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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
Thomas J. Shelley
Affiliation:
Professor of church history at St. Joseph's Seminary, Dunwoodie, Yonkers, New York.
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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
Information
Church History , Volume 65 , Issue 1 , March 1996 , pp. 28 - 41
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): 1–17Google Scholar, repr. Pozzetta, George E., ed., The Immigrant Religious Experience (New York, 1991)Google Scholar. Pozzetta's volume contains several other pertinent articles.

3. The Austrian historian, A. F. Pribram, gave up his dream of writing the history of the Habsburg Empire because he did not know fourteen languages. Macartney, C. A., The Habsburg Empire 1790–1918 (London, 1968), p. xi.Google Scholar

4. The best history of Yonkers is still Allison, Charles Elmer, The History of Yonkers, Westchester County, New York (1896; repr. Harrison, N.Y., 1984).Google Scholar

5. See Greene, Victor R., “For God and Country: The Origins of Slavic Self-Consciousness in America,” Church History 35 (1966): 446–460CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Galush, William, “The Polish National Catholic Church: A Survey of Its Origins, Development and Missions,” Records of the American Catholic Historical Society of Philadelphia 83 (1972): 131–149Google Scholar; and Boyea, Earl, “Father Kolasinski and the Church of Detroit,” Catholic Historical Review 74 (1988): 420–439.Google Scholar

6. Yonkers Gazette, 4 February 1888.

7. U. S. Bureau of the Census, , Report on Statistics of Churches in the United States at the Eleventh Census, 1890 (Washington, D.C., 1894), pp. 91, 100, 104–105, 112–113Google Scholar. Minutes of the Meetings of the Archdiocesan Consultors, Archives of the Archdiocese of New York (hereafter cited as AANY), 8 May 1906. On the assimilation of German Catholics in the United States, see U. S. Catholic Historian 12 (Summer 1994), which devoted the entire issue to this topic.

8. Allison, , History of Yonkers, pp. 182–184, 341–363Google Scholar; Yonkers Statesman, 23 July, 1 August, and 14 October 1893; Yonkers Gazette, 9 September 1893.

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

10. Lings to Corrigan, 27 August 1900; Minutes of the Meetings of the Archdiocesan Consultors, 3 October 1900, 1 June 1904, AANY.

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

12. Lings to Charles McDonnell, 11 January 1892; Lings to Corrigan, 13 January [1893?], AANY. In Europe it was customary for diocesan priests of the Byzantine-Slavic rite to be married. For example, in the diocese of Mukačevo in the 1890s, only thirty-three of five hundred diocesan priests were celibate. For an excellent treatment of the controversies caused by the presence of married Byzantine-Slavic priests in the United States, see Simon, Constantin S.J., “The First Years of Ruthenian Church Life in America,” Orientalia Christiana Periodica 60 (1994): 187–232Google Scholar.

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14. Lings to Corrigan, 13 and 21 January 1893, AANY.

15. Lay trusteeism had been a serious problem for many American bishops in the early nineteenth century. They outlawed the practice at the First Provincial Council of Baltimore in 1829, but it reappeared later in the century in many of the national parishes that were founded at the initiative of the laity. See Carey, Patrick W., People, Priests and Prelates: Ecclesiastical Democracy and the Tensions of Trusteeism (Notre Dame, Ind., 1987)Google Scholar; and Stolarik, M. Mark, “Lay Initiative in American-Slovak Parishes, 1880–1930,” Records of the American Catholic Historical Society of Philadelphia 83 (1972): 151–158.Google Scholar

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18. History of St. Michael's Ukrainian Catholic Church (Yonkers, , n.d.), pp. 42–44.Google Scholar

19. Ibid.; Lings to Corrigan, 3 March [1899]; Lings to Corrigan, n.d. [March 1899], AANY.

20. Lings to Corrigan, 21 March 1899; Lings to Corrigan, 30 November 1898, AANY.

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

23. Lings to Corrigan, 10 April and 31 July 1899, AANY.

24. Procko, Bohdan P., “Soter Ortynsky: First Ruthenian Bishop in the United States, 1907–1916,” Catholic Historical Review 48 (01 1973): 513–533.Google Scholar

25. Lings to McDonnell, 11 January 1892, AANY.

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.

27. Misiak, Henry, “An Historical Record of the Parish and Church of St. Casimir, Yonkers, New York,” in Golden Jubilee, St. Casimir's Parish, Yonkers, New York, 1900–1950 (Yonkers, 1950), p. 38.Google Scholar

28. Slupek to Corrigan, 1 October 1900; Minutes of the Meetings of Archdiocesan Consultors, 7 November 1900; Lings to Corrigan, 13 February 1901; Lings to Joseph Mooney, 27 April 1901, AANY. On Dworzak, see Wroblewski, John, “‘Non Recuso Laborem’: The Life and Times of Monsignor Joseph C. Dworzak, Pastor and Community Activist,” (Master's thesis, St. Joseph's Seminary, 1992).Google Scholar

29. Boytim to Corrigan, 12 June 1891, AANY.

30. Lings to Corrigan, 26 February and 19 April [1891?], AANY.

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

32. Lings to Corrigan, 26 February [1891?], 2 July 1892, AANY; Yonkers Herald, 10 June 1895.

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): 16–31.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.