Foundations of the Anglican Church CXX

King's Chapel, Boston MA

The Glorious Revolution of 1688 deposing James II and offering the Crown to his daughter and son-in-law, William and Mary, marks an immensely critical shift in the British Constitution, and co-incidentaly in the Church of England.  Going back to Anglo-Saxon days, the Crown of England had always been seen—in theory—as “elective,” but the consistent practice of male-primogeniture had obscured the elective element of English Kingship and the theories of “Divine Right of Kingship” advanced during the Tudor/Stuart dynasties created a real moral dilemma for the Bishops of the Church of England at Parliament’s deposing James and inviting William and Mary to take the throne.  There had been dynastic shifts before, of course, such as when Henry VII seized the Throne after defeating Richard III, but the process had not been as blatantly parliamentary as the 1688 coup.  Henry VIII’s having Parliament ratify the Act of Succession granting the Throne to his son, Edward, and then—should Edward die without issue—to his daughters who were seen as illegitimate (his marriages to their mothers having been annulled) rather than to the next legitimate heir is another trace of the Crown being constitutionally elective (remember, the British Constitution is unwritten and subsists in the tradition rather than in a document), but even though it was by act of Parliament, the Crown was passing from father to children and male primogeniture sequence.  So following the 1688 coup, the bishops, in having to make a choice as to whether or not swear allegiance to the new monarchs, were on some pretty untested ice.  The Archbishop of Canterbury and the other eight bishops who refused to take the oath all subscribed to the theory that the King ruled not at the invitation and consent of Parliament but by Divine Right.  A cynic would suppose—and there is probably some truth to it, that the remaining bishops who did take the oath did so for the sake of political convenience—so that they could keep their jobs. To give them some moral credit, however, they also were concerned about the survival of their Protestant faith and preferred the Protestant William and Mary to the Catholic James—who had shown himself somewhat antagonistic to the Established Church.  But they—and others who favored the new monarchy—also perceived a wider reality.  They recognized that the Crown is not personal, that is that there is a difference between the Crown—the institution of kingship—and the individual who wears it.   An oath of loyalty to the King is not a pledge to an individual but to the institution he—or even more precisely—his crown, represents: the rule of Law in the nation. 

I bring this up because I think we religious people are often literalists who cannot see beyond the literal face of our symbols to the realties they represent.  Religious people are inclined to imprison themselves in thinking inside the box rather than apprehending the broader and more profound perspectives.  I think we are seeing this sort of blindness today in those who struggle with Pope Francis and his new vision for the Church.  They can’t move from a Church of power, a religious institution, a “we have always done it this way” (even when we haven’t), into the sorts of possibilities that Francis is presenting for the Church to grow into to better serve the world and the spiritual needs of its people.  For some the Church subsists in its traditional liturgy—or even its pomp—and its canon law.  When a Pope comes with a vision of how to make the Church’s mission to proclaim the Kingdom of God in a post-modern world, they see this as a departure from Tradition rather than the preservation of what has always been at the heart of the Tradition. 

In any event, as the High Church party among the bishops represented this stuck-in-the-past model of Church and Crown and thus supported James and (what was perceived to be) traditional kingship, under William and Mary there was a favoring of Whig government both in Parliament and in the Church. The Whigs believed in a dynamic approach to the English Constitution, not a static and preservationist approach.  Whigs were optimists who saw change as a positive factor permitting institutions to evolve into ever better forms. Whig bishops were particularly important to the government as the bishops sat in the House of Lords, which in the 18^th century, was still the more powerful House of Parliament.  When Queen Anne came to the Throne, she favored the Tories but found that she too needed the Whigs to govern.  England was rapidly evolving from its old aristocratic/oligarchic monopoly on power to what was becoming a bourgeois democratic constitutional monarchy and there was no reversing the trend.  The economic vitality of the expanding British Empire was creating a new social class with the merchant and industrialist forces making their political power felt and the new rich were Whigs.  When upon Anne’s death the Hanoverians Georges (I, II, and III) reigned, the Whigs found themselves more often than not in power and the candidates put forward to the various episcopal sees tended to represent their social and political agenda.  Whigs tended to be Latitudinarian (Tories were High Church) in theology and Church polity.  This made for some pretty mediocre leadership in the Church of England in the 18^th century. 

Many of the Latitudinarian bishops of the late 17^th and early 18^th centuries sought to re-integrate the Dissenters (Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Baptists) into the Church of England and consequently were both soft on enforcing the official liturgy and did not see the importance of the doctrines that made the Church of England a via media between Protestantism and Catholicism.  Gone was the intellectual and spiritual vitality of the Caroline Divines.  The Church of England acquired the reputation for doctrinal vagueness that persists even today when there is no consistency of doctrine among Anglicans on such questions as the nature of the Eucharistic Presence, the nature of the ordained ministry, or even what constitutes the Church. In the 18^th century even Unitarianism was condoned in Anglican circles leaving closet Arians secreted among clergy and laity alike, our American George Washington apparently being one.  Another example is King’s Chapel in Boston, an Anglican church founded in 1686 and whose minister, James Freeman, and congregation adopted Unitarianism in 1785.   Although the historic creeds have continued to be used in the Anglican liturgy they are often more formulaic than actually reflecting the faith of the Church’s members.  This spills over too into moral issues where often precise theological methodology has been trumped by a rather superficial liberalism and feeling of good will that has not asked some of the hard questions that need to be part of the theological critique regarding issues such as abortion, human sexuality, and Christian marriage.  And much like the situation at the time of the Glorious Revolution, Anglicanism is threatening to come apart at the seams because of a theological latitude that is more an indifference or at least an unwillingness to face hard issues rather than to sit down and hammer out a consistent theological framework rooted in tradition but able to respond to the contemporary world.  Other than N.T. Wright and Rowan Williams (and with no disrespect to the late John Macquarrie and J.A.T. Robinson), these days Anglican theologians are rare birds and you have buffoons like John Shelby Spong being sported as the intellectual du jour. Well, my biases are showing and I had better get back to the 18^th century. 

One example of Whigish episcopal mediocrity in the Established Church was Thomas Tenison who, as Rector of the prominent London parish, Saint Martin in the Fields had preached the funeral sermon for Nell Gwynn in 1687.  Gwynn, an actress whose life had been marked by numerous sexual liaisons as she climbed her way up from the gutter (not just a figure of speech: her mother, drunk, had drowned in a gutter) to the palace, was the somewhat notorious mistress of Charles II by whom she bore two children.  Tenison pretended in his sermon that “pretty, witty Nell” (so termed by Samuel Pepys) had repented of her somewhat sordid life, a claim that was widely scoffed at by contemporaries.  Gwynn was a famously witty person and not one to take herself seriously.  Once, when her coachman attacked a man for calling Nell “a whore,” she broke up the fight insisting: “I am a whore; find something else to fight about.”  But courtesan though she was, she had been courtesan to a King and so Tenison was rewarded for his pastoral sensitivity to the King’s “Protestant whore” (to distinguish her from the King’s “Catholic whore,” the Duchess of Portsmouth), by being made Bishop of Lincoln and eventually Archbishop of Canterbury.  Today I think we would commend the generosity of a clergyman who conducted so public a funeral for a person of such shady repute: after all, prostitutes and tax collectors are entering the Kingdom of God before most of us more reputable Pharisees.  In the 18^th century though it would have been thought more proper for the duty to bury such a sinner to be delegated to a more obscure clergyman than the Rector of Saint Martin in the Fields.  

Foundations of the Anglican Church CXIX

Gerald Valerian Wellesley,
canon of Durham Cathedral
and avid reader of the Times
of London 

Well, I have promised a number of faithful readers that I will get back to our series on the history of the Anglican Church—and so here we are, back in the last decade of the 17^th century with a deposed King and a deposed Archbishop of Canterbury and a Church facing a crisis, a crisis which it will not navigate without banging itself on a few rocks that will leave it battered and weakened and with lifeboats setting out on the seas of evangelicalism. 

In 1688 a coup d’etat replaced the Catholic King James II with his Protestant daughter Mary and even more Protestant son-in-law, William of Orange.  Nine bishops, including Archbishop Sancroft of Canterbury, were deposed for refusing to wear allegiance to the new monarchs—they saw their support of the “Glorious Revolution” and the new co-monarchs (an oxymoron if there ever was one) William and Mary as being contrary to the oaths they took at their episcopal consecrations to be loyal to the King (in this case, James).  It was a bitter irony as they were being deprived of their sees for loyalty to a Catholic King when to a man the bishops were rabidly anti-Roman.  Anti-Roman, but not anti-Catholic in as that they were all High Churchmen who saw the Church of England as being a branch of that catholic (i.e.) universal Church along with the Greek and Roman Churches.  But deprived and deposed they were.  They are referred to as non-jurors as they would not swear (Latin: jurare) the oath of allegiance. 

Now Mary was very devout, but while Protestant, wasn’t much interested herself in matters of doctrine, but her husband, William, was a passionate Calvinist.  While Mary was the one with title to the Crown, William’s head was not graced with a “Crown Matrimonial,” i.e. he was no mere consort.  He was, by the grace and invitation of Parliament, co-regent.  In fact, given his domination of Mary and her willingness to leave politics to the husband whom God had set over her in authority (they were Protestants after all and thus unblinking subjects to the Word of God), William was the power figure in this equation.  William was no fan of the High Church movement (which he considered too close to the Catholic theology) represented by the Caroline Divines and consistently appointed Latitudinarians to the episcopal bench. 

High Churchmen represented a somewhat Catholic (though not Roman Catholic) school of thought that stressed the Prayer Book liturgy and sound patristic theology.  They encouraged—and practiced—a devout personal life with a piety rooted in the Prayer Book offices and many showed an interest in the continental mystics.  (The continental mystics tended, of course, to be Roman Catholics such as Francis de Sales, Archbishop Fenelon, Dom Augustine Baker, Brother Lawrence of the Resurrection and others, especially French and Spanish spiritual writers.)

The Church of England had been drained of most of its Low Churchmen at the Restoration when they tended to go with the various dissenters: Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Baptists and others.  Low Churchmen tended to look only to the Biblical text for theological guidance and were liturgical minimalists.  Their piety was more rooted in evangelical preaching than the Prayer Book offices and they looked askance on the mystical tradition as being among the worst abuses of superstitious Romanism.  But, as I said, their influence in the Church of England had been minimized with the definitive break of the Dissenters with the official Church in 1660. 

The Latitudinarians or Broad Churchmen were somewhere in the undefined middle of these two extremes.  The old couplet tells it all:

High and Crazy

Low and Lazy

Broad and Hazy

It is hard to pin down exactly what a Latitudinarian believes—or if they believe at all.  They usually are inclined to ignore the sort of details of dogmatic theology in which High Church advocates of the time found their entertainment, but they also differed from low Church people in tending to like the various forms of biblical criticism that stretch the text to make it mean whatever you wish it to.  When it comes to liturgy they follow the Prayer Book but without much enthusiasm, much less an imagination.  I always think of the Reverend and Honorable Gerald Valerian Wellesley, brother of the Duke of Wellington and a canon of Durham Cathedral who was said to take the Times into choir with him tucked under his surplice and read it while the choristers sang Morning Prayer.  Though coming towards the end of the period we are looking at, Wellesley’s morning reading is that sort of cavalier abandon that typifies the Latitudinarians.  It wasn’t rooted in an indifference to matters religious as much as it was symptomatic of a religious liberalism that downplayed personal faith for intellectual abstractions. 

After leaving off the series on the Church of England about eight weeks or so ago, I did a series on the Enlightenment because if we are to understand the malaise of the Church of England in this period we need to understand that intellectual environment that pervaded European society at the end of the 17^th century and throughout most of the 18^th.  The Enlightenment’s contempt for the medieval period, a time which Enlightenment thinkers referred to as “The Dark Ages” (as if the sun had taken a thousand year hiatus), pushed philosophers and historians and even theologians into an intellectual corner where, if they wished to be thought at all critical in their scholarship, they distanced themselves from the sort of faith and piety characteristic of pre-Enlightenment societies.  It is not unlike the supercilious phony liberal intellectualism of today when people think they have to dismiss millennia of wisdom in favor of abstract and cerebral theories they can parrot without comprehending. 

This Enlightenment spirit infected the Church of England as its bishops and higher clergy were invariably members of the same clubs and traveled in the same social and intellectual circles as the various scientists and philosophers who were advancing the secularist thought of the time.  (This intellectual contamination affected Scandinavian Lutheranism and Continental Catholicism as well, particularly in France, but also to some extent in the Austria and its possessions, as well as Spain and Portugal, but nowhere nearly as much as it did in England.) It was typical of many clergy and not a few bishops to belong to a Masonic Lodge and thus inevitable for some of the theological freethinking of the Lodges to find their way into the Church.  Archbishop Tillotson, William’s nominee to succeed the deposed Sancroft at Canterbury, had to dispel rumors that he was a Unitarian, a not uncommon theological position among Enlightenment thinkers. 

While they were soft on doctrine and often somewhat broad minded on personal (i.e. sexual) morality, the Latitudinarians were inclined to an excessive emphasis on social mores.  They tended to espouse economic liberalism and Adam Smith ideas on Free Market Capitalism, but they regularly used the pulpit to call for reform of the Poor Law, educational reforms, and prison reform as well as hammering away at such social evils as slavery, alcoholism, prostitution, and child employment.  By and large, the 18^th century Church of England was a rather limpid thing whose appeal was primarily among the fashionable well-to-do’s and Whig part politicians.  It would produce two important reactions: one in the eighteenth century and the other—and at the other extreme of the ecclesial spectrum—in the nineteenth.  

The Know-Nothings and Anti-Catholicism

We mentioned in previous posts that the Whig party was the anti-immigrant/anti-Catholic party. The Whigs were the liberal party and the heirs of the Enlightenment democratic heritage that valued reason about Tradition—a position that would put them into opposition with Catholicism, especially the European variety of Catholicism that had been closely tied to monarchism and absolutism in opposition to democracy. The “old-school” American Catholics of the Archbishop John Carroll variety had long ago, at the time of the American Revolution, accommodated themselves quite comfortably to the democratic ideals of the new nation, but the “new school” Catholics emigrating from Europe and brining European ideas with them were more reserved not only about American political structures but about American society in general and the American Church in particular. We start to see here in the 1830’s a fork in the path of the American Church, a fork which will allow two Catholic Churches to develop side by side with each other, a Church which will usually be broad enough to accommodate both branches in its communion but at two periods—in the final decades of the nineteenth and early decades of the twentieth and again at the final decades of the twentieth and the opening decade of the twenty-first centuries will find that communion stretched close to its point of fracture. But that is the topic for a future series of blogs. We want to stay on the topic of anti-Catholicism.
The Whig distrust of Catholics and immigrants drove the waves of Catholic immigrants into the Democratic party. At the same time, the Whig inability to achieve its political goal of preserving the ascendency of WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) political and economic power led the decline of the party. As the Whigs lost power, it was natural for another party to rise in its place to preserve the same set of ideals in opposition to the Jacksonian Democrats. Two parties would fill that vacuum. The first would fail, the second would endure.
Eventually the Republican party would emerge to balance the Democrats, but the time was not yet ripe for the Republicans. As the Whigs faded, their banner was taken up by a short-lived political alliance (it becomes a party in the 1850's) called the “Know-Nothings,” Originally not a national party but a loose-knit alliance of various local groups, in many respects like today’s Tea Party, the Know-Nothings began in New York State in 1843 as the American Republican Party. Within two years it had spread to other states and became a national organization known as the Native American Party. Ten years later it changed its name to the American party. It was only when it took on this name that it evolved from what might be called a movement into a formal political party. Its genius and its success was in organizing on the local and grass-roots level. It tended to do well in local elections, and to some extent in state elections, but was never effective in electing a President—though it did try.
Before we go further, an incident in Europe fueled the anti-Catholicism in America. In 1848 there was a revolution against the Papal Government in Central Italy—the Papal States. American Catholics often forget that for centuries the Popes had not only been spiritual leaders but also ruled a nation in central Italy. Italy, as we know it, only became a nation in 1870 when the King of Savoy, his Prime Minister Cavour, and his great General, Garibaldi, overthrew a variety of Kings, princes, Grand Dukes, and Dukes, uniting their various independent principalities into a single nation. One of the Kings overthrown and deprived of his temporal crown was the Pope—but this is some 22 years later. In 1848 a group of Italian Nationalists, drove the Pope—the newly elected Pius IX—from Rome where he fled to Gaeta outside Naples and prepared for a possible flight from Italy. (The British—strange friends (Well, not so strange when you know your history)—had a warship waiting to take him to refuge/exile should he so need. He didn’t need, as it turned out.) With the help of French troops, the rebellion was squashed and the Pope was restored. Pius had been a political liberal to this point favoring Democratic reforms. When he saw what Democratic Reforms led to—well, he wasn’t to sure about Democracy any more. The Americans saw the crushing of the Roman Revolution of 1848 as a blow to Democratic government. It reinforced their stereotype of Catholicism as monarchist and absolutist. And it made the American Nativist Party very successful. Rumor flew that the Pope planned an invasion of America to destroy our freedom even as he had destroyed the liberties of the Roman people. Today it sounds pretty silly that a papal army with the intent to invade would attack America (remember the old Peter Sellers' movie, The Mouse That Roared?) but in the 19th century many believed it. As late as the election of John Kennedy in 1960 many were convinced that the Pope had designs on this country.
The Know-Nothing Party platform was
• Severe limits on immigration, especially from Catholic countries
• Balancing what immigration there was in favor of English, Welch, Scots, and Protestant Irish
• Restricting political office to native-born Americans
• Mandating a wait of 21 years before an immigrant could gain citizenship
• Restricting public school teachers to Protestants
• Mandating daily Bible readings in public schools
• Restricting the sale of liquor
The Know-Nothings—and by the way they were called that, because when questioned about their political organization they would answer, like Sergeant Shultz “I know nothing.” Of course they didn’t have Shultz’s accent; they didn’t like Germans, or Irish, or anybody except those of British extraction. There was a secrecy to their organization and how these various local groups coordinated their efforts which actually led to their being particularly effective. In the spring of 1854 they won elections in Boston, Salem and other New England towns. That autumn they swept the state elections. (Gone was the moderation of Mayor Lyman and Edward Cutter and the Charlestown Selectmen of 1834) In Philadelphia their candidate, Robert Conrad, promised to crack-down on crime, close Saloons on Sundays, and appoint only native-born Americans to city posts. In Washington DC the Know-Nothing candidates won in a landslide. They were unsuccessful in New York—with its large immigrant population—but won a credible 26% of the vote in a four-way election. They did manage to elect both the Mayor of San Francisco and the Governor of California.
The following year they carried Chicago and the Know-Nothing Mayor, Levi Boone, barred all immigrants from city jobs, The success of the Know- Nothings led them to coalesce into a national party in 1854 as the American Party. One of the voices raised against the Know-Nothings was Abraham Lincoln who said—and given the political atmpsphere in Illinois said courageously-- As a nation, we began by declaring that “all men are created equal.” We now practically read it “all men are created equal, except negroes.” When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read “all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and Catholics” When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretence of loving liberty—to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy.
Lincoln was no particular friend of Catholicism—few politicians could afford to be at this period—but he was committed to democracy and the ideals of the Republic and he saw how the Know-Nothings threatened to undermine the basic values on which this nation was founded

I'm not sure where the image today comes from; i found it in my photo file but it is not one of my pictures. (I am pretty handy with Photoshop, but not that fancy)

Convent Burnings and Anti-Catholicism

In 1820 the Bishop of Boston, Jean-Louis Lefebvre de Cheverus invited the Ursuline nuns from Montreal to send a community of sisters to open a convent and school next to his Cathedral in Boston. The Ursulines had a fine reputation for the education of young women both in Europe and in French Canada. In fact this was there second school in the United States as they had operated an academy in New Orleans—originally French and only recently acquired for the United States—since 1727. The Boston convent and school moved to Ploughed Hill—now renamed Mount Benedict—seven years later. Most of the students came from upper class Protestant families who found the idea of sending their daughters to a “convent school” quite fashionable. (Georgetown Visitation similarly had a large population of upper class Yankee Protestant students at this same period.) All this was well and good during the lull in anti-Catholicism in the early years of the Republic but it would change as the embers of anti-Catholicism were fanned back into flame by the mass influx of Catholic immigrants in the 1830’s and 1840’s and by the anti-Catholic preaching of rabid demagogues in the pulpit, preachers like the Reverend Lyman Beecher, father of the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe.
Beecher is probably best known for his abolitionism—his preaching and writing against slavery, but abolitionism is only a small part of a much larger picture. Abolitionism was certainly a noble cause but not all causes associated with American liberalism of the early nineteenth century were so idealistic. Yesterday we talked about the Whig party and the Whigs were the political expression of liberalism. The Whigs split, north and south, on the slavery issue but Whigism was primarily a Northern movement. The Whigs were anti-immigrant because they believed that the democratic ideals of the young nation could only be preserved by people of British ancestry since our Republic was founded to preserve the liberties granted to Englishmen going back to the time of Magna Carta. Representative Government came from the British Parliamentary heritage and while England itself still had a monarchy, its powers were severely limited by Parliament, particularly by the People’s House—the House of Commons. Whigs also saw and wished to maintain that Protestantism was rightfully seen, if somewhat unofficially, as the religion of this Republic. Catholicism was highly suspect. It owed allegiance to a foreign prince,—the Pope—who was an absolute monarch. Priests were agents of the Pope. These immigrants were coming—especially the Germans—from monarchial government. The Irish were worse. They were an inferior race, kept ignorant by their priests, and rebellious against their English masters. Nineteenth century “liberals” tended to be as prejudiced as any Grand Inquisitors of medieval Spain. The fact that most of the immigrants, and the Irish in particular, gravitated towards Jackson’s Democratic party only increased the Whig hatred of anything Immigrant, anything Irish, and anything Catholic. In addition to preachers like Beecher, and perhaps inspired by him, there was a rash of anti-Catholic literature with lurid stories about priests and nuns, vaults filled with the murdered babies of unholy liaisons, the dangers of a papal takeover of the American Republic, the suffering of Protestants in Catholic dominated lands, and other inflammatory prose.
A young Episcopalian student in the School, Rebecca Reed, converted to Catholicism and entered the Ursuline convent. It wasn’t a good fit and she was dismissed towards the end of her postulancy. Reed wrote a book Six Months in a Convent. The book was only published after the Charlestown riots, but drafts of the manuscript had circulated widely among Boston Protestants. The disgruntled would-be nun did not have a lot of good to say about her experience and her book was of a certain “escaped from the convent-genre” popular at the time for its sensationalism.
There was much social unrest in Boston and surrounding towns, especially among the laboring classes. The immigrants—in Boston mostly Irish—were cheap labor. Working class Protestants were finding it hard to compete for jobs. This added to the tension in the city.
On the evening of July 28th 1834, a distraught nun—Sr. Mary John (aka Elizabeth Harrison) knocked on the door of a Protestant Gentleman, Edward Cutter, in Charlestown and asked for help to reach an acquaintance in Cambridge. Mr. Cutter obliged. The next day Mr. Cutter went to the home of the acquaintance to inquire after the nun and was told that she had returned to the convent in the company (custody?) of her Mother Superior and the Bishop of Boston—now Benedict Joseph Fenwick. Rumors began to spread. Was Ms. Harrison being held against her will? Rebecca Reed’s monograph would certainly lead one to think this was a possibility. As the agitation spread, placards were posted around Boston declaring:
"To the Selectmen of Charlestown!! Gentlemen: It is currently reported that a mysterious affair has lately happened at the Nunnery in Charlestown, now it is your duty gentlemen to have this affair investigated immediately. If not the Truckmen of Boston will demolish the Nunnery Thursday night—August 14."

The nuns and the bishop did the utmost to head off trouble. Mr. Cutter and the Charlestown selectmen (town council members) were allowed to come to the convent and interview Sister Mary John, the sister whose flight to Mr. Cutter’s home had started the incident. The nun said that she was free to leave the convent at any time of her choice; she was not being held against her will. A few days later the selectmen were admitted to the convent and Sr. Mary John—not the superior, but again the nun whose notoriety had brought attention to the convent—gave them a thorough tour of the buildings. The Selectmen released a statement to be published in the press that Sr. Mary John was in good health, she was not being held against her will, and that the convent was in every respect a fit place for nuns and students.
That very same night, however, August 11, 1834, a mob of Protestants gathered outside the convent door, calling for the release of any being held there against their will. When a nun came to the window and asked them to disperse, declaring that the nuns and children had all retired for the night, the mob offered her “protection” if she wanted to flee. The Superior, Mother St. George, appeared and made what was probably the greatest mistake in the event, declaring “the Bishop has twenty-thousand of the most vile Irishmen at his command and you may read your riot act till your throats are sore, but you’ll not quell them.” This did not intimidate the mob in the slightest; it served only as a challenge. They dispersed only to come back about two hours later and about two thousand strong. The ringleaders set fire to barrels of pitch on the convent grounds. Fire companies came, but the firemen only joined the crowd. The mob, growing restless, broke into the convent through battered doors and shattered windows ransacking the place. The nuns and students fled to the gardens behind the school through back doors. The mob then torched the building. More to come

The image today is a sketch of the ruins of the Charlestown Convent

The progress of Anti-Catholicism, an ongoing saga

Well, let’s come back to the story of anti-Catholicism in America. As I mentioned in an earlier blog, Catholicism did its best in the new American Republic to “fit in.” By tradition American Catholicism was rooted in the recusant Catholicism of the English and Anglo-Irish gentry who settled Maryland and there was very little foreign about it. The churches were plain—the Cathedral in Baltimore didn’t even have any statues. The clergy and religious dressed simply but without distinguishing features. (The Carmelite nuns who came to Southern Maryland from what is today Belgium traveled from Europe to their new Maryland home in lay clothes and under the titles Miss or Missus, depending on their age. Saint Rose Philippine Duchesne and the “Madames” of the Sacred Heart who accompanied her from France, also travelled in secular dress coming to make their foundation in America.) While mass remained in Latin—despite Bishop Carroll and other clergy talking of a vernacular liturgy—baptism, marriage, and funeral rites (other than the mass itself, of course) were translated (without permission of Rome) into the vernacular. There were no public processions in the streets or other displays more common to Continental Catholicism; discretion ruled the day and it seemed very natural to these Marylanders because it was their heritage from England and the Irish Pale.
The waves of immigrants that came in the 1830’s and 1840’s changed that. The Germans, and smaller numbers of French and Italians, brought the more vibrant Catholicism of their homelands. They were used to public processions, religious garb, more elaborate churches and worship, more emotional display of religion. The Germans and Italians were also particularly interested in preserving their language and culture and wanted alternatives to public education where they could educate their children in the language and customs of their homelands. The German and French immigrants were, by and large, more educated than the Italians and the Irish. The Irish (along with the Germans, the biggest group of immigrants) were—unlike the Germans and unlike earlier Irish immigrants—poorly educated, many practically illiterate. They came fleeing hunger during the Great Famine.
The established American citizenry—though descendents of immigrants themselves—looked down on these immigrants and had a grave distrust of how they would adapt themselves to life in the American Republic. They were, well so un-American. They didn’t speak English—except for the Irish who often spoke it poorly and many of whom were in fact native Irish speakers. Their religion was strange, exotic with Latin prayers and songs, and clergy in strange garb. Their priests seem to have too much influence over them—they weren’t independent minded as were Americans. (Get three Congregationalists together and you have four opinions.) And they weren’t republicans. (Not in our terms of Republicans/Democrats, but in believing in the political philosophy of republican government.) Indeed the French and the Germans in particular tended to monarchy as the preferred form of government. The French remembered the travesty of their Revolution which simply replaced one despot with another and did great harm to both the social order and the Church in the process. The Germans too were coming from the network of principalities, kingdoms and duchies that would be united into modern Germany in 1870 and were not used to democratic thought.
In addition to not being experienced in (or possibly convinced of) a republican form of government, the immigrants had little use for Protestantism. To the French and the Italians, Protestants were a pretty much unknown element. (There were some French Protestants but after the Wars of Religion in the 17th century they were a definite minority, most having fled to the Netherlands or England and from these refuges many going on to the English colonies in North America.) The Germans, coming from Catholic principalities along the Rhine or Bavaria understood Protestants to be the “enemy” from the Protestant German States, most notably Prussia and the northern German regions. As for the Irish—well to them “Protestants” were the bastards that had let them starve, taking what few crops survived the famine and shipping them off to England to sell there while forcing the impoverished tenant farmers off their lands and leaving them destitute. No, this was not a happy arrangement to have these “foreigners” sweep onto our shores.
The Irish in particular had great resentment. During the famine not only had their Protestant landlords let them starve but Presbyterian and Anglican “angels of mercy” had opened soup-kitchens to feed the starving and now dispossessed masses. All one had to do was renounce the Catholic faith, join the sponsoring Denomination, and dinner was free. Catholics who “took the soup” found themselves shunned by those who preferred hunger to religious blackmail. Their neighbors and relatives would drop the “O’” or the “Mc” in front of the apostate’s name as a sign of their contempt. So if your name is Connell, or Sweeney, or Loughlin—or some other name that might normally begin with an Irish prefix—one of your ancestors may well have “taken the soup.”
On the other hand, the contempt was not one–sided. The Irish immigrants found a particularly bitter resentment on the part of the old Yankees. The East-Coast American Establishment were strong Anglophiles for whom everything British was to be admired and copied. They shared the English bias against the Irish that was as racist as any prejudice against people of color. “No Irish,” and “Irish need not apply” signs appeared at factory gates and tenement doors.
As I had mentioned in an earlier blog, in the first years of the Republic, Catholics had tended to favor the Federalist cause rather than Jefferson’s Republicans (who are today’s Democrats, or at least the forebearers of the modern Democrat Party). But as the Federalist party faded from the scene, a new party rose up called the Whigs. The Whigs saw a huge threat in the presidency of Andrew Jackson. Jackson was a military man, a famous general, and he had no patience for the slow deliberations of politics. The presidency changed drastically under Jackson, growing stronger in power at the cost of Congress’ prerogatives, Jackson didn’t pull a coup-d’état or anything like that. It was all done through his allies in the Congress; and he was an immensely popular president who had the electorate behind him, especially the lower classes and the frontiersmen on the western edge of the young country.
Whigs were not only concerned about Jackson’s threat to the Republic, they were concerned about this wave of immigrants and how they would fit into the American Republic. The Whigs were not anti-immigrant per se; it was more what they were for rather than what they were against. The Whigs believed in a universal public school system. There was an advantage to this as until this point public schools were sporadically placed leaving many children, especially in the South and in rural areas without an opportunity for education. The problem is that the Whigs wanted there to be no more than one system of education which would teach English only and would stress Protestant religion with daily bible reading and other practices to which Catholics objected. (One reason they objected, of course, is that the Bible to be read was the King James "Protestant Bible.") The Catholics, though traditionally opponents of Jefferson’s Democratic Republicans, now felt them less a threat than the Whigs. As Catholics began to shift towards the Democratic-Republicans, the Whig’s fear of these immigrants with their foreign religion only increased.
The Whigs had moderate luck in obtaining elected office for their candidates. They lost presidential elections in 1836, 1844, 1852, 1856, and 1860—by which time they faded out of existence This means that in 1840 and 1848 their candidates were elected. A major reason for their lack of success was that the Catholic and immigrant population—a swelling percentage of the population as a whole, was joining what is now called the Democratic party. But we are getting ahead of ourselves.
One of the first signs of anti-Catholicism was the Charlestown Convent Burning of 1834. We will do a blog on this event to give a fuller detail. Suffice it to say that the Ursuline nuns from French Canada had established a convent and school in the Boston suburb of Charlestown. The short version of the story is that one of the nuns had run away and sought refuge in the home of a friend. The next morning the local gentleman, a Mr. Cutter, who had taken her there inquired about her welfare, only to be told that she had returned to the convent in the company of her Mother Superior and the Bishop. This fueled rumors that women were being held against their will in the convent. An inquiry was held by the local selectmen who visited the convent and inspected it and assured the populace that the sisters were there voluntarily. However a large mob gathered outside the convent on the night of August 11, 1834 and set fire to barrels of tar on the grounds. The fire spread. The local fire brigade arrived on the scene but did not do anything to put the fire out. The placards and speeches provide a direct link between the mob and the rising Catholic population, mostly Irish laborers, in Boston. In the subsequent trial twelve of the thirteen ringleaders were acquitted, despite some of them admitting to the crime. The one found guilty was a sixteen-year old boy who was pardoned by the governor at the request of, among others, the Superior of the Ursulines and the Bishop. More on this in a future blog—and in our next blog on anti-Catholicism we look at the “Know-Nothing” party
today's image is a 19th century print of the Ursuline Convent in Charlestown MA, site of famous 1834 Convent Burning.