Sacramento and the Catholic Church

Shaping a Capital City

Steven Avella

• Publisher: University of Nevada Press
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9780874177664
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

This work examines the interplay between the city of Sacramento and the Catholic Church since the 1850s. Avella uses Sacramento as a case study of the role of religious denominations in the development of the American West. In Sacramento, as in other western urban areas, churches brought civility and various cultural amenities, and they helped to create an atmosphere of stability so important to creating a viable urban community. At the same time, churches often had to shape themselves to the secularizing tendencies of western cities while trying to remain faithful to their core values and practices.

Besides the numerous institutions that the Church sponsored, it brought together a wide spectrum of the city's diverse ethnic populations and offered them several routes to assimilation. Catholic Sacramentans have always played an active role in government and in the city's economy, and Catholic institutions provided a matrix for the creation of new communities as the city spread into neighboring suburbs. At the same time, the Church was forced to adapt itself to the needs and demands of its various ethnic constituents, particularly the flood of Spanish-speaking newcomers in the late twentieth century.

CHAPTER 1

A Cooperative Community, 1850–1886

“To build up Sacramento and promote its prosperity”

The primacy accorded commerce and civic advancement in Sacramento provided the social and cultural framework for the city’s religious communities and institutions. This was underscored in the recollection of a September 1849 Sabbath day in Sacramento by argonaut Peter Decker: “Went to church, no not church but to meeting, for it was not at the call of the church . . . bell. Neither could I see heavenward pointing spire through the trees, but found commerce had preceded the gospel when I looked at the masts of the ships crowding the Sacramento [River].”¹ Commerce had indeed preceded the gospel. In fact, commerce was the gospel in Sacramento.

RELIGION IN SACRAMENTO: A STRUGGLE TO FIND A PLACE

Religious communities did not have an easy time in Sacramento. Located in California’s Central Valley, between two great rivers—the Sacramento and the American—Sacramento was for a time a freewheeling, transitory community with little time for religion. In the pell-mell rush for instant wealth that transformed northern California in 1848–1849, hordes of gold seekers from across the country and around the world crowded into Sacramento, coming and going to the Sierra foothills. As was common in most “instant cities” and mining camps of this era, there was a noticeable loosening of moral and social restraints. Merchant Mark Hopkins of Sacramento put a positive spin on the social climate when he wrote to his brother in 1850, “There is a freedom of thought & action that seems to characterize the people of this country.” Others may have compared Sacramento to Sodom and Gomorrah. Religious faith and institutions, usually the products of more settled social conditions, struggled for a foothold in early Sacramento. As one former believer confided to Congregationalist minister William F. Taylor, many Gold Rush–era Californians “hung up their religion with their cloak” when they traveled West.²

Sacramento provides a good case study of the development of religion on mining frontiers of the American West.³ Despite the lack of stable populations and apathy, ministers and preachers tried to preach the gospel in Sacramento. Early church gatherings took place along the riverfront, under stands of oaks, huddled around wagons, or perched atop quickly built levees. Later, church meetings were quartered in stables, shops, and warehouses. No early preacher could count on a regular congregation. Sacramento Congregationalist minister Joseph Augustine Benton wrote in 1849, “The citizens with a few exceptions are here without their families and not expecting to remain long.”⁴ The temporary locations and their transient congregations were also buffeted by the elements. The heavy rainfall of the winter of 1849–1850 brought floods, delaying the building of one church and sweeping a small Methodist chapel off its moorings. Fires raged that wiped out wide swaths of the city, including a few fledgling churches.

The Reverend Benton also noted other recurring features of Sacramento religious life: skepticism and indifference. “There were some in town then . . . who might have done much, who, it was thought would do much, and who, nevertheless, did not do much, if anything, toward establishing a church and maintaining a minister. Whether they thought the proposed preacher a very indifferent sort of a man, or suspected him of a desire to make money out of them, by going into a sort of pious speculation, or whether they were pretty indifferent characters themselves, it is not necessary now to inquire.” Methodist pastor Isaac Owen, writing in March 1850, could not escape the hard reality of the place: “With shame and confusion we are constrained to say that many that left their friends and homes acceptable members of the church and doubtless made fair promises to maintain their Christian character have not only failed to report themselves here as members of the church, but have fallen into the common vices of the country.”⁵ Even those who came with deep religious beliefs sometimes modified or abandoned them under the new circumstances in Sacramento.⁶ Church founder and local Catholic physician Gregory J. Phelan observed sadly, “Many Catholics who have come to California have become very careless and indifferent.” Even ministers of the gospel succumbed. Isaac Owen noted that even those “solemnly ordained and set apart to the work of ministry” had turned to waiting on tables and selling liquor.⁷

Eventually, churches were able to move from their primitive riverfront locations, and the first generation of church construction took place between I and L streets and between Fifth and Eighth. Some smaller congregations would dip south to N and east of Tenth, but the churches of the first phase of Sacramento’s growth were in close proximity to one another. An 1858 article in the Sacramento Daily Union indicated that the number and size of church buildings exceeded the number of people who attended them. “Much of [the number of churches] is due to our oft-boasted Californian liberality. Men who are never seen inside our churches do not hesitate to contribute handsomely to their support. . . . Were it not for this liberality, we should have much fewer churches.”⁸ Sacramentans may have built churches, but they did not frequent them.

Examples of religious apathy or a selective approach to religious affiliation persisted even beyond the Gold Rush era. In 1859, the Daily Union counted just 655 active Protestant church members in a community of 15,000. This, the writer commented, is “little leaven for so large a measure of meal,” and further noted that most new members came from other cities, bearing letters of membership from their denominations elsewhere. In an 1861 sermon, the Reverend J. D. Blain bewailed the listless state of church affairs among the Methodists: “The saddest, most humiliating fact that stands out in the past has been the general lack of revivals.” Even the Sunday School Union formed in September 1850 by Congregationalists, Methodists, Presbyterians, and Baptists did not bring about a quickening of Sacramento faith. Begun with some enthusiasm and an average attendance of 150 children, the school met once a month and then scaled back to meeting quarterly. When the Baptists decided to withdraw, the group went steadily downhill. By 1860, although 900 were enrolled in the program, only 475 were the offspring of active church members, meaning that children were being sent for Christian instruction without the example of parents who were regular churchgoers. When the number enrolled was contrasted with the 2,500 eligible citywide to participate, it became clear that the majority of youth did not care to participate in Sacramento’s largest religious instruction program. By 1861 there were just 255 enrolled, with an average attendance of 150.⁹

The Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA), a great success in the industrial cities of the East and Midwest, had a difficult time getting off the ground in Sacramento. Begun at a prayer meeting of young men at the Baptist church in September 1866, the organization floundered, in spite of the fact that its founding president, Nehemiah Denton, worked closely with the city’s Protestant clergy to broaden its appeal to the city’s young men. Even taking into account the transiency of Sacramento’s early population and a lack of steady leadership, the YMCA faltered because Sacramentans had other priorities. “Building their businesses, their neighborhoods, their community and their city literally from scratch . . . Sacramento just didn’t have much in the middle and upper levels of society” to support the organization, notes historian Timothy Comstock. Perhaps most important, “Sacramento was not a hotbed of evangelical movement.” Comstock observes, “The city had plenty of Protestant churches, with reasonably large and active congregations. However . . . those churches did not dominate the life and development of this city. . . . Sacramento developed in a state of peaceful co-existence with the churches, and not as directed by them.”¹⁰

Organized religion also had little success as a form of social control in Sacramento.¹¹ Gambling, prostitution, drinking, and other social pathologies consistently resisted religious and civic efforts at cleanup during the latter half of the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries. Religion was highly privatized in Sacramento, as it was elsewhere in the West. Sometimes people “outgrew” the religious commitments of their youth and dropped out of church altogether—never to return. Such was the case of Judge Peter Shields (1862–1962), a long-serving jurist in Sacramento County. Born a Catholic in Sacramento County, he had attended St. John the Baptist Church in Folsom and was schooled at the Christian Brothers “College.” Although the brothers may have claimed him as one of their most prominent alumni (and sought his endorsement for various fund-raising projects), Shields himself rejected the title “brothers’ boy.” By the end of his life, he described his Catholic education in remarkably nonsectarian terms. Speaking of one of the brothers who had taught him Christian doctrine, he claimed he had “little recollection” of the subject matter, “but I am sure [the brother’s] faith was broad and intelligent. . . . He never attempted religious indoctrination and I left the School with a mind free to search for its own truths and to follow them when found.” Shields rejected in particular Catholic teachings about a cruel and punishing God, which had scared him at a parish mission he attended as a youth. Toward the end of Shields’s life, Bishop Joseph McGucken attempted to entice him back to the religion of his youth, but he gently turned the prelate away: “My dear Bishop, I have lived in this way for many years that have taken me into old age. . . . [If] I went back to the ways of sixty-five years ago I could not live differently or better than I am doing here and now.”¹² Shields, like many others in the American West, did not need religion to live a life of decency and virtue. No one seemed to care whether he attended church, and he suffered no punishment at the polls from his lack of formal religious practice. His case was not unusual among many prominent Sacramentans.

Religious indifference and low rates of church affiliation persisted throughout the nineteenth century. As late as 1901, First Baptist pastor A. P. Banks complained, “The attendance is far below that of cities of like population and wealth in this state, or, so far as I know, in any state in the Union.” Certainly, he moaned, “it is not the fault of preachers, for have we not had Dwinelle, Dewey, Frost, Silcox [all ministers who formerly served in Sacramento] and a score of other distinguished men, who in other cities are preaching to crowded houses?”¹³

In 1910, Presbyterian pastor J. T. Wills echoed Banks’s lament, noting that even in urban booster publications, Protestant churches were given short shrift. “Are there any churches in Sacramento city and county?” Wills wondered in a newspaper editorial. He acknowledged it was “a strange question to ask,” but “it has been asked by people who have read the literature sent out by real estate firms and realty syndicates, and they find that while they get a great deal of information about the climate and soil, the farms and crops, the rivers and ditches and the other advantages of the great valley, as a place in which to find homes, they find no mention of any churches.” He concluded sarcastically, “Some of them say they can learn that it is a good place for raising cattle and hogs, but they want to know if it is a place where they can safely raise their children.” As late as 1921, when the city was considerably developed, an eastern visitor who took in the city panorama from the capitol dome, praised the beauty and verdure of the city, but noted “one peculiarity. . . . There were no very high church spires . . . such as are usually found in a city as old and rich as Sacramento.” The only exception: the Catholic cathedral.¹⁴

The true priests of the city were its business and professional classes. Baptist minister A. P. Banks indirectly acknowledged the primacy of business and the extensive influence of businessmen over city priorities. In his lament over low church attendance, he laid the blame for the “languid religious spirit” at the door of the very people who had built Sacramento: the businessmen. “These men, whose genius flows through every other enterprise in our city, the Churches lack.”¹⁵ Sacramento believers did eventually create churches, and various denominations established a visible presence. But there was never a critical mass sufficient enough to stamp a religious character on Sacramento in the same way Mormonism had on Salt Lake or Catholicism had on Chicago or Boston. In those cities, religious institutions attained a high level of prestige and influence in urban affairs by their sheer size and resources. In Sacramento, religion was clearly secondary to other more defined urban goals, such as money-making and city survival.

How, then, did religious institutions find their footing in western cities such as Sacramento that seemed to make a virtue of religious indifference? Naturally, as they did everywhere, religious institutions adapted themselves to their milieu. Although they retained core beliefs and practices, religious communities in the West softened the edges of their sectarian boundaries and placed more emphasis on their contributions to the social and economic development of their communities. This adaptation was best modeled, perhaps unconsciously, by the most prestigious and long-serving minister in Sacramento’s first generation, Congregationalist Joseph Augustine Benton (1818–1892).

NEGOTIATING THE ROLE OF RELIGION IN “SECULAR” SACRAMENTO

Even in the heat of the Gold Rush, Sacramento was not a totally secular city. There were people who believed and prayed, and Benton found them. In the same recollections that bemoaned the skepticism and penury of early Sacramentans, Benton also mentions finding “a few at that early day who took much interest in me and my work from the very first.”¹⁶ But in order to make himself relevant to the wider community, Benton soon found a way to negotiate a middle ground between it and the unique teachings and subculture of his church. Benton’s ministry provided a prototype for religious agency in the city.

Benton was one of early Sacramento’s longest-serving ministers, coming to the city in 1849 and leaving in 1863. He noted in 1854, “Of the clergymen belonging to this city, there is now no one who has lived here two full years but the speaker.”¹⁷ Benton stayed long enough to understand the forces that shaped Sacramento and understood what it took to adapt his message and pastoral practices to the specific needs and ethos of the community. For example, as a gesture to his denominationally skittish Sacramento flock, he dropped the word Congregational from the title of First Church so as to make it more generally appealing. Likewise, he put his 350-seat church at the service of the larger community. Located at Sixth and I streets, it hosted concerts, traveling speakers (including one of the first appeals for Irish independence), and scientific demonstrations. The Sacramento Republican Party held its first convention there. Benton himself, one of the best orators in the city, occasionally lectured on secular topics. Even though the need for the church space diminished as other public halls were constructed, Benton’s adept use of the church as an urban middle ground (no doubt adapted from the New England meetinghouse tradition) inserted his congregation into the mainstream of urban life.

Benton’s broad-minded ministerial techniques and his far-ranging civic interests made him a sort of unofficial city chaplain during his nearly fourteen-year ministry. He appeared regularly at civic ceremonies, offering prayers and lending dignity to public events. In September 1850, he played a prominent role in one of the city’s first civic “liturgies,” a lengthy memorial procession to mourn the passing of President Zachary Taylor. It was a memorable occasion, with Masons in full regalia, an elegant hearse with plumed horses, the mayor and city council, and large numbers of Mexican War veterans.¹⁸

Apart from ceremonial religious duties, Benton swung his support behind key city priorities that had little to do with strictly religious purposes. Interestingly, he endorsed these secular ends for religious reasons. Benton viewed Sacramento’s survival of flood and fire as a manifestation of divine purpose. Sacramento had been preserved for a reason; it had a destiny. In a sermon called “City-Building,” he compared Sacramento to the other inland cities ...