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Dean Lings's Church: The Success of Ethnic Catholicism in Yonkers in the 1890s

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2009

Thomas J. Shelley
Affiliation:
Professor of church history at St. Joseph's Seminary, Dunwoodie, Yonkers, New York.

Extract

From the period after the Revolutionary War, when Philadelphia and New York merchants first replaced Maryland planters as the lay elite, American Catholicism has been predominantly urban. This became especially noticeable in the late nineteenth century when large numbers of European immigrants swelled the Catholic ranks in many cities of the Northeast and Midwest. The astonishing ethnic variety of the newcomers made the American Catholic Church more “catholic” than ever before, which was a boon to Catholic apologists, but a nightmare for the American bishops. To their credit, they responded to this pastoral challenge imaginatively and effectively by creating an extensive network of “national parishes” for virtually every sizable ethnic group.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Church History 1996

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References

1. Kantowicz, Edward R., Corporation Sole (Notre Dame, Ind., 1983), p. 67.Google Scholar

2. The pioneering work in the field is that of Dolan, Jay, The Immigrant Church (Baltimore, Md., 1975)Google Scholar. For the success of the immigrant church in a small midwestern industrial city in the early twentieth century (and useful bibliographical references), see Mohl, Raymond A. and Betten, Neil, “The Immigrant Church in Gary, Indiana: Religious Adjustment and Cultural Defense,” Ethnicity 8 (1981): 117Google Scholar, repr. Pozzetta, George E., ed., The Immigrant Religious Experience (New York, 1991)Google Scholar. Pozzetta's volume contains several other pertinent articles.

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9. Lings to Corrigan, 10 December 1895; Corley to Corrigan, 20 December 1896, AANY.

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11. Rossi to Thomas Carroll, 6 May 1929, AANY. The most recent study of Italian Catholics in New York is Brown, Mary Elizabeth, Churches, Communities and Children: Italian Immigrants in the Archdiocese of New York, 1880–1945 (Staten Island, N.Y., 1995).Google Scholar

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21. Tymkewych to Lings, n.d. [1899]. The four-page letter is written in Lings's hand. There is a slightly longer typed version of the letter, dated 27 March 1899. A cover letter to Corrigan indicates that Lings translated Tymkewych's letter to him from German to English for Corrigan's benefit.

22. Unlike Corrigan, Lings held a surprisingly tolerant view of the Byzantine-Slavic married clergy. “It is certain,” he said, “that married priests have shown themselves as effective … as the unmarried ones.” Lings, The Report of the Greek Church in Union with the Catholic Church in the Province of New York, n.d. [August 1898], AANY. By contrast, Bishop Richard Phelan of Pittsburgh remarked: “A married priest could neither be a good priest, nor a good Catholic.” Simon, , “First Years,” p. 226.Google Scholar

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26. Dworzak to Corrigan, 7 October 1899, AANY. The “schismatic priests” were the dissident Polish-American clergy who would soon form the Polish National Catholic Church.

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31. Liptak, Dolores, Immigrants and Their Church (New York, 1989), p. 138Google Scholar. On the Slovaks of Yonkers, see Tanzone, Daniel F., Slovaks of Yonkers, New York (n.p., 1975).Google Scholar

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33. Lings to Corrigan, 4 January 1895; Petition to His Grace, the Archbishop of New York, 19 March 1896; Lings to Corrigan, 25 February 1902, AANY. See Shelley, Thomas J., “Neither Poles nor Magyars nor Bohemians: The Slovak Catholics of Yonkers, New York,” Records of the American Catholic Historical Society of Philadelphia 105 (1994): 1631.Google Scholar

34. In addition to his other duties, Lings continued to administer his own large parish of St. Joseph. He reported that five thousand Catholics lived within the boundaries of the parish, and 825 children attended his parochial school. Lings to Corrigan, n.d. [1900?], AANY. In 1900 there were 2,171 children enrolled in the three parochial schools in Yonkers, taught largely by the local Sisters of Charity. The total cost of salaries for the year at all three schools was $10,556.96, which meant that the yearly cost per pupil was $4.86. Catholic Directory (New York, 1900)Google Scholar, and Annual Financial Report, St. Joseph, St. Mary, Sacred Heart parishes, Yonkers, N.Y., 1900, AANY.