church and America, The

Health Progress, Jul/Aug 2002 by Dolan, Jay P

Catholicism's Charity and Justice Traditions Have Helped Shape Our Nation

How has Catholicism shaped American society? This is not an easy question to answer. I would like to examine the issue under the larger umbrella of what Robert Bellah calls the "good society."1 I want to argue that Catholics have sought to build a society infused with a public spirit and a public consciousness that champions the common good. Rather than endorsing the voracious individualism that is so much a feature of American culture, Catholics have sought to build a society defined by mutual care and responsibility.

I want to explore this idea under the themes of charity and justice. Over the course of the past 150 years, a Catholic crusade on behalf of charity and justice has enabled a great society to become a good society.

THE CRUSADE FOR CHARITY

In the mid- 19th century, Catholics were this nation's poor. The only people worse off economically and socially were African Americans. In its early years, the United States had had relatively few Catholics. They were a small denomination concentrated in Maryland and Kentucky, both Southern slave states. But massive immigration after 1820 changed the situation dramatically. Driven from Europe by poverty and famine, thousands of Irish and German Catholics immigrated to this country. Within a few decades, the U.S. Catholic Church had become both the nation's largest religious denomination and a church of immigrants.

We often tend to romanticize the immigrant experience by recounting rags-to-riches tales. Most of these are not true. Members of the second or third generation sometimes achieved respectability, but not even they won riches. The immigrant generation of Catholics-the first wave of Irish and German immigrants that arrived in the 1840s and '50s-made up the majority of the nation's poor. A look back at 19th-century New York City will illustrate this point very clearly.

At mid-century, New York was one of the most densely populated cities in the world. It also had one of the world's highest death rates. One third of all infants died within a year, and death claimed the lives of at least one half of all children under five. Bellevue Hospital, the city's public institution, was where the poor went to die. Three-quarters of its patients in 1855 were Irishborn; they were described as "the worst fed and worst nurtured class in the community."2

The Irish made up the vast majority of unskilled workers in New York, trying to support themselves and their families on a few dollars a week-if they were lucky enough to find work. Many of the unskilled Irish slipped into a state of poverty. Hundreds entered the city's poorhouse; in fact, two out of three persons in the poorhouse in 1858 were Irish. Such pervasive poverty caused Archbishop John Hughes, the leader of the city's Catholics, to describe New York's Irish immigrants as the "poorest and most wretched population that can be found in the world-the scattered debris of the Irish nation."3 New York was not unique. In numerous cities across the country the situation was much the same-Irish and German Catholics made up the urban poor.

Immigrant women were particularly vulnerable. Among the Irish, high accident and death rates among male workers (along with a high male desertion rate) left large numbers of women as heads of households. Many women were forced to enter the poorhouse, where they constituted the majority of the female population. They also filled the city's hospitals and prisons. Irish immigrant women, both married and single, were clearly a population at risk.

We must also remember that the United States was, in the mid-19th century, a Protestant country. Protestantism had shaped the nation's culture. A key component of this culture was a very negative view of Roman Catholics. Such an attitude was a holdover from the Protestant Reformation. In the 19th century, it took such forms as anti-nun literature, the sacking of convents and churches, and "No Popery" campaigns, eventually leading to the formation of a political party, the Know-Nothings, whose entire ethos was rooted in hatred of Catholics and foreigners.

The success of the Know-Nothing party caused Abraham Lincoln to write: "Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation, we began by declaring that 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."4

Immigrant Catholics were not well received in such public institutions as schools, hospitals, asylums, and orphanages. Because of their religion, they suffered humiliation as well as discrimination. Priests often were not allowed to visit parishioners in public hospitals. Catholic children living in orphanages were often forced to attend compulsory Protestant worship services and encouraged to abandon their own faith and embrace a particular version of Protestantism.

Caring for the poor and the sick was a long-- standing Christian and Jewish tradition. But, in the 19th century, it took on new meaning for Catholics in the United States. Because of the pervasiveness of poverty in the Catholic community, on one hand, and the intolerant Protestant atmosphere of most public institutions, on the other, Catholics undertook a crusade of charity that would prove to be truly remarkable. What occurred in New York City illustrates the extent of this crusade.