent investigators went on to document a similar feminization of piety outside of New England in both the Protestant and Catholic traditions. A feminization of piety during the nineteenth century has now been documented in the Anglican high church tradition (Reed 1988), the British evangelical tradition (Brown 2001), Catholicism in France (Harris 1999; Pope 1988), and American Catholicism generally (Dolan 1992, 230–233). It has also been found among Cajun Catholics in Louisiana, a case that will be discussed at length in Chapter 4. In explaining why this feminization of piety occurred, investigators have generally advanced two separate hypotheses, and there seems to be a rough correlation between which of these two hypotheses a researcher prefers and whether the researcher’s focus is on Protestants or Catholics.
Scholars concerned with the feminization of piety in the Protestant tradition have tended to emphasize the “male flight” hypothesis, that is, that religion became increasingly feminized because male participation in formal religious activities diminished (Bonomi 1986, 111–115; Westerkamp 1999, 79–81). Generally, these investigators see this withdrawal as having been provoked mainly by the erosion of male lay authority as authority in local congregations came increasingly to be exercised solely by a professional ministry. There is a substantial amount of historical evidence to support the male flight interpretation. For example, feminization of piety was least pronounced in those Protestant groups where lay males retained a substantial amount of control; also, even within a single denomination, feminization was most likely in congregations with settled ministers and least likely in congregations without settled ministers (see Bonomi 1986, 111–115, for a review of the evidence).
Scholars studying the feminization of Catholicism, by contrast, have tended to advance what might be called a “female sociability” hypothesis. The general idea here is that during the nineteenth century the church was one of the few institutional settings where women could socialize with non-family members and engage in the honest exchange of ideas on issues of mutual concern. Ruth Harris (1999, 234–235), for example, suggests that a large part of the appeal of Catholicism to middle-class women in France was that the church provided them with “a unique opportunity to talk about religious preoccupations and to confront issues of identity and selfhood, to share with intelligent educated men [i.e., their confessors and spiritual directors] problems close to their hearts.”
The male flight and female sociability hypotheses are of course not mutually exclusive. Ralph Gibson (1989), unlike Harris, uses both arguments simultaneously to account for the feminization of piety in the French Catholic tradition. Then, too, it seems clear that the male flight hypothesis, though developed mainly by scholars studying the Protestant tradition, fits the history of European Catholicism quite well. In the early modern period, for example, the rituals and celebrations most central to the lived experience of Catholicism in many Catholic societies were the rituals and celebrations organized by lay confraternities—and this confraternal religion was overwhelmingly masculine. True, some female confraternities did exist, but in areas like Spain, the Spanish Americas, and Italy the most important celebrations were those organized and enacted by confraternities whose leadership was exclusively male and whose membership was either predominantly or exclusively male (for a sampling of the literature on this subject, see Donnelly and Maher 1999; Meyers and Hopkins 1988). Even where female confraternities did exist, they were often under lay male control, and more specifically under the control of male kin. During the eighteenth century, however, the autonomy of Catholic confraternities increasingly came under attack from both church and state. As lay (male) control eroded, Catholic men—just as the male flight hypothesis predicts—increasingly abandoned religion, with the result that Catholic practice became increasingly feminized.
Can either the male flight or the female sociability argument help us understand why Irish American Catholicism was initially “feminized”? As to the first hypothesis, the answer is clearly no. Male flight cannot explain the early feminization of Irish American Catholicism for the simple reason—pace Larkin—that Irish male immigrants were not active participants in the sacramental life of the church to begin with. The female sociability argument, by contrast, seems more promising. True, it would likely be too much of a stretch to suggest that Irish American women, who were overwhelmingly working class, flocked to the church so that they could enjoy the sort of intellectual discussion which, Harris tells us, was so appealing to middle-class female Catholics in France. On the other hand, Robert Orsi has explained the appeal of Italian American festas around the turn of the century (Orsi 1985) and the appeal of devotion to St. Jude (Orsi 1996) in the 1940s and 1950s by arguing that these devotions provided immigrant women and their daughters with opportunities to discuss—with women similar to themselves—a variety of personal problems associated with marriage and family life. At one level, then, it would certainly be plausible to suggest that Irish American women in the mid-nineteenth century participated in church because it provided a “safe” institutional context in which they could raise issues and problems they shared in common with each other. Nevertheless, even though plausible, such an interpretation is flawed in the same way that Larkin’s national identity argument is flawed: while it might explain why Irish American women participated in some church activities, it does not really explain why they embraced and internalized (as they apparently did) the particular variant of Catholicism being promoted by ultramontanist leaders.
Why might the ultramontane emphasis on obedience have fit well the needs and concerns of Irish Catholic women in the United States as, following Hynes, it did with the needs and concerns of the stem family in Ireland? Asking this particular question leads us directly into two distinct bodies of scholarly literature that, when combined, provide us with an answer.
Domestic Service and the Need for Discipline
One of the best-established facts about Irish American life during the nineteenth century is that the occupational niche most associated with Irish American women was domestic service (Meagher 2005, 175–176). Already in 1855, for instance, nearly three-quarters of all domestics in New York City were Irish and nearly half of all Irish-born women under the age of 50 worked as domestics (Kenny 2000, 110). Kelleher (2003, 196–197) reports that in 1880 nearly half of all Irish-born women in Chicago aged 15 to 24 worked as domestic servants in private households and that if the designation “domestic service” is expanded to include both household servants and “hotel help,” that proportion jumps to over 80 percent. In 1900 it was still the case that more than 70 percent of employed Irish-born women in the United States were in domestic service (Miller, Doyle, and Kelleher 1995, 54) and that the Irish-born constituted 41 percent of all foreign-born servants (Katzman 1978, 66).
I might add that the United States was by no means the only outpost of the Irish diaspora where Irish Catholic females entered domestic service in large numbers. During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, domestic service was the single most common occupation for Irish females in all the urban centers where the Irish settled (Akenson 1993). In his study of Hamilton, Ontario, for example, Michael Katz (1975) found that in the 1851 census 61 percent of Irish Catholic females aged 17–19 were domestic servants; in the 1861 census this percentage (for the same group) was 58 percent. Overall, Katz suggests (p. 289), such data make it highly likely that “almost every Irish Catholic young woman who came to Canada spent part of her life as a resident domestic servant.”
Although there were many things about domestic service that would have been unappealing to Irish women (not the least of which was the condescending attitude that many employers had toward all things Irish), it did offer a number of advantages. Most obviously, domestic service paid well, at least compared to the sort of jobs that Irish males could get (if they were lucky enough to get a job) and employment was relatively steady. All this, plus the fact that room and board were often provided, meant that Irish American women were typically able to build up savings in a way that was not possible for their male counterparts (on this point, see Diner 1983, 70–105; Miller, Doyle, and Kelleher 1995).
Purely financial considerations aside, domestic service provided Irish women with another important advantage: it brought them into daily contact with the culture of middle-class Anglo-Americans and so aided in the their acculturation and upward mobility. Hasia Diner (1999, 964) provides a succinct account of this process:
Domestic servants … gained an exposure to American culture [and] learned how middle-class Americans lived. In their employers’ homes they developed standards of American consumption, in terms of language, food, furnishings, dress, and gender roles. Irish women who labored as domestic servants in these middle-class homes and then married seem to have modeled their consumption patterns in part on what they had seen on the job.
Yet, even granting that a great many Irish women did come to adopt middle-class values as the result of domestic service, there is still a theoretical issue that needs to be resolved: what was the mechanism that caused this to occur? What Diner seems to be suggesting, in the passage just cited, is that Irish American domestics embraced middle-class values and practices simply by virtue of having observed them—what we might call “cultural transformation by osmosis.” Kerby Miller and his colleagues (1995, 55) have suggested that Irish domestics internalized middle-class Victorian values because this was what they had to do to keep their jobs. Diane Hotten-Somers (2003), however, has recently suggested that something more complex was going on.
Middle-class wives, Hotten-Somers reminds us, were charged with the ultimate responsibility of ensuring that their households met certain (middle-class) cultural standards. Some of these standards involved the expectation—central to the cult of domesticity that emerged in the nineteenth century—that the middle-class home “should be a haven in a heartless world for their husband and children” (2003, p. 230); but other standards involved more practical matters, like an emphasis on cleanliness and orderliness. But to ensure that these standards were met, middle-class women had to depend on their servants—especially if they wanted to free themselves (as they apparently did) from many of the most onerous household tasks. The result, Hotten-Somers argues, is that mistresses actively involved themselves in the process of transmitting middle-class values to their Irish domestic servants—and if an inexperienced mistress might not know how to do this, there were any number of books and articles to which she could turn for advice.
One such advisor, Mary Allen West, in a journal that catered to a Protestant audience, provided this advice to inexperienced mistresses (1889, 406):
Systematize work; let each day have its appropriate labor, with margins for the unexpected that always happens, so that when Nora wakes up in the morning she loses no time in wondering what is to be done that day. Having established your system, abide by it, even at the expense of some inconvenience to yourself. Routine work soon becomes second nature, and is performed automatically, thus preventing jars.
Given the emphasis on planfulness and discipline here, such a passage—with only a few minor modifications—could easily be mistaken for the sort of advice presented in Poor Richard’s Almanac, the source from which Weber would later take so many of the aphorisms that summed up the Protestant work ethic.
A similar emphasis on the need for domestic servants to acquire middle-class values and habits appears in the published advice given to domestic servants themselves. Advice to Irish Girls in America (1872), by Margaret Anne Cusack,1 was addressed explicitly to female domestics who were both Irish and Catholic, and much of her advice was presented using a religious idiom. Cusack, for example, suggests (pp. 87–88) that Irish servants start off the day by saying morning prayers in their room before going down to their work, and then she tells them what to pray for:
—If you are passionate, say “My God help me to keep my temper to-day, however I may be provoked.”
—If you are proud, say: “My God help me to be humble to-day, however, I may be tempted to be proud.”
—If you are slothful, say “My God, help me to work well and faithfully to-day, and to overcome my natural indolence.”
—If you are fond of eating and drinking, say “My God, help me to overcome my love of eating and drinking to-day.”
Implicit in this advice is the suggestion that a good domestic needs to acquire a strong sense of self-control. Cusack later spends an entire chapter (pp. 94–102) explaining why honesty and frugality are necessary traits in a domestic. She also advises her readers to adjust to being the object of surveillance:
Masters and mistresses naturally watch their servants. They cannot help doing so, for so much depends on what they do, and say, and act. They will soon see if a servant does her duty honestly, and they will make their own remarks, though perhaps the girl may never hear them.
Though Cusack writes from a thoroughly Catholic perspective (in later chapters, for example, she explains Catholic doctrine, the differences between Catholicism and Protestantism, and how servants should respond to anti-Catholic bias), the list of attributes she sees as necessary in a good domestic—self-control, honesty and frugality, a willingness to accept scrutiny by others—are, again, the same sorts of middle-class values that Weber saw as central to the Protestant ethic and the same values that would have been of central importance in middle-class American homes generally during the late nineteenth century.
In the end, then, everyone agrees that Irish domestics needed to acquire middle-class values and habits. Diner suggests that the learning process was accomplished by simple observation; Hotten-Somers suggests that middle-class wives played a critical role in the process; and the existence of books like Cusack’s suggests that many domestics might have followed the published advice they were given. But I propose that there was something else that worked to equip Irish maids with the middle-class attitudes and habits they needed if they were to properly discharge their duties as maids, and it is something that has been hiding in plain sight for some time: the process of becoming a good Catholic.
Catholicism and Social Discipline
For some time now, a number of scholars, mainly working in Italy and Germany, have called attention to the critical role played by religion in the rise of the modern state in Europe (Gorski 2003a; see especially Prodi 1989; the various essays in Prodi 1994; Reinhard 1989). Their core argument, which builds upon earlier arguments developed by Max Weber, Norbert Elias, and Michel Foucault, is that the new forms of religion that emerged in the wake of the Reformation, in both the Protestant and the Catholic traditions, had the effect (however unintended) of creating the sort of populations on which the modern state depends.
Wolfgang Reinhard (1989), in particular, argues that during the sixteenth century the Catholic Church and the various Protestant churches did the same thing: they transformed themselves into stable groups with well-defined boundaries, a process that he calls “confessionalization.” For each group, this was accomplished by (1) settling on a clear statement of doctrine (as occurred for Lutherans with the Augsburg Confession of 1530 and for Catholics at the Council of Trent a few decades later), and (2) eliminating elements in their rituals that might lead to confusion (i.e., elements that might make Catholic rituals seem Protestant or Protestant rituals Catholic). Catholic and Protestant authorities then mounted concerted campaigns to ensure that these newly formulated doctrines and rituals were made central to the religious life of their respective constituencies. This was done in part by using older methods (like preaching) and newer technologies (like printing) to present the doctrines and rituals to these constituencies. But partly, too, churches sought to promote devotional homogeneity through what Paolo Prodi and his students have called “disciplinamento sociale,” social disciplining. Partly, this meant simply an increased emphasis on obedience to those in authority. More importantly, however, it involved promoting noncoercive methods of social control. Two methods were especially important: getting people to submit voluntarily to increased surveillance by church authorities (epitomized, at least in the Catholic case, by an increased emphasis on the confessional) and by ensuring that the laity internalized the new norms and values and so self-monitored their own behavior accordingly. Precisely because these ecclesiastical campaigns were so effective in shaping the personality of church members, they created precisely the sort of populations on which the modern state depends, which are—as Reinhard (1989, 397) points out—populations willing to embrace discipline and to be the object of bureaucratic administration.
So what has any of this to do with Irish American Catholicism? I am not aware of anyone working in the social disciplining tradition who has shown an interest in Irish Catholicism, let alone Irish American Catholicism. Nevertheless, the literature just reviewed is relevant to the concerns of this chapter, because the Romanization campaign mounted by the church in the nineteenth century (and which proved so successful in the case of the Famine Irish in America) mimics all the emphases that marked the social disciplining campaign that had been mounted by the post-Reformation church centuries earlier.
The Romanizers sought to confessionalize Catholicism by promoting a distinctive set of devotions throughout the Catholic world that very clearly distinguished Catholics from other Christians. After all, there was nothing in any Protestant tradition (or, for that matter, in any Orthodox Christian tradition) that resembled the devotions most favored by the Romanizers, like devotions to Sacred Heart of Jesus, the Forty Hours, the Immaculate Conception, and so on. Also central to the Romanization campaign, as mentioned several times now, was a strong emphasis on the need for the laity to be obedient—to the pope, to their bishop, and to their local priest. Then, too, it is not difficult to see the attempts by church authorities to secure control over the education of Catholics as an effort to ensure that Catholic laity would internalize Catholic norms and values at an early age and so be able to monitor their own behavior.
Scholars like Reinhard and Prodi, of course, are concerned with great and grand issues like the rise of the modern state and the way in which the social disciplining of European populations contributed to the rise of the state. My argument here is far more prosaic: Irish American women embraced Romanized Catholicism (in ways that Irish American men did not) because—at least at a general level—there was an affinity between the values and behaviors being promoted by the Romanizers and the cultural standards these women were expected to meet by the middle-class families who employed them as domestics. By becoming “good” Catholics they acquired in a fairly obvious way a number of traits desired in a “good” domestic: a willingness to accept authority and discipline, to monitor their own activities, to accept intense surveillance, to be reliable and diligent in their duties, and so forth. The requirement to attend mass on Sundays and holy days of obligation (a “precept of the Church” and one mentioned in all devotional manuals of the period) presupposes an ability to meet deadlines, just as the requirement to fast (take only one meal) or to abstain from meat on certain days during the year presupposes the ability to defer immediate gratification—again, qualities desirable in a domestic. The requirement that Catholics contribute to the support of their local church (another precept of the Church given prominence in devotional manuals of the period) necessitates frugality and a commitment to saving money—both of which, again, were virtues favored in middle-class Protestants households.
Loose Ends
Two problems remain to be resolved. The first is similar to the problem encountered in connection with Miller’s nativist hostility hypothesis: even granting that Irish domestics were under strong pressure to reshape their personalities to their employers’ expectations, why didn’t Irish American Catholics combat hostility toward them by simply becoming Protestant? Would Protestantism have served them as well as Catholicism? Some American historians studying Protestantism (see, for example, Mathews 1969) have advanced an argument similar to the social disciplining theorists’, namely, that during the early nineteenth century evangelical Christianity “disciplined” individuals in ways that fit well with the requirements of the emerging national state. Becoming Protestant would have blunted the anti-Catholic bias of Anglo-American employers. So, why wasn’t that option taken? The second problem is, of course, explaining why Irish American males—who were certainly not employed as domestics—also (eventually) became good Catholics. In fact, both problems can be resolved by going back, again, to the fact that “being Catholic” and “being Irish” became increasingly intertwined as the nineteenth century progressed. Given that “being Catholic” was increasingly central to an Irish identity, at least for post-Famine emigrants, an Irish domestic who became Protestant would be giving up part of her identity as Irish, something that would mean disassociating herself not only from Ireland but also from family and friends who wished to retain their Irishness. The cost of doing this, I suggest, was just too great. The need to maintain an Irish identity ensured that, for example, Irish domestics would turn to Catholicism, not Protestantism, for the social disciplining that their jobs required.
Male Famine emigrants, as already mentioned, were predisposed to maintain an Irish—and, so, simultaneously, a Catholic—identity because of the intense nationalism that characterized this group at mid-century. Maintaining a Catholic/ Irish identity should have inclined them toward religious/ethnic endogamy, that is, toward marrying an Irish Catholic wife, and that is precisely what they did. More than 80 percent of the Irish men who came to the United States in the mid-1800s married Irish Catholic women, a percentage that didn’t begin to decline until the 1880s. Husbands and sons were therefore drawn into becoming practicing Catholics by virtue of their association with Irish American women.
Conclusion
So, do I really mean to suggest that it was Irish American women’s status as domestics which created in them a predisposition to become good Catholics? Yes, I do. If the affinity between the values required to maintain the stem family and Romanized Catholicism could lead the strong-farmer class in Ireland to embrace Tridentine Catholicism (Hynes), and if the affinity between the values required in business and those central to evangelical Christianity could ensure the success of evangelical Christianity in small town America at the turn of the twentieth century (Weber), then it strikes me as entirely plausible that because Irish American women were under strong pressure from their employers to demonstrate middle-class values they would have been predisposed to undergo the social disciplining that was part and parcel of becoming a good Catholic in nineteenth century America.
None of this is to deny that other factors also contributed to the transformation of Irish immigrants into the gold standard of the American Catholicism. Indeed, I have already identified factors which would have predisposed Irish immigrants to think of themselves as Catholics and to attend a local Catholic church:
• the increasing interconnection between “being Irish” and “being Catholic”
• nativist anti-Irish hostility where it existed
• a desire, especially among women, to gather in a safe institutional context outside the home to discuss issues of concern to immigrants
There were certainly other, eminently practical, considerations that would have brought newly arrived immigrants to the Catholic church. And the effect was cumulative; the more Irish who participated in the local Catholic church, the more it became a gathering place where immigrants new to the area could make contact with relatives, find out what employment opportunities existed in the area, and so on. The fact that many Irish immigrants likely did attend church mostly for practical reasons like these, rather than out of a sense of piety, probably explains why so many pastors in the Midwest and the far West during the period when these areas were first being settled by Famine immigrants (1850–1880) complained that their Irish parishioners were Catholic in name only (Blessing 1977, 245). Indeed, I now suspect that when my ancestor Margaret Fogarty, whose story I told at the beginning of this chapter, got off the boat that first Sunday in Cincinnati to locate a Catholic church, she likely did it more because she was concerned with finding lodging for her and her children than because of a deep attachment to the mass. That she did secure shelter for herself and her children because of someone she met at that church only lends plausibility to this interpretation.
Nevertheless, all of these incentives for the Famine Irish to retain a Catholic identity or loosely associate themselves with their local Catholic church do not explain why they and their children became such good Catholics so quickly, why they so readily internalized the norms being promoted by the American Catholic Church and regulated their behavior accordingly. To explain that we need to examine something that has been overlooked in all existing discussions of Irish American Catholicism: the fact that Irish females in America moved overwhelmingly into domestic service, where success depended upon subjecting themselves to a process of social disciplining, which the ultramontanists then controlling the church were only too willing to provide.
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