Archdiocese of New York City Bicentennial

On November 24, 1815, the good ship Sally sailed into New York harbor after a voyage of 67 days from Dublin. The trip had taken so long that there were rumors in New York that the vessel had been lost at sea. One of the passengers was an elderly Irishman who had caught a bad cold during the late autumn crossing of the North Atlantic. The Shamrock, the Irish newspaper in New York, misspelled his name as John Connoly, but it identified his occupation correctly. He was the newly appointed Roman Catholic Bishop of New York.

November 24, 1815, is not a red letter day in the history of the Archdiocese of New York, but perhaps it should be because it was the first time that the fledgling diocese had a resident bishop. Bishop Connolly discovered that he was the spiritual leader of a community of some 12,000 souls in New York City and an unknown number of Catholics scattered across New York state and the northern half of New Jersey, an area of 55,000 square miles. A year later he wrote: "My daily burdens are truly greater than my strength, owing to my not having more than three priests to help me in this city."

St. Vincet Ferrer Church on Lexington Ave between 65th and 66th Streets.

Today this same area comprises two archdioceses, nine dioceses, 2,000 churches, 6,000 priests and more than 10 million Catholics. Not even the wildest optimist could have envisioned such a development 200 years ago. To understand how it happened requires a look back as well as a look ahead.

Colonial New York
During the colonial period there was only a faint and intermittent Catholic presence in New York. Nothing suggested that Catholics would ever find a welcome in this part of North America. The earliest Catholic presence dates from 1642 when Jesuit missionaries from French Canada attempted to evangelize the Iroquois Confederacy in upstate New York. Three of the missionaries died as martyrs, René Goupil in 1642, and Isaac Jogues and Jean de Lalande in 1646. Isaac Jogues was a priest and the other two were lay volunteers. They were canonized with the other North American martyrs in 1930.

Despite their heroic efforts, however, the French missionaries made few converts among the Iroquois. A notable exception was Kateri Tekakwitha, who was born in 1656 in present-day Auriesville, the site of the martyrdom of the three French missionaries. She was baptized on Easter Sunday in 1676, died in Canada four years later and was beatified in 1980.

The first priest to set foot in New York City was Isaac Jogues. After his initial escape from Iroquois captivity with the help of the Dutch in 1643, he spent a month in the little settlement when it was still New Amsterdam. Although the population numbered fewer than 500, Jogues reported that it was already a cosmopolitan center where 18 languages were spoken. However, he found only two Catholics, an Irishman and a Portuguese woman.

Neither the Dutch nor the English colonial authorities tolerated the practice of Catholicism. A brief exception occurred after 1674 when the colony came under the control of the Duke of York, a convert to Catholicism, who ascended the English throne as James II in 1685.

Thomas Dongan, an Irish Catholic, was governor from 1683 to 1688, and directed the colonial assembly to issue a Charter of Liberties and Privileges, giving religious toleration to all Christians. Dongan also brought three English Jesuits to New York. The first to arrive, Father Thomas Harvey, celebrated the first Mass in New York City one Sunday in 1683.

This short interlude of religious toleration came to an abrupt end with the Revolution of 1688 in England that toppled James II from the throne. Catholicism was again proscribed in New York. In 1696 the mayor of New York City announced that there were only 10 Catholics in the city. In 1700 an anti-priest law outlawed the presence of Catholic priests under penalty of life imprisonment. Meanwhile in upstate New York the French Jesuits abandoned their missions among the Iroquois in 1709. Thereafter Catholic life in the colony became virtually extinct until the American Revolution.

America's first Bishop, John Carroll.

The Revolution and the Republic
At the end of the American Revolution there was a Catholic community of about 200 people in New York City, who were now free to practice their religion for the first time in a century. On June 10, 1785, the lay leaders formed "The Roman Catholic Church in the City of New York." They rented several lots from Trinity Episcopal Church and erected St. Peter’s Church on Barclay Street, a small brick building that was the first Catholic Church in New York. The cornerstone was blessed on Oct. 5, 1785, and the unfinished building was dedicated on Nov. 4, 1786.

It was easier to erect a church building than to find a suitable pastor. The first two pastors of St. Peter’s Church were both Irish Capuchins, Charles Whelan and Andrew Nugent. They soon fought with one another and with the lay leaders who were the legal trustees of the church. Peace came to the parish only with the arrival in 1787 of William O’Brien, an Irish Dominican, who remained as pastor for the next 20 years. However, the issue of lay trusteeism, which centered around the respective roles of the clergy and laity in administering the parish, remained unresolved for the next 50 years, not only in New York, but in many other parishes across America as well.

One reason why the lay leaders assumed a dominant role in the parish was that they filled a vacuum in the absence of normal Church government in the United States. That situation began to change after 1789 when John Carroll was appointed the Bishop of Baltimore with jurisdiction over the whole American Church. For the next two decades St. Peter’s was a parish in the diocese of Baltimore with John Carroll functioning as New York’s first bishop from a distance of 200 miles. He was the first to recognize the awkwardness of the situation and was delighted when, on April 8, 1808, Pope Pius VII made Baltimore a metropolitan see and created new dioceses in Boston, New York, Philadelphia and Bardstown, Kentucky.

A Diocese Without a Bishop
Since John Carroll had no one to recommend for New York, the Roman authorities selected the first bishop, Richard Luke Concanen, an Irish Dominican friar, who had lived in Rome for some 40 years. However, because of the naval war between France and England, the closest that Concanen ever got to his diocese was Naples, where he died on June 19, 1810, after a fruitless effort to book passage to New York. Cardinal O’Connor liked to quip that he was the smartest bishop of New York because he never came here.

Meanwhile, with Bishop Concanen’s permission, Archbishop Carroll appointed a vicar general in New York, Anthony Kohlmann, an Alsatian Jesuit, who has a good claim to be regarded as the real founder of the diocese.

The Immigrant Church
When Bishop Connolly landed in New York in 1815, perhaps the biggest shock he experienced was the ethnic diversity of his flock. The Irish comprised the largest segment of the Catholic community, followed by the French (both from France and Haiti), Germans, African-Americans, and lesser numbers of Spanish, Portuguese, Italians, English and native-born Americans. It was a harbinger of things to come.

The year of Bishop Connolly’s arrival marked the beginning of the largest recorded migration in history as millions of Europeans left their homeland in search of a better life in America. Many of them were Catholic and within a short time they were to transform the minuscule American Catholic community into the largest Christian church in the United States.

With good reason the Catholic Church in New York has been called "The Immigrant Church." The only variable has been the place of origin of the immigrants. The Irish and Germans predominated before the Civil War, followed by Italians and Eastern Europeans later in the century. The 20th century witnessed the arrival of large numbers of Hispanics from the Caribbean and Latin America, and more recently immigrants from Asia and Africa. Two hundred years ago Father Kohlmann preached on Sunday in
English, German and French in St. Peter’s Church. Today Mass is celebrated in the archdiocese on Sunday in 25 languages, including Akan, Arabic, Igbo, and Tagalog.

A Diocese Adrift
During the 30 years after 1808 the population of the diocese soared to about 200,000. Neither Bishop Connolly (1815-1825) nor his successor Bishop John Dubois (1826-1842) could cope with the demands of the rapidly growing diocese. Connolly was 68 years old when he was transplanted from Rome to America. Dubois had the handicap of his French birth for which the New York Irish never forgave him even though he placed a shamrock in his episcopal coat of arms as a peace offering.

On a 3,000-mile pastoral visitation of the diocese in 1829 that took him as far west as Buffalo and as far north as the Canadian border, Bishop Dubois repeatedly discovered more Catholics than he expected. "700 are found where I understood there were but 50 or 60," he wrote, "1,100 where I was told to look for 200." At the St. Regis Indian reservation a dozen young Native Americans served his Mass in surplices made from blankets while the choir sang Indian hymns that reminded him of Gregorian chant. When Alex de Tocqueville visited New York City in 1831, he was told by the vicar general, Father John Power, that the Catholics were already the single largest religious body even though they had only five churches compared to almost 100 Protestant churches.

In 1817 three Sisters of Charity came from their motherhouse in Emmitsburg, Md., to establish the first charitable institution in the diocese, the Catholic Orphan Asylum. Only a dozen years earlier Elizabeth Ann Seton, a native of New York City, had been received into the Catholic Church in St. Peter’s Church and had founded her new religious community in 1809. She was canonized in 1975, the first native-born American saint.

Over the years one of the most faithful benefactors of the Catholic Orphan Asylum and many other charitable causes was Pierre Toussaint, a Haitian-born slave. Emancipated in 1807, he became a prosperous businessman and a pewholder of St. Peter’s Church where he attended the 6 a.m. Mass every day for more than 60 years. At his death in 1853 he was one of the best known African-Americans in New York City. In 1997 he was declared Venerable, the first step in the process of canonization.

Bishop and Chief
In 1837 the 40-year-old John Hughes was appointed the coadjutor bishop to the aging John Dubois. Ordained a bishop the following year, John Hughes was made the administrator of the diocese in 1839. He succeeded Dubois as the fourth bishop of New York in 1842, became the first archbishop of New York in 1850 and died on January 4, 1864. To use his own words, for a quarter-century he ruled the Church in New York as "bishop and chief."

Surveying the condition of the diocese, he confided to a friend, "I think that I have been sent here in punishment for my sins." John Hughes opened 61 new churches within the confines of the present archdiocese (at one point a new church every 10 weeks) and brought 10 new religious communities to the diocese, who in turn made possible a vast expansion of Catholic educational and charitable activities.

Geographically the diocese shrank to approximately one-tenth of its original size with the creation of new dioceses in Buffalo and Albany in 1847, and Brooklyn and Newark in 1853. Nonetheless, in the area that remained under the jurisdiction of John Hughes, the Catholic population almost doubled from 200,000 to over 350,000. By 1865 one out of every four New Yorkers was born in Ireland, and one of every six New Yorkers was born in Germany.

John Hughes was the first archbishop of New York to become a national figure. Within five years, he was the best-known, if not necessarily the best-loved Catholic prelate in the United States as a result of three well-publicized controversies. First he successfully challenged the lay trustees for control of the cathedral by appealing over their head to the pewholders who had elected them. Secondly he single-handedly destroyed the Public School Society, an elitist private organization that enjoyed a monopoly on public education in New York City. It was less than a total victory, however, since it eventually led to the secularization of the public schools.

His finest hour occurred in May 1844. A Nativist mob that had precipitated three days of anti-Catholic riots in Philadelphia threatened to repeat the performance in New York. Hughes placed armed guards around his churches and warned the mayor that "New York would become a second Moscow" if the city fathers did not maintain law and order. It was a reference to the deliberate destruction of that city by the Russians 30 years earlier. The combination of firmness and bluster had the desired effect. The Nativists called off their demonstration and New York City was spared the mob violence that had racked Philadelphia.

Native American Sculpture of Blessed Kateri Tekakwitha by Dale Lamphere

John Hughes was a highly controversial figure in his own day and he remains so today. His autocratic style and belligerence have drawn criticism from many quarters, but Msgr. John Tracy Ellis, the respected historian of American Catholicism, offered a more favorable judgment. While conceding that Hughes "was not what one could call a likable character," Ellis pointed out that "there were times when his very aggressiveness was about the only approach that would serve the end he was seeking, justice for his people."

John Hughes’ greatest monument is St. Patrick’s Cathedral. He laid the cornerstone on August 15, 1858, but did not live to see it completed. It was meant to be a statement in stone of the presence of the Immigrant Church in the city that was the capital of Protestant America. "We propose," he said, "to erect a cathedral in the city of New York that may be worthy of our increasing numbers, intelligence, and wealth as a religious community." St. Patrick’s Cathedral remains today as a tribute to the determination and foresight of New York’s greatest Catholic leader.

The Gilded Age
Neither of John Hughes’ two immediate successors, John Cardinal McCloskey (1864-1885) and Archbishop Michael Augustine Corrigan (1885-1902), possessed his vision or feisty personality, but they inherited the secure place that Hughes had carved out for Catholics in New York. They were also the beneficiaries of the demographic changes that saw the Catholic population triple to 1,200,000. By 1880 New York was a predominantly Catholic city that elected three Catholic mayors during the next two decades.

In 1875, when John McCloskey became the first American cardinal, it was a recognition of the importance that the Archdiocese of New York had now assumed in the Catholic world. The changes that took place during McCloskey’s own lifetime were breathtaking. Born in Brooklyn in 1810, when the Catholic population of the whole state was little more than 15,000, he left behind at his death in 1885 an archdiocese of 600,000 Catholics.

The growth was especially spectacular under Archbishop Corrigan, who founded 99 new parishes in 17 years, a record unmatched by any other archbishop of New York. In a pastoral letter that he issued in 1900, Archbishop Corrigan said that during the previous decade, he had dedicated a new church, school, rectory, convent, or institution every two weeks, a total of over 250 buildings.

The growth of the religious communities was equally impressive. By 1900 there were 20 communities of men and 32 communities of women at work in the diocese. The largest was the Sisters of Charity whose numbers grew from 33 sisters in 1846 to 1,145 professed sisters in 1900. By that date they staffed 77 schools and institutions, including the New York Foundling Hospital. It has been said that the real founder of the parochial school system in New York was not John Hughes, but Mother Jerome Ely, the longtime mother general of the Sisters of Charity. She probably had more authority and more responsibility than any other woman in New York in her day.

The increasing wealth of the Catholic community in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was evident in the erection of such impressive churches as St. Francis Xavier, St. Paul the Apostle, St. Ignatius Loyola, St. Jean Baptiste, and especially St. Vincent Ferrer. However, as the church historian Henry Browne observed dryly, the Catholics did not live in churches. Most were poor people who lived in the cold-water flats of tenement houses. Their own poverty made their generosity to the Church all the more admirable. A visitor to the 6 a.m. Sunday Mass at St. Stephen’s Church in 1866 noticed that no one put more than a penny in the collection basket, but every single person contributed a penny, no matter how poor they might have been.

In the 1880s, when Edward McGlynn, the pastor of St. Stephen’s Church, added a noon Mass on Sunday, he told Archbishop Corrigan, "Churches are for the people, and not people for the churches." He explained that even Sunday was not a full day of rest for many of his parishioners. "Very many have to work all night or from three or four o’clock in the mornings of Sundays as well as other days."

Dr. McGlynn (as he was invariably called in deference to his Roman doctorate) became the most famous or notorious priest in New York, and was excommunicated for five years, because of his involvement in local politics. For some, like Tammany chieftain Richard Croker, McGlynn was a populist demagogue. For others, he was a rare Catholic champion of the Social Gospel in the heyday of laissez-faire capitalism.

On Top of the World
The first half of the 20th century was the Golden Age of urban Catholicism in the large cities of the Midwest and Northeast. Pastors boasted about the size of their parish plant, by which they meant a church, school, rectory, convent, and sometimes a parish hall, which anchored a whole neighborhood and was a social as well as a religious center. To borrow Charles Morris’ comment about contemporary Philadelphia, an alien anthropologist from outer space who landed in a working-class neighborhood in New York "would know instantly the centrality of religion to the lives of the inhabitants." In New York this era coincided with the episcopates of John Cardinal Farley (1902 -1918), the last Irish-born archbishop of New York, and Patrick Cardinal Hayes (1919-1938), who was born on the Lower East Side, not far from the birthplace of Al Smith.

When the diocese celebrated its centenary in 1908, one highlight was a march of 40,000 men up Fifth Avenue to the cathedral. It was a calculated demonstration of Catholic power, which peaked in those years when the Cardinal’s Residence at 452 Madison Avenue was familiarly known as the Powerhouse. When George McClellan Jr. was elected mayor, he called at the Powerhouse to ask Archbishop Farley if he had any recommendations for city commissioners. The archbishop’s response surprised him. Farley said that he would prefer fair-minded Protestants to Catholics who would bend over backwards to avoid the impression that they were favoring their own church.

The centenary celebration was also the high-water mark of Irish domination of the archdiocese, which had already begun to wane. By that date over one-third of the 136 parishes in New York City were national parishes, representing eleven different ethnic groups. The most notable demographic change was the influx of some 300,000 Italian immigrants during the previous three decades. Not since the Great Famine in Ireland had so many Catholics from one country come to the archdiocese in such a short
period of time.

Alfred E. Smith, governor of New York and, in 1928, the first Catholic candidate for President.

The most famous of the Italian immigrants was Mother Frances Xavier Cabrini, who arrived in New York City in 1889 with her Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart. She died in Chicago in 1917 and was canonized in 1946, the first American citizen to be declared a saint. Four years later Pope Pius XII conferred on her the title of Patroness of Immigrants.

In the early 20th century the growth rate of the Catholic population was only half of what it had been during the previous half-century. Most of it took place in the Bronx, southern Westchester, and Staten Island. The reason was not the lack of newcomers, but the exodus of Catholics from Manhattan. As far back as 1896 the pastor of St. Peter’s Church complained that "Brooklyn and [New] Jersey have taken away our industrious middle class." In the later 1930s New York ceased to be the largest archdiocese in the nation, overtaken first by Chicago and then by Boston.

Nevertheless, New York remained a vital center of American Catholic life. The publication of the Catholic Encyclopedia and the founding of Maryknoll in 1911 were both milestones of different kinds in the coming of age of American Catholicism. The most famous chaplain in World War I was Father Francis P. Duffy of the New York 69th National Guard Regiment. Two of the most influential Catholic magazines originated in New York, the Jesuit weekly America, founded by Father John J. Wynne, S.J., in 1909, and the lay-sponsored Commonweal, which dates from 1924. In 1919 Msgr. Robert F. Keegan began the organization of Catholic Charities, which became a model for many other dioceses.

In 1928, when a Catholic was first nominated for President of the United States, it was a New York Catholic, Governor Alfred E. Smith. Although Al Smith was often identified exclusively with the Irish, he was a classic example of the inclusiveness of the Immigrant Church of New York. His grandparents were German, Italian, Irish and English.

In 1933, in the depths of the Depression, Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin founded the Catholic Worker movement in New York City. In 2005 Cardinal Egan took the first steps to introduce the cause of her canonization in Rome. In 1934 Father John LaFarge, S.J., and George K. Hunton formed the Catholic Interracial Council of New York. Four years later Catherine de Hueck Doherty opened Friendship House in Harlem. Two of the most effective communicators of the Gospel had a New York connection, if not New York roots. Msgr. Fulton J. Sheen was the Lenten preacher at St. Patrick’s Cathedral every year from 1930 to 1952, while Thomas Merton was baptized in Corpus Christi Church on November 16, 1938.

A Church and Society in Flux
The last of the brick-and-mortar archbishops of New York was Francis Cardinal Spellman (1939-1967). The friend of both Pope Pius XII and President Franklin D. Roosevelt, he was the most prominent archbishop of New York since John Hughes and the most influential American Catholic churchman since Cardinal Gibbons. As the Military Vicar for the Armed Forces, Spellman headed a second diocese of several million Catholics and became a reassuring symbol of Catholic patriotism to many Americans during World War II.

Father John LaFarge, SJ., a founder of the Catholic Interracial Council of New York.

After World War II, Spellman embarked upon a major diocesan building program that took 24 pages to describe in a press release by the New York chancery office for his silver jubilee as archbishop in 1964. In 1965 there were 362,025 students in the Catholic schools of the Archdiocese of New York and the Diocese of Brooklyn. According to Msgr. George A. Kelly, only two public school systems in the nation, New York City and Chicago, had larger enrollments.

In addition to his ability as a builder and fundraiser, Spellman also showed imagination and resourcefulness in responding to the pastoral needs of several hundred thousand Puerto Ricans who came to the archdiocese in the first airborne migration in history. One of his proudest moments occurred on October 4, 1965, when he welcomed Pope Paul VI on his whirlwind visit to the United Nations and New York City.

However, Spellman’s last years were overshadowed by changes in the church and country that he neither welcomed nor understood. Although he was responsible for bringing Father John Courtney Murray to the Second Vatican Council and strongly supported the Declaration on Religious Liberty, he resisted many of the changes of the Council, especially the introduction of the vernacular liturgy. He remained a staunch supporter of the Vietnam War to his death, disappointed that his appeals to American patriotism did not bring the same positive response that they did during World War II.

We Have Been Here Before
A major challenge for the post-conciliar Church in the United States was the implementation of the reforms of the Council in an increasingly secularized society, a development symbolized most alarmingly perhaps by the Roe v. Wade decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in 1973. In New York the impact of secularization was especially severe at the same time that the archdiocese was called upon to meet increasing pastoral demands with diminished resources of priests and religious. That has been the common experience of the last three archbishops of New York: Terence Cardinal Cooke (1968-1983), John Cardinal O’Connor (1984-2000), and Edward Cardinal Egan (2000-present).

In the 40 years since the close of Vatican Council II, the Catholic Church in New York preserved its claim to the title of the Immigrant Church. The number of Catholics increased from 1,800,000 to over 2,500,000 due largely to immigration from Latin America and to a lesser extent from Asia and Africa. At the same time the number of active diocesan priests that Cardinal Egan had at his disposal in 2007 was little more than the number that were available to Archbishop Corrigan over a century ago for a Catholic population of half the size.

There were other equally disquieting statistics that could be cited on the occasion of the bicentennial of the diocese. However, one of the benefits, if not the purpose of Church history, is to place statistics, whether of the good or bad variety, in historical perspective. Writing in the late 1960s, when the American Catholic Church was in turmoil, Msgr. John Tracy Ellis said that, next to the grace of God, he found the greatest source of reassurance in his knowledge of Church history. It reminded him that the Church had surmounted far worse crises in the past. Another Church historian, David Knowles, put it more simply. "We have been here before," he said.

Even a cursory knowledge of the history of the Archdiocese of New York should provide similar reassurance today. One need only think of Bishop John Connolly arriving in New York harbor on the Sally in 1815 to find a raw frontier diocese half the size of Italy with three churches and six priests. It is doubtful if any bishop in the history of the Catholic Church in the United States ever began his Episcopal career under more disheartening circumstances.

One need not go back 200 years in New York Catholic history to find reassurance for the future. Thirty years ago a New York priest was appointed the pastor of a parish in the South Bronx during the worst period of that area’s ordeal by fire. He said that the neighborhood resembled Dresden after the firebombing of World War II. "There were gutted buildings on every street and sheet metal boarding up the windows with painted flowerpots on them. It was like living in a movie set."

"It is a place that should have died," he concluded, "but it didn’t. There is no explanation for it," he added, "except the immense love and creativity of so many people and the grace of God." Despite many difficulties past and present, those same two factors—the love and creativity of so many people and the grace of God—have brought the Archdiocese of New York to the present moment. It is a good omen for the future.

Msgr. Thomas Shelley is a priest of the archdiocese and professor of historical theology at Fordham University. He is the author of the forthcoming ‘‘Bicentennial History of the Archdiocese of New York.’’