Part 17 (2/2)
In the Roman Catholic Church of the United States, during this stormy period, there was by no means a perfect calm. The ineradicable feeling of the American citizen--however recent his naturalization--that he has a right to do what he will with his own, had kept a.s.serting itself in that plausible but untenable claim of the laity to manage the church property acquired by their own contributions, which is known to Catholic writers as ”trusteeism.” Through the whole breadth of the country, from Buffalo to New Orleans, sharp conflicts over this question between clergy and laity had continued to vex the peace of the church, and the victory of the clergy had not been unvarying and complete. When, in 1837, Bishop John Hughes took the reins of spiritual power in New York, he resolved to try conclusions with the trustees who attempted to overrule his authority in his own cathedral. Sharply threatening to put the church under interdict, if necessary, he brought the recalcitrants to terms at last by a less formidable process. He appealed to the congregation to withhold all further contributions from the trustees.
The appeal, for conscience' sake, to refrain from giving has always a double hope of success. And the bishop succeeded in ousting the trustees, at the serious risk of teaching the people a trick which has since been found equally effective when applied on the opposite side of a dispute between clergyman and congregation. In Philadelphia the long struggle was not ended without the actual interdicting of the cathedral of St. Mary's, April, 1831. In Buffalo, so late as 1847, even this extreme measure, applied to the largest congregation in the newly erected diocese, did not at once enforce submission.
The conflict with trusteeism was only one out of many conflicts which gave abundant exercise to the administrative abilities of the American bishops. The mutual jealousies of the various nationalities and races among the laity, and of the various sects of the regular clergy, menaced, and have not wholly ceased to menace, the harmony of the church, if not its unity.
One disturbing element by which the Roman Catholic Church in some European countries has been sorely vexed makes no considerable figure in the corresponding history in America. There has never been here any ”Liberal Catholic” party. The fact stands in a.n.a.logy with many like facts. Visitors to America from the established churches of England or Scotland or Germany have often been surprised to find the temper of the old-country church so much broader and less rigid than that of the daughter church in the new and free republic. The reason is less recondite than might be supposed. In the old countries there are retained in connection with the state-church, by constraint of law or of powerful social or family influences, many whose adhesion to its distinctive tenets and rules is slight and superficial. It is out of such material that the liberal church party grows. In the migration it is not that the liberal churchman becomes more strict, but that, being released from outside pressure, he becomes less of a churchman. He easily draws off from his hereditary communion and joins himself to some other, or to none at all. This process of evaporation leaves behind it a strong residuum in which all characteristic elements are held as in a saturated solution.
A further security of the American Catholic Church against the growth of any ”Liberal Catholic” party like those of continental Europe is the absolutist organization of the hierarchy under the personal government of the pope. In these last few centuries great progress has been made by the Roman see in extinguis.h.i.+ng the ancient traditions of local or national independence in the election of bishops. Nevertheless in Catholic Europe important relics of this independence give an effective check to the absolute power of Rome. In America no trace of this historic independence has ever existed. The power of appointing and removing bishops is held absolutely and exclusively by the pope and exercised through the Congregation of the Propaganda. The power of ordaining and a.s.signing priests is held by the bishop, who also holds or controls the t.i.tle to the church property in his diocese. The security against partisan division within the church is as complete as it can be made without gravely increasing the risks of alienating additional mult.i.tudes from the fellows.h.i.+p of the church.[312:1]
During the whole of this dreary decade there were ”fightings without” as well as within for the Catholic Church in the United States. Its great and sudden growth solely by immigration had made it distinctively a church of foreigners, and chiefly of Irishmen. The conditions were favorable for the development of a race prejudice aggravated by a religious antipathy. It was a good time for the impostor, the fanatic, and the demagogue to get in their work. In Boston, in 1834, the report that a woman was detained against her will in the Ursuline convent at Charlestown, near Boston, led to the burning of the building by a drunken mob. The t.i.tus Oates of the American no-popery panic, in 1836, was an infamous woman named Maria Monk, whose monstrous stories of secret horrors perpetrated in a convent in Montreal, in which she claimed to have lived as a nun, were published by a respectable house and had immense currency. A New York pastor of good standing, Dr.
Brownlee, made himself sponsor for her character and her stories; and when these had been thoroughly exposed, by Protestant ministers and laymen, for the shameless frauds that they were, there were plenty of zealots to sustain her still. A ”Protestant Society” was organized in New York, and solicited the contributions of the benevolent and pious to promote the dissemination of raw-head-and-b.l.o.o.d.y-bones literature on the horrors of popery. The enterprise met with reprobation from sober-minded Protestants, but it was not without its influence for mischief. The presence of a great foreign vote, easily manipulated and cast in block, was proving a copious source of political corruption. Large concessions of privilege or of public property to Catholic inst.i.tutions were reasonably suspected to have been made in consideration of clerical services in partisan politics.[313:1] The conditions provoked, we might say necessitated, a political reform movement, which took the name and character of ”Native American.” In Philadelphia, a city notorious at that time for misgovernment and turbulence, an orderly ”American”
meeting was attacked and broken up by an Irish mob. One act of violence led to another, the excitement increasing from day to day; deadly shots were exchanged in the streets, houses from which b.a.l.l.s had been fired into the crowd were set in flames, which spread to other houses, churches were burned, and the whole city dominated by mobs that were finally suppressed by the State militia. It was an appropriate climax to the ten years of ecclesiastical and social turmoil.[314:1]
FOOTNOTES:
[296:1] Johnson, ”The Southern Presbyterians,” p. 359.
[297:1] For the close historical parallel to the exscinding acts of 1837 see page 167, above. A later parallel, it is claimed, is found in the ”virtually exscinding act” of the General a.s.sembly of 1861, which was the occasion of the secession of the Southern Presbyterians. The historian of the Southern Presbyterians, who remarks with entire complacency that the ”victory” of 1837 was won ”only by virtue of an almost solid South,” seems quite unconscious that this kind of victory could have any force as a precedent or as an estoppel (Johnson, ”The Southern Presbyterians,” pp. 335, 359). But it is natural, no doubt, that exscinding acts should look different when examined from the muzzle instead of from the breech.
[304:1] Tiffany, chap. xv.
[305:1] The intense antagonism of the New England Congregationalists to Jefferson and his party as representing French infidelity and Jacobinism admits of many striking ill.u.s.trations. The sermon of Nathanael Emmons on ”Jeroboam the son of Nebat, who made Israel to sin” is characterized by Professor Park as ”a curiosity in politico-homiletical literature.” At this distance it is not difficult to see that the course of this clergy was far more honorable to its boldness and independence than to its discretion and sense of fitness. Both its virtues and its faults had a tendency to strengthen an opposing party.
[306:1] Hobart's sermon at the consecration of Right Rev. H. U.
Onderdonk, Philadelphia, 1827.
[312:1] For a fuller account of the dissensions in the Catholic Church, consult, by index, Bishop O'Gorman's ”History.” On the modern organization of the episcopate in complete dependence on the Holy See, consult the learned article on ”Episcopal Elections,” by Dr. Peries, of the Catholic University at Was.h.i.+ngton, in the ”American Catholic Quarterly Review” for January, 1896; also the remarks of Archbishop Kenrick, of St. Louis, in his ”_Concio in Concilio Vaticano Habenda at non Habita_,” in ”An Inside View of the Vatican Council,” by L. W.
Bacon, pp. 61, 121.
[313:1] A satirical view of these concessions, in the vast dimensions which they had reached twenty-five years later in the city and county of New York, was published in two articles, ”Our Established Church,” and ”The Unestablished Church,” in ”Putnam's Magazine” for July and December, 1869. The articles were reissued in a pamphlet, ”with an explanatory and exculpatory preface, and sundry notices of the contemporary press.”
[314:1] A studiously careful account of the Philadelphia riots of 1844 is given in the ”New Englander,” vol. ii. (1844), pp. 470, 624.
This account of the schisms of the period is of course not complete. The American Missionary a.s.sociation, since distinguished for successful labors chiefly among the freedmen, grew out of dissatisfaction felt by men of advanced antislavery views with the position of the ”American Board” and the American Home Missionary Society on the slavery question.
The organization of it was matured in 1846. A very fruitful schism in its results was that which, in 1835, planted a cutting from Lane Seminary at Cincinnati, in the virgin soil at Oberlin, Ohio. The beginning thus made with a cla.s.s in theology has grown into a n.o.ble and widely beneficent inst.i.tution, the influence of which has extended to the ends of the land and of the world.
The division of the Society of Friends into the two societies known as Hicksite and Orthodox is of earlier date--1827-28.
No attempt is made in this volume to chronicle the interminable splittings and reunitings of the Presbyterian sects of Scottish extraction. A curious diagram, on page 146 of volume xi. of the present series, ill.u.s.trates the sort of task which such a chronicle involves.
An ill.u.s.tration of the way in which the extreme defenders of slavery and the extreme abolitionists sustained each other in illogical statements (see above, pp. 301, 302) is found in Dr. Thornwell's claim (identical with Mr. Garrison's) that if slavery is wrong, then all slave-holders ought to be excommunicated (vol. vi., p. 157, note). Dr. Thornwell may not have been the ”mental and moral giant” that he appears to his admirers (see Professor Johnson in vol. xi., p. 355), but he was an intelligent and able man, quite too clear-headed to be imposed upon by a palpable ”ambiguous middle,” except for his excitement in the heat of a desperate controversy with the moral sense of all Christendom.
CHAPTER XVIII.
THE GREAT IMMIGRATION.
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