Catholic New York City
()
About this ebook
Read more from Richard Panchyk
Hidden History of Long Island Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsHidden History of Queens Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Hidden History of Long Island Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsHidden History of Queens Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsEngineering the City: How Infrastructure Works Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5German New York City Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsNew York City Skyscrapers Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Forgotten Tales of Long Island Rating: 1 out of 5 stars1/5Manhattan Churches Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings101 Glimpses of the South Fork Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings
Related to Catholic New York City
Related ebooks
New York City's Italian Neighborhoods Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Catholics in Washington D.C. Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsJewish Chicago: A Pictorial History Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Pittsburgh Irish: Erin on the Three Rivers Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsJewish Albuquerque:: 1860-1960 Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Around Utica Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Bronx: The Ultimate Guide to New York City's Beautiful Borough Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsWest Brighton Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsRemembering Pittsburgh: An "Eyewitness" History of the Steel City Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Lost Metairie Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsGerman Pittsburgh Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsLost Lake Pontchartrain Resorts & Attractions Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsExploring Cajun Country: A Tour of Historic Acadiana Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsTottenville Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA Taste of Upstate New York: The People and the Stories Behind 40 Food Favorites Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5Philadelphia's King of Little Italy: C.C.A. Baldi & His Brothers Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsPittsburgh Remembers World War II Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsMassachusetts Avenue in the Gilded Age: Palaces & Privilege Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsHow the Other Half Looks: The Lower East Side and the Afterlives of Images Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsDowntown Pittsburgh Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Discovering Staten Island: A 350th Anniversary Commemorative History Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsGerman Chicago Revisited Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsHaunted Manatee County Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsOlde London Punishments Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Sunday in New York Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsHidden History of Staten Island Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Cultural Life of the American Colonies Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5White Plains, New York: A City of Contrasts Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsFairmount Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsHamilton Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings
United States History For You
Master Slave Husband Wife: An Epic Journey from Slavery to Freedom Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Killing the Guys Who Killed the Guy Who Killed Lincoln: A Nutty Story About Edwin Booth and Boston Corbett Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5A People's History of the United States Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Library Book Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/51776 Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Fourth Turning Is Here: What the Seasons of History Tell Us about How and When This Crisis Will End Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America's Secret Government Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Book of Charlie: Wisdom from the Remarkable American Life of a 109-Year-Old Man Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Indifferent Stars Above: The Harrowing Saga of the Donner Party Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Slouching Towards Bethlehem: Essays Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Emerald Mile: The Epic Story of the Fastest Ride in History Through the Heart of the Grand Canyon Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The White Album: Essays Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Masters of the Air: America's Bomber Boys Who Fought the Air War Against Nazi Germany Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes: Revised and Complete Edition Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Manhunt: The 12-Day Chase for Lincoln's Killer: An Edgar Award Winner Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Fifties Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Bowling Alone: Revised and Updated: The Collapse and Revival of American Community Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Twelve Years a Slave (Illustrated) (Two Pence books) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Great Reset: And the War for the World Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Disloyal: A Memoir: The True Story of the Former Personal Attorney to President Donald J. Trump Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Reviews for Catholic New York City
0 ratings0 reviews
Book preview
Catholic New York City - Richard Panchyk
author.)
INTRODUCTION
Catholic New York City has certainly come a long way on the journey to its present glory and prominence. Catholics in Colonial New York City were few and far between. From its earliest beginnings and for more than 200 years afterward, New York City was a decidedly Protestant settlement. The first wave of settlers in New Amsterdam (as it was called), arriving from the 1620s to the 1660s, were primarily Dutch Protestants. Following the British capture of the city and its name change to New York, there was a great influx of English Protestants. Roman Catholics in the Colonial city were represented by a few French, some Irish, and some Germans here and there.
By the 1780s, the Catholic population of the entire state of New York was only about 1,500. The greatest concentration of Catholics in the young nation was in Maryland, which had nearly 16,000 Catholics. It was for this reason that in 1784, Pope Pius VI named John Carroll as the bishop of Baltimore and the leader of the entire country’s Catholic community. New York City’s very first Catholic church, St. Peter’s on Barclay Street, was finally built in 1785, more than 160 years after the settlement was begun.
It was not until 1808 that the see of New York was designated and a bishop of New York, Luke Concanen, was named. By that time there were an estimated 14,000 Catholics in the city. Unfortunately, the first bishop never made it to New York City; he was stuck in Italy under the regime of Napoleon Bonaparte and died there. As the first few decades of the 19th century progressed, the ratio of Protestant to Catholic citizens slowly began to change, but the city’s growing Catholic population still did not receive the attention it deserved. By 1822, there were 20,000 Catholics in the city but only 8 priests. In fact, by 1830, there were still but four Catholic churches in the city, those of St. Peter (Barclay Street), St. Patrick (Mott Street), St. Mary (Grand Street), and St. Joseph (Sixth Avenue). By 1840, six more had been built: St. Nicholas (East 2nd Street), St. Paul (East 117th Street), St. James (James Street), Transfiguration (Mott Street), St. John the Baptist (West 30th Street), and St. John the Evangelist (East 50th Street).
As the earliest Catholic parishes in New York City were comprised predominantly of Irish, many in the German community longed to have their own identity, separate from the Irish. They desired their own church, where a focus could be placed on their language, culture, and customs. The force of their numbers helped make this a reality, and the first German church, St. Nicholas, opened in 1833 on East 2nd Street, in a heavily German neighborhood.
By 1865, there were eight German parishes in the city. These were dedicated to serving German populations and catering to the German language preferences of the communicants. In the decades that followed, several other ethnic groups also formed their own parishes as their numbers in the city increased. In 1873, some Polish Catholics organized the St. Stanislaus B. and M. Society to collect funds to acquire a church of their own. This effort eventually led to the formation of the St. Stanislaus Parish on 7th Street. By 1914, the Italians had 35 churches, the Germans 15, the Poles 11, the Greeks 3, the Spanish 2, the Hungarians 2, and the Slovaks 2.
The Catholic population grew even more rapidly during the second half of the 19th century. The cause of this change was not due to any specific factors within New York but was primarily due to mitigating factors in Europe. Whenever conditions for the common peasant or city dweller in Europe worsened, immigration tended to increase. Poverty, hunger, civil unrest, and a growing impression that America really was the land of opportunity helped contribute to the flood of Catholic immigrants into the country. The 1848 potato famine in Ireland caused a huge influx of Irish immigrants, the great majority of them Roman Catholics. Overall annual immigration to the United States quadrupled between 1844 and 1850. Poverty and strife caused German immigration to peak between 1852 and 1854. A total of 500,000 Germans (both Catholic and Protestant) came to the United States over those three years. German immigration peaked again in 1866–1867 and between 1881 and 1885.
The surging Catholic population in New York City met with some resistance from certain elements of the population. A nationwide political party called the Know-Nothings, which was at its peak between 1851 and 1858, featured a party platform that was decidedly anti-Catholic. In 1855, the party received 146,000 votes in New York State. In New York City, however, the anti-Catholic contingent was defeated by sheer force of numbers, and the Catholic population soon grew so large that any prejudice was by far the minority.
As for Italians, their immigration numbers had remained under 5,000 before 1873 and under 10,000 until 1880. In 1900, there were 100,000 Italian immigrants arriving, and in the peak year of Italian immigration, 1907, 285,000 immigrants arrived in the country (the same year that overall immigration to the United States peaked, at over 1.2 million people).
From 1890 to 1906, the population of the United States went from 30.3 percent Catholic to 36.7 percent Catholic. In 1900, there were an estimated one million Catholics in the New York Diocese, and in 1910, there were 1.2 million Catholics in the diocese. The Diocese of Brooklyn, formed in 1853 and consisting of Brooklyn, Queens, Nassau, and Suffolk Counties, included 1.2 million Catholics.
The increasing power of the Catholic Church in New York was not simply represented in increasing numbers of churches. The Roman Catholic presence in New York has meant the establishment of a range of educational and charitable institutions. By 1900, there were 121 parish schools, 61 for boys, with 18,953 pupils; 61 for girls, with 21,199 pupils; nearly 5,000 students in colleges and academies; 2 schools for deaf mutes; 3 homes for aged; 15 hospitals; 26 industrial and reform schools; 6 orphanages;