This segment deals with the effects that the major migration of people to America in the early 1800s had on the country and on the Catholic church.

Our Catholic Roots 1492—1865

IV. The Catholic Community Grows with America: 1815-1829

Foreword
Years of embargoes, blockades, and finally the war of 1812 had reduced American trade and communication with the rest of the world. But with peace restored in 1815, transatlantic trade rebounded rapidly. With it appeared the first stages of a major movement of people from Northern Europe to the United States. This migration would later reach huge proportions. Both the American Catholic Church and the American nation would be deeply affected and permanently changed by the arrival of all these new people.

The church's first challenge was to find enough priests to provide the sacraments for their fast-growing flock. Then, they needed churches in which they might worship. Lacking the stable organization of the European church, American Catholics often had to put their parishes together on their own and go searching for their own priest. In the short term, this led to frequent conflict with church authorities. But it also encouraged bishops like John England to think about other ways of managing the church's temporal affairs.

Protestant America was not particularly friendly to the growing numbers of Catholic immigrants. At times, it was downright hostile, discriminating against newly arrived Irish and German Catholics on both religious and ethnic grounds. This imposed complex and heavy burdens on the leaders of the Catholic Church.

St. Elizabeth Ann Seton

10. Church Development: 1815-1820
Old Archbishop Carroll was almost eighty when he died in 1815, and he was laid to rest in the chapel of St. Mary's Seminary which he had founded in Baltimore. In accord with longstanding arrangements approved by Rome, Leonard Neale automatically became the new archbishop the moment Carroll died. Two years later, Archbishop Neale was dead. The pressures of his duties, and the endless conflicts with parish trustees, helped to drive the already feeble Neale to his grave. In that short time, he had not been able to achieve very much. He did, however, make sure that Father Ambrose Maréchal, a French Sulpician priest from the Baltimore seminary, should succeed automatically to the office of archbishop. When Neale's death came in 1817, Ambrose Maréchal became archbishop.

Archbishop Ambrose Maréchal

Maréchal's Challenge
One of Maréchal's first decisions was to try to visit every part of his vast archdiocese, which then covered 317,000 square miles. What he found was at first overwhelming. But in 1818, when Maréchal made an official report about this trip to his Roman superiors in the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith, he was cautiously optimistic. The archbishop's letter to Rome, which can still be read, shows no hesitancy in identifying the church's major problem in this new nation-a lack of priests. He informed Rome that to serve the 100,000 Catholics in his growing archdiocese, he had only 52 priests scattered across many states.

Maréchal wrote about the problems of his priests:

...They have come from various nations, namely, Italians 1, Germans 3, English 4, Belgians 7, Americans 12, Irish 11, and French 14. Each of these missionaries has a church in which he celebrates the most holy sacrifice of the Mass; many of them also have two or three missions some distance removed, which they visit at least once a month. Some of these churches are built of wood, others of brick, others of polished stone; but scarcely any of them is sufficiently large to accommodate the increasing number of Catholics. And so during the coming year ten new churches will be built in various parts of my diocese...

While he could not even imagine the vast dimensions that the immigration of Catholics from Europe would reach by the 1830s and 1840s, Maréchal already recognized that priests in increasing numbers would be needed to serve this fast-growing flock. And, though a Frenchman himself, he promised that he would "leave nothing undone" to try to guarantee that all his clergy were Americans who spoke the language well and understood the culture. Unfortunately, his goal would not be attained for many years. Although in Archbishop Carroll's time seminaries had been founded at Baltimore and Emmitsburg to train American priests, the rising tide of immigration would keep the American church dependent on missionaries from Europe for the rest of the century.

Maréchal was proud of American Catholics, whom he described as devoted to their families, hard working at their jobs, and regular in their attendance at mass. He observed that even many Protestants were being attracted to the church. Nevertheless, he admitted that American Catholics shared the national fault, a desire for unlimited riches, which seems to have seized the minds of all....

This spelled trouble for a rapidly expanding church, especially outside the larger towns. With no help at all from the state, and very little income from church property, American churches were entirely dependent upon the voluntary contributions of the people. And the hardworking people were quite intent upon holding on to what they had. This was very different from the experience of the church in Europe. There it was rich in land and often received financial support from the government.

It was hard to build new churches and schools with so little money, and even the new cathedral in Baltimore had to be financed in part by lotteries. Worse yet, most of the priests were forced to live in poverty, despite their constant hard work. No wonder, said Maréchal, so many young Americans were discouraged from considering the priesthood as a vocation.

Total immigration to the United States: 1820-1860:

1820s—151,000
1830s—599,000
1840s—1,713,000
1850s—2,314,000

Help From Europe
Before becoming archbishop, Maréchal had been a teacher at the seminary in Lyons, France. So he was very pleased when Catholics living in that city were the first to come forward with aid for the struggling missionary church in the United States. At the suggestion of New Orleans Bishop DuBourg, also a Frenchman, they founded the Society for the Propagation of the Faith in 1822. Every member of the society promised to contribute a penny each week and to pray daily for the missions.

This new French society was only the first of a number of missionary organizations supported by West Europeans. The usual pattern was for an American missionary priest or bishop to come on a begging tour of a country which was sending many immigrants to his diocese. The argument was very simple and it usually drew a positive response: "If you, who have an old and established church, will share just a few of your priests and a little of your cash, we will bring the church to your brothers and sisters who have emigrated to our shores and are now beyond the church's reach."

By their generous response to such pleas, Catholics in France, Austria, and Bavaria made a remarkable contribution to building the American church where it was poorest. They were also directly responsible for sending members of different religious orders—Benedictine monks, the School Sisters of Notre Dame, the Redemptorist priests, and several communities of Benedictine, Dominican, and Ursuline sisters.

Throughout the nineteenth century, these societies faithfully continued to send priests, sisters, and large gifts of cash to help the North American missions. As a result, millions of Americans who would have been lost to the church became active and practicing members. In addition, much of the sense of community and the richness of the ethnic cultures that the immigrants had brought with them was preserved by the presence and support of priests and sisters speaking their own language.

At the time he made his 1818 report to Rome, neither Archbishop Maréchal nor his brother bishops in America could guess what was about to happen to the American church. The "push" of overpopulation and poverty in Europe, and the "pull" of freedom and prosperity in America would lead European immigrants in the millions to choose America as their permanent home. And among these, one of the largest groups would be Catholics.

The nearly five million immigrants who arrived between 1820 and 1860 exceeded the entire number counted in the federal census of 1790. Over half of these newcomers were from the British Isles, and the vast majority were farmers and laborers, most of them poor. The second largest contingent were Germans, and they too were mainly farmers. Some of the immigrants, mainly Germans, succeeded in returning to farming, settling on cheap land in the sparsely populated countryside. However, the most populous immigrant group, the Irish, were forced by their poverty and general lack of skills to settle in the big cities where they landed, most especially Boston, New York, and Philadelphia. There they made their living as laborers, domestic servants, and factory workers.

Nineteenth-century workers walking to their jobs in the textile mill. They carry the food they will need throughout the long work day.

Conditions in the mills made their work difficult and dangerous.

Problems for Immigrants

Within the nation, a great population shift was going on. Many younger members of American families in the older states were packing up and moving west to seek their fortunes. As a result, some of the original thirteen states were even experiencing an overall decrease in population. At exactly the time the industrial revolution was taking hold in the cities, the native labor force required to propel it was departing for the farms and mines of the West.

The newly arriving Irish immigrants promised a solution to this problem. Theirs were the hands that would build up the cities, and construct the roads, canals, and railroads. They would run the new factories springing up all over the Northeast as the United States entered upon the industrial revolution.

Making the transition from Europe to America was never easy. Most immigrants arrived with little more than the clothes on their backs. Having left the security of their European towns and villages, they found themselves without roots in a foreign culture, where many of them could not even speak the language. In the face of such overwhelming odds, most of the immigrants survived. Many, however, did falter temporarily, and many others simply failed. With some correctness, established Americans often noted that the majority of city dwellers living on welfare or accused of crimes were immigrants. And everyone knew that most of these were Catholics.

As poor immigrants began to arrive in large numbers in the 1820s, the leaders of the Catholic Church in the United States felt compelled to respond to the spiritual and social needs of the newcomers. Maréchal and his brother bishops did the best they could with what they had. New churches went up everywhere, and the immigrants clustered around them. Hospitals operated by Catholic sisters opened in the larger towns. More and more poor children found their way to Catholic schools and orphanages, where they were instructed by Sisters. Some American-born students from the local seminaries were ordained to the priesthood, and the bishops stepped up their efforts to recruit priests from Europe.

However, all these successes seemed very small in the face of what later become a drowning flood of Catholic immigration. With sadness, the bishops would later admit that thousands of new arrivals had been forever lost to the church because so often there was no one to preach the gospel to them, no one to give them the sacraments. Yet the bishops and their people never lost hope, never ceased to struggle, and, step-by-step, the church did move forward.

Alexis de Tocqueville, a sensitive and observant "reporter" of the American scene. Europeans learned from him about life and conditions in the young United States of America.

Terms

dilemma: a situation in which a person must choose one out of two equally good choices

immigration: the process of entering and settling down in a country in which one was not born.

vocation: a career choice, especially the choice of a religious career

Questions for Reflection

What were the major problems raised by Archbishop Maréchal in his firs official report to Rome?

What parallels can you see between the patterns of poverty and crime in the 1800s and the experience in our big cities today? Living in a land of abundance, Americans have often identified poverty with immorality. What is your reaction to this judgment?

Describe the full range of problems that immigrants might face upon their arrival in the United States. Outline carefully the spiritual and other kinds of help that they might need from the church. Give special attention to the problems of becoming equal, functioning members of American society.

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