The Historical Value of the Immigrant Parish: How Long Should a Ministry Last?

FROM THE ARCHIVE
The Historical Value of the Immigrant Parish: How Long Should a Ministry Last?
Mary Brown, Ph.D.

In 1921, the United States Congress passed the first of nearly a decade’s worth of laws limiting European immigration to the United States. Immigrants from all over Europe were beginning to arrive in waves, and popular sentiment had started growing against the newcomers.

For example, since 1880, hundreds of thousands of Russian Jews had fled life-threatening persecution. Nearly equal numbers of Eastern Europeans, Germans, and Italians had escaped grinding poverty during the same period, while the Potato Famine of 1845-1852 drove Irish migration to the United States, as work was scarce and poorly paid.

As a result, by 1905, migration to the United States topped a million a year, over 1% of the total population in a country of under 100 million. Most of these migrants settled in port or industrial cities, where the proportion of the immigrant to native population was much higher. World War I had raised the question of how loyal these European populations were to the United States. Nativists argued that the war had transformed Europe from multi-ethnic empires to nation-states, and it was time to develop such a national consciousness among immigrants to the United States and among their offspring.

First steps toward integration: Czech immigrants in kerchiefs and traditional jackets meet Czech-speaking social worker Mrs. Emma Doubek on the docks of New York, October 3, 1930.

The Catholic Response

In response to this influx, during the nineteenth century, American Catholic dioceses had developed infrastructure designed to integrate immigrants into the faith and society gradually, with the purpose of shielding them from the influence of non-Catholic faiths or secular culture. The American Church provided nearly cradle-to-grave service, so that whatever a Catholic needed could be found within the faith. At the heart of the system was the parish, a place where Catholics could use a native language in confession, fill the church building with familiar images and statues, and socialize according to homeland custom.

While opinion differed as to the exact timeline, American Catholic leadership generally agreed that this would be a temporary model. In the early twentieth century, some Catholic leaders, such as Chicago’s George Cardinal Mundelein and Boston’s William Henry Cardinal O’Connell, altered the infrastructure to increase the rate of integration. By forbidding foreign-language clergy from hearing confessions in English, for example, they sought to force the adult children of immigrants, who were usually more comfortable speaking English, away from their parents’ parishes, thus making immigrant parishes a one-generation phenomenon.

Parishes and Culture

Two forces reshaped “national” parishes, as those providing specialized language services were called. The first force was what Sociologist Milton Gordon described as a “segmented” assimilation in his 1964 study of the subject, meaning that immigrants and their descendants let go of some aspects of their homeland culture, held on to other aspects, and combined still other aspects into a new culture. Language, which was a battleground focus for many opponents of immigration, was actually a cultural trait that disappeared more rapidly than others.

The first generation of immigrants had often plunged into work and raising families, sacrificing their own education in English. (One unexplored story of American Catholicism is that of immigrant communities organizing nursing homes for elderly members.) However, American-born youth often did not even need parochial school nuns conversant in their parents’ languages (although the sisters’ language skills could be helpful to the parents); they picked up English quickly. In addition, as immigrant communities prospered and started building their own churches in which their parishioners could meet, they often used architectural styles from their homelands—and they got little criticism for doing so from their more American co-religionists. While Americans complained that Italians didn’t attend Mass regularly, contribute to collections, send their children to parochial school, or foster vocations, at the same time, they routinely described Italian churches, exterior and interior, in favorable terms.

Greenwich Village’s Our Lady of Pompei’s is reminiscent of architecture in Italy. Credit: Rocco Galatioto.

Over time, immigrant parishes developed their own type of “segmented” assimilation, best conveyed by looking at parish photographs. For example, pictures of the interior of Our Lady of Mount Carmel in Utica, New York, show the work of the D’Ambrosio Ecclesiastical Art Studio, founded by an Italian-trained immigrant artisan who raised his children in the business. Walls and ceilings in the church are covered in murals of saints familiar to Italian immigrants. At the same time, photos of parish youth show them modeling sports uniforms and posing with sports equipment.

Italian and American influences at Our Lady of Mount Carmel, Utica, New York, where the pastor (William Pizzoglio, c.s., on right in basketball photo, was from Brazil.

Parishes and Their Local Communities

The second force that transformed immigrant parishes came from outside the immigrant community, although perhaps still within the neighborhood. Some neighborhoods experienced ethnic “succession,” as one group of immigrants would be supplemented with, or replaced, with subsequent groups.

The Apostles of the Sacred Heart came to St. Anthony in New Haven when it was an Italian parish and continued to serve a changing neighborhood.

Perhaps the most noteworthy example of this succession is Transfiguration Catholic Church on Mott Street in New York City. Founded in 1853, its first congregation was predominantly Irish, but under the care of an exile from Cuba, Father Felix Varela. In the 1870s, Italians began to appear at the church and in 1901, the Archdiocese of New York asked the Salesians of Don Bosco to staff it, as that community could provide a steady supply of Italian-speaking clergy. The Salesians turned out to be a good choice, as the community also had missionaries in China, and soon Mandarin- and Cantonese-speaking clergy were in demand as Transfiguration found itself in the center of New York’s Chinatown. In the twenty-first century, the congregation also included Fujianese-speaking Chinese.

Other downtown neighborhoods emptied of immigrants, but did not immediately fill up again with new immigrants or any other demographic group. Instead, downtown neighborhoods combined government offices, shopping, and tourist attractions, including historic churches.

The experience of Father Peter Meehan is instructive. Assigned to the Mission of the Holy Rosary/ Seton Shrine in New York in 1999, Father Meehan knew the parish was on the site of one of the homes of Saint Elizabeth Ann Bayley Seton–the reason for its shrine status. The parish was founded in 1884 to enable the Archdiocese of New York to place clergy close to Ellis Island to assist Irish immigrant women arriving to connect with family or to search for work.

As Father Meehan was surprised to find, he still had the registers listing all the women who had passed through Holy Rosary’s Irish mission, from its founding until the closing of Ellis Island in 1954. Father Meehan re-envisioned his parish as a pilgrimage site that celebrated three aspects of Catholic history: the connection to Mother Seton, the connection to the Irish, and the connection to the immigrant experience.

St. Anthony’s in downtown Buffalo. Although it’s brick and has a shorter campanile it bears some similarity to Our Lady of Pompei, above.

Few parishes are as fortunate to have such rich historical connections, or as unfortunate in having such an experiment come to an end. (In 2012, Superstorm Sandy flooded the church basement, destroying the historical display installed there; in 2015, the Archdiocese merged Holy Rosary with two other nearby parishes and reassigned Father Meehan.)

However, many other parishes created to serve particular immigrant communities have woven themselves into the fabric of their neighborhoods. Professor Martin F. Ederer of the State University of New York (SUNY) Buffalo, for example, has described the history of Saint Anthony of Padua, originally erected in downtown Buffalo to serve Italians settled there. The addition of a highway along the shore of Lake Erie and the re-creation of downtown as a government center and tourist attraction have threatened the survival of Saint Anthony over and over again.

But these historical developments have also helped save the church. Father Secondo Casarotto, c.s., made the most of St. Anthony’s role in the local Italian Catholic community by not only saying Mass in Italian, but also by hosting Italian cultural events at the parish. The parish played an independent but collaborative role supporting the city’s plans for its downtown area.

Holy Rosary in Washington, D.C., is even more thoroughly integrated into community life. Founded for Italian immigrants, the parish continues to offer Mass in Italian, now often for Italians serving with the Italian embassy, the Vatican embassy, or one of the international agencies headquartered in Washington, D.C. It represents Italian culture to the community through its church building, through language lessons and cultural events at its Casa Italiana, through a bilingual newspaper circulating across the Virginia-Maryland-DC Italian community, and, most recently, through a museum of local Italian history. The museum joins an already existing museum of German American history in Washington, D.C., while a museum of the District’s Jewish-American history is planned for space across the street from Holy Rosary.

Combination of Italian and American Catholicism: Knights of Columbus march past Holy Rosary in Washington, D.C., on their way to a Columbus Day observance at the Columbus statue at the city’s Union Station.

Conclusion

It may be argued that the last thing a church should be is a museum, a cultural artifact rather than a living community. While that may be true, it does not paint the complete picture. Faith is an abstract that is transmitted—whether it’s people communicating with God or one generation passing on beliefs to the next—using cultural artifacts.

From the point of view of understanding God, the more diverse religious cultures are, the more comprehensive our understanding is likely to become. From the point of view of understanding the importance of immigration, historic immigrant parishes tell an important story. A century ago, American didn’t know what to do with these immigrants. Now, with their communities and cultures so fully embedded in the American mosaic, it’s hard to know what Americans would do without them.

April 13, 2023