No CrossRef data available.
Article contents
The Irish Priest in North America
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 March 2016
Extract
To assert at the outset of this study, as I do, that the task before me is both impossible and essential, may be justly proclaimed a proceeding both cowardly and obvious. We are principally concerned with the nineteenth century, but the twentieth century prolonged many of the features of Irish Roman Catholic clerical identity of the nineteenth, in North America as elsewhere. Vitally important patterns and castes (social and mental) were established in the eighteenth century, and the first Irish-American Roman Catholic priestof major significance in the United States, John Carroll (1735-1815), first Roman Catholic bishop in the U.SA and first archbishop of Baltimore, owed his American birth initially to migration of his father’s kinsmen in the late seventeenth century. Anglophone North America from 178 3 consisted of two political obediences, with similarities and contrasts both subtle and, at least superficially, forceful. The huge and consistently expanding area of white settlement in North America in which the Irish Catholic clergy participated, created other great divergences: when American historians at the end of the nineteenth century under the influence of figures as divergent as Frederick Jackson Turner of the ‘frontier thesis’, Ulrich Bonnell Phillips of slavery apologetics, and Alfred Thayer Mahan of sea-power celebration, looked to environmentalism as the chief explanation of the American past, they may have oversimplified—indeed, they did oversimplify—but their sheer preoccupation with the question gives its own warnings against a filio-pietism which chooses to see an Irish ethnic character resolutely asserting itself to the third, fourth, and even later generations.
- Type
- Research Article
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 1989
References
1 The work of John Tracy Ellis dominates the whole subject, and anything he has written or influenced is invaluable to the student, from the Catholic Historical Review during his editorship and subsequently, to the New Catholic Encyclopedia whose editor for American Catholic history. Mother Mary Peter, OSU, was a distinguished pupil of his and whose contributors, as i can personally testify, had so many reasons to bless him and her. His Life of James Cardinal Gibbons (2 vols, Milwaukee, 1952) is both in subject and in treatment the great exemplary work on a North American priest; his The Formative Years of the Catholic University of America (Washington, D.C., 1946) opens up a host of major problems; his ‘American Catholics and the Intellectual Life’, Thought, 30 (1955), pp. 351-88, inspired a most constructive debate; his American Catholicism (Chicago, 1955) is a profoundly judicious survey, his Documents of American Catholic History (2 vols, Milwaukee, 1961, Chicago, 1967) is a mine of rich material and abounds in pointers for different areas of future investigation; The Catholic Priest in the United States, Collegeville, Minn., 1971) edited by him contains his ‘The Formation of the American Priest: An Historical Perspective’, pp. 3-110, which was the main intellectual stimulus for the present essay. Ellis quietly but firmly forces the thought of students of American Catholicism, whether Catholic or not, American or not, out of their personal blinkers, and was most unusual among American historians in taking account of Canadian developments. Monahan, Arthur P., ‘Canada’ in Corish, Patrick J. (ed.), A History of Irish Catholicism (Dublin, 1971), 6 Google Scholar, pt 3, is useful if largely a simple charting. Dolan, Jay P., The American Catholic Experience (Garden City, N.Y., 1985)Google Scholar, is an interesting reappraisal. The Dictionary of American Biography, Who Was Who in America (especially the Historical first volume 1607-1896), Encyclopedia Canadiana, The Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups (1980), abound in helpful material. Thomas N. Brown, Irish-American Nationalism 1870-1890 (Philadelplhia, 1963) marks the Copernican revolution in Irish-American lay historiography. Lawrence J. McCaffrey, The Irish Diaspora in America (Bloomington, 1976) is a challenging if somewhat defensive presentation by a scholar of authority in Irish history on both sides of the Atlantic. The various studies and historiographical surveys by David Noel Doyle are most instructive, for which most recently see Irish Historical Studies, 23 (1982-3), pp. 254-83. The chief influences on my remarks on Ireland are the writings of Patrick J. Corish, Maureen MacGeehin (later Wall), S.J. Connolly, and in certain respects Emmet Larkin; and the essay by Brendan Bradshaw in this volume. I had the advantage of a lifetime’s instruction from my father, R. Dudley Edwards, on the questions raised herein: his last words of advice to me were given while the essay was in final draft, and he died a few hours before its last pages were written (he would not have wanted me to go to his obsequies without finishing my text). It is thanks to him that I owe my first instruction from my old tutor at University College Dublin, John A. Watt, in whose honour this inadequate tribute has been written, and to him also the first basis of understanding with my all too generous and patient editor, W.J. Sheils. If this essay, even in a very small way, reflects some of the excitement and enthusiasm with which Professor Watt galvanized his students, 1 have succeeded in what I tried to do.
The quotation from Mencken was reprinted in his A Carninal of Buncombe, ed. Malcolm Moos (Baltimore, 1956), and may be conveniently found in its latest edition (Chicago, 1984), pp. 141-2.
2 Smith’s ancestry seems to have been discovered by Frances Perkins, his former supporter and then Roosevelt’s Secretary of Labor, when she was working on the biography of Smith she did not live to write. (Information from his subsequent biographer, Matthew, Josephson H. and Josephson, M., Al Smith: Hero of the Cities (London, 1970)Google Scholar).
3 Some of these ideas were stimulated by conversations with Thomas N. Brown and David N. Doyle.
4 I am graceful to John J. Appel particularly with respect to conversation on Scotch-Irish historical societies in America.
5 The major source on the contrasting fortunes of the Knights of Labor with respect to VS. and Canadian authorities is still Henry J. Browne, The Catholic Church and the Knights of Labor (Washington, D.C., 1946). A note on the Louisianian exception to pro-slavery nativism can be found in my article ‘NATIVISM (American)’ in NCE.
6 I thank Dr Pieter Stokvis of the Netherlands American Studies Association on this matter, and see his and other essays in Rob Kroes (ed.), American Immigration: Its Variety and Lasting Imprint (Amsterdam, 1979).
7 Some of the material relating to Coughlin comes from oral testimony collected by the BBC Radio producers Daniel Snowman and David Perry and communicated to me, as well as from abusive mail directed to me personally, by Coughlin supporters. Invaluable personal recollections of Feeney were supplied by the late Kenneth Wiggins Porter, my colleague at the University of Oregon, to whose beloved memory I owe countless tributes.
8 It is useful co mention hete the value for me of the generosity in time and scholarly information of Monsignot Ellis, but his personal communications of knowledge and insight inform the whole essay.
9 Ellis, American Catholicism should obviously be taken as source for almost the whole essay, but his discussion of this point (pp. 91-6) is obviously seminal. I have also benefited from Madeleine Hooke Rice, American Catholic Opinion in the Slavery Controversy (New York, 1944), and from the Ph.D. dissertation by my student Douglas Cameron Riach (Edinburgh University, 1975) on ‘Ireland and the American Anti-Slavery Movement’.Joseph M. Hernon,Jr., Celts, Catholics and Copperheads: Ireland Views the American Civil War (Columbus, Ohio, 1968) shows how far the Irish in Ireland had moved from Daniel O’Connell on the slavery question.
10 I base myself here on a study of the American press in general during ParnelPs American mission of 1880.1 am grateful to my student Dr Christopher McGimpsey for material on United States Protestant backlash in the 1890s. The backlash of the 1920s and its origins are studied in Edward Cuddy, “The Irish Question and the Revival of Anti-Catholicism in the 1920s, Catholic Historical Review, 67 (1981), pp. 369-85. Maguire, Irish in America (London, 1868), pp. 98-9, is an admirable, if ostentatiously pious, compilation of tradition and history, as well as personal observation, on the whole North American scene, and is particularly noteworthy on the Canadian side: my father first brought its merits home to me.
11 I have benefited from Dr John Sweetman’s work on comparative controversies arising from Irish clerical controversies on Irish national questions in Australia and New Zealand.
12 Maguire, Irish in America, pp. 106, 346. Froude, ‘Romanism and che Irish Race in the United States’, North American Review, 129 (1879), pp. 521-2. Apart from the indignation this engendered it proved an involuntary source for Irish nationalist agitators, Parnell quoting it in favour of the Land League cause in his address to the United States Congress, 2 February 1880. O’Reilly’s lines come from his poem ‘In Bohemia’. Robert Emmet Curran, SJ, ‘The McGlynn Affair and the Shaping of the New Conservatism in American Catholicism, 1886-1894’, Catholic Historical Review, 66 (1980), pp. 184-204. On Scott Fitzgerald, see my essay on the revival of his Irishness and Catholicism under the influence of Gibbon’s protégé Monsignor Cyril Sigourney Fay, in A. Robert Lee’s forthcoming collection of essays on Fitzgerald.
13 On D’Arcy McGee, apart from obvious sources, see Thomas N. Brown, ‘The Irish Layman’, in Corish (ed.), A History of Irish Catholicism, 6. McGee, The Irish Position in Britain and in Republican North America (Montreal, 1866), contains observations worthy of respect for its perception as well as for its courage.
14 Froude, ‘Romanism and the Irish Race’, pp. 521-2. Ellis (ed.), Documents of American Catholic History (1066), I, pp. 317-21: 99. Archbishop Hughes’ Opposition to Western Colonization for Catholic Immigrants, March 26, 1857.
15 Spalding, ‘Mr Froude’s Historical Method’, North American Review, 130 (1880), pp. 293, 287, 295. (Froude had produced a second instalment in the issue of January 1880 which need not concern us here. Charles Stewart Parnell, The Irish Land Question’, ibid. (1880), pp. 388-406, is also an answer to, and still more an exploitation of, the questions raised by Froude.)
16 Gerald J. Storcz, ‘Archbishop Lynch and New Ireland: An Unfulfilled Dream for Canada’s Northwest’), Catholic Historical Review, 68 (1982), pp. 612-24.
17 Apart from the relevant articles in NCE (by Thomas N. Brown and others), Patrick J. Blessing, ‘Irish’ in Stephan Thernstrom (ed.). Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups, pp. 524-45, is generally helpful here, as is Dolan, American Catholic Experience, pp. 143-4, and more generally 127-57. But the question of Irish-speaking immigration to North America is still only in its historiographical infancy, the most important recent work being that of Dr Cormac Ó Grada from whom a major summation on the whole matter is shortly to appear, one hopes. Somewhat less scientific work had been carried out on the question by Proinnsias Mac Aonghusa in various lectures in Irish and English which righdy point to the contrast between users of Scots-Gaelic and Irish-Gaelic in Canada as a useful basis for future study.
18 ‘Chicago’, NCE, and other articles; also Dictionary of American Biography, Who Was Who in America, 1.
19 Brown in NCE; Blessing in Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups.
20 Patrick J. Corish, The Irish Catholic Experience (1987), passim.
21 Griogöir Ó Dúbhghaill has in preparation a study of Ferguson which is to explore some of these points further. My own reading owes something to the insights of Conor Cruise O’Brien. The poem appears in many anthologies, most recently in Kinsella, Thomas, The New Oxford Book of Irish Verse (Oxford, 1986), pp. 288–91 Google Scholar.
22 Redpath, Talks About Ireland (New York, 1881). The Georgist paper the New York Standard is a useful source for anti-clerical comment on the McGlynn affair in early 1887.
23 The catechism chiefly in use was chat by the Revd Andrew Donlevy (1694?-1761?), The Catechism, or Christian Doctrine, by way of Question and Answer, drawn chiefly from the Express Word of God, and other Prime Sources (Paris, 1741, in Irish; 3rd edn., Dublin, 1848, bilingual). See also Corish, Patrick J., The Catholic Community in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Dublin, 1981). pp. 111–12 Google Scholar.
24 Fryde, E. B. et al. (eds), Handbook of British Chronology (3rd edn, London, 1986), pp. 411, 432, 441 Google Scholar (where the name appears variously ‘Gallagher* and ‘O’Gallagher’, hardly surprisingly since his own first language was evidently Irish which knows no distinction between these forms). A bilingual edition by Canon Ulick J. Bourkc of Sermons in Irish-Gaelic by the Most Rev. James O’Gallagher, Bishop of Raphoe (Dublin, 1879) carries a ‘literal idiomatic English translation on opposite pages’ but I have found it necessary to supply translation more literal still: see especially pp. 40-1. In some ways ‘a short sweetness’ may convey O’Gallagher’s meaning even better than ‘a short pleasure’.
25 Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford, 1933), 3.66 (“Deal, sb.2 4) simply assumes the North American usage derived from the Teutonic root meaning ‘part’ or ‘amount’, and its Supplement (Oxford, 1972), I. 745, follows suit. But this makes no sense. The first recorded U.S. usage is the New York banker John Rathbone (1834), the first Canadian is the writer T. C. Haliburton (1838), both of whom would be witnesses to the progress of such a word from usage by Irish servants.
26 The Jansenist thesis has been most notably put forward by Sean O’Faolain, The Irish (Harmondsworth, 1969), pp. 104-11. The whole book is well worth reading in any of its editions. Professor Emmet J. Larkin adumbrated the Gallicanism thesis informally in Dublin in the late 1950s but it seems with some modifications to underly most of his subsequent books on Irish Church-State relations. Dolan, American Catholic Experience, pp. 33-4, succinctly outlines the baroque thesis. I base myself on O’Gallagher, Donlevy and various Irish poems reprinted in Pádraig Ô Canainn (ed.), Filidheacht na nGaedheal.
27 Joyce, J. A., Dubliners (London, 1914)Google Scholar. I am grateful to my Edinburgh University students in Modern Irish History for stimulating discussions on these questions.
28 Dolan, American Catholic Experience, pp. 329-41. See also the pioneer study by James J. Green, ‘American Catholics and the Irish Land League, 1879-1882’, Catholic Historical Review, 35 (1949-50), pp. 19-42.
29 Henry J. Browne, ‘Public Support of Catholic Education in New York, 1825-1842: Some New Aspects’, Catholic Historical Review, 39 (1953-4), p. 18. See also T. Ô Raifeartaigh,’ Mixed Education and the Synod of Ulster”, Irish Historical Studies, 9 (1954-5), pp. 281-44.
30 Maynard, Theodore, The Story of American Catholicism (New York, 1941)Google Scholar offers a convenient presentation of the traditional picture of American Catholicism, but Ellis, Documents, is necessary to see the reality in depth.
31 Davin, The Irishman in Canada (Toronto, (1877]), p. 101. D’Arcy McGee, Irish Problem, p. 7. J. F. Maguire’s position as one of the ‘Brass Band’ seems to lend a slight note of wistfulness to his description of the more substantial accomplishments of his fellow-Irish coreligionists in North America. On these questions in general I have said a word in my ‘The American Image of Ireland: a Study of its Early Phases’, Perspectives in American History, 4 (1970), pp. 241-82.
32 Carroll to Plowden, 7 July 1797, in Thomas O’Brien Hanley, SJ (ed.). The John Carroll Papers (Notre Dame, 1976), 2, p. 217. Carroll to Plowden, 7 December 1804 (ibid., 2, p. 462). Carroll to John Troy, 21 March 1810 (ibid., 3, p. 116). Carroll to the Hierarchy of Ireland, 11 November 1810 (ibid., 3, po. 126). Carroll to Troy, n.d. (ibid., 3, p. 312). Carroll to Tristram (ibid., 3, p. 352).
33 Carroll to Plowden, 12 March 1802 (ibid., 2, p. 383). Carroll to Enoch Fenwick, 10 September 1815 (ibid., 3, p. 358). Dolan, American Catholic Experience, 103-24, is stimulating on Carroll, and Annabelle M. Melville./o/m Carroll of Baltimore (New York, 1955) is useful, but the Papers must be the most profound source.
34 Carey, An Immigrant Bishop (Yonkers, N.Y., 1982), 6, p. 7.
35 Ibid., passim. England to the Cardinal-Prefect of Propaganda, 30 January 1833, in Peter Guilday, The Life and Times of John England (New York, 1927), 1, p. 531.