The Shared Parish

Latinos, Anglos, and the Future of U. S. Catholicism

Brett C. Hoover

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781479854998
• Topic: Théologie et religion
• Subtopic: Dénominations chrétiennes

Asfaith communities in the United States grow increasingly more diverse, manychurches are turning to the shared parish, a single church facilityshared by distinct cultural groups who retain their own worship and ministries.The fastest growing and most common of these are Catholic parishes shared byLatinos and white Catholics. Shared parishes remain one of the few institutionsin American society that allows cultural groups to maintain their own languageand customs while still engaging in regular intercultural negotiationsover the sharedspace.

Thisbook explores the shared parish through an in-depth ethnographic study of aRoman Catholic parish in a small Midwestern city demographically transformed byMexican immigration in recent decades. Through its depiction of shared parishlife, the book argues for new ways of imagining the U.S. Catholic parish as anorganization. The parish, argues Brett C. Hoover, must be conceived as botha congregation and part of a centralized system, and as onepiece in a complex social ecology. The Shared Parish alsoposits that the search for identity and adequate intercultural practice in suchparishes might call fornew approaches to cultural diversity in U.S. society, beyond assimilation ormulticulturalism. We must imagine a religious organization that accommodatesboth the need for safe space within distinct groups and for social networksthat connect these groups as they struggle to respectfully co-exist.

1

All Saints from Village Church to Shared Parish

In early 2008, I facilitated the creation of a bilingual display on the history of All Saints Parish. In preparation, a group of older parishioners sorted through their memories, I sorted through parish archives, and a handful of us looked through the photographs, newspaper articles, and other materials provided by the same group of elderly parishioners. A teacher with an artistic bent designed the display space and helped me set out the materials. We set out old photographs, first-person accounts of the past, anniversary booklets, newspaper articles, and artifacts. Over the next few weeks, parishioners filed by the exhibit after mass or during the Lenten fish fries sponsored by the Knights of Columbus. They examined photographs of the old Gothic Revival church—inside and out—and the old parish school building (also formerly a house for priests and then nuns), both now long gone. Some of the Euro-American parishioners pointed out their own ancestors in first communion photographs from 1906 and baptism photos from 1914. There were reproduced accounts of turmoil in the town of Havenville from the early years of the parish. People looked at Altar Rosary Society medals from the 1940s and 1950s, an anniversary booklet from the 1990s, and a grayed photograph of the twin angels that once flanked the old Gothic Revival church’s entrance. It was pointed out how photographs of Catholic Youth Organization activities during World War II contained only young women, most of the young men being away at war. People remembered with pride the women’s choir from the early 1960s, a group of housewives who had made popular records of sacred music and toured internationally.

Although almost all of the materials came from elderly members of the Euro-American community, the exhibit gathered interest in the Mexican community as well. Several people remarked on how different the parish’s past was from what they had expected. They looked at photographs of the previous parish church and saw strong similarities between its Gothic Revival style and the churches they had known back in Mexico. Reading a story about the first parish school’s makeshift desks (planks nailed over pews in the church), one man spoke of his own family’s struggles to piece together a makeshift parish church in their poor neighborhood in central Mexico. The parish’s history of struggle and traditional Catholicism resonated with its newest parishioners. Meanwhile, on the Euro-American side, parishioners reveled in a public display of their heritage. The exhibit provoked new anecdotes. A married couple told me how they had met at a church social decades before. A retired schoolteacher described how she was hired to teach in the parish school after the public school district refused to hire her because she was a Catholic. One elderly man, noting the record of the name of a former pastor, spoke of temporarily moving to another parish when he and his wife could no longer bear the man. Exhibit photos of the parish during World War II brought out war stories from several of the older men.

Parishioners in both communities found themselves drawn in by the exhibit’s evocation of times past. Some found themselves surprised about the difference between the economic struggles of the parish’s past and the relative success of today. Most saw similarities and differences across time. The exhibit had, in a sense, opened up a path between then and now, displacing the nostalgia and amnesia that often rule our conceptions of the past. In a different way it raised the question, “How did we get to where we are now? Who has made up this worshipping community and how has that changed over time?” Of course, modern historiography accepts that history never simply equates to an assembly of facts about the past but is instead an interpretation of the fragmented information we have. The pages that follow here mold the record of memory—written, oral, archival, material, and photographic—into an narrative interpretation of what happened at All Saints over the years. This testimony, like all, remains incomplete and partial, but we cannot move forward in understanding All Saints as a shared parish today without understanding whence it came. We cannot understand, for example, contemporary resistance to demographic changes without a feel for the fraught intercultural encounters of the mid-twentieth century, when Havenville was a homogenous Euro-American cultural environment and differences were not well tolerated. On the other hand, history can offer hope. Reconstructing intercultural encounters of a more distant past—for example, the relatively uneventful nineteenth century rapport between Germans and Irish, between Catholics and Protestants—might provide surprising resources for wading through the intercultural tensions of today.

The history of All Saints Parish can be roughly divided into four distinct periods. All Saints began in its early years as a tiny Roman Catholic parish in a small Protestant town. During those “village church” years, it was one of the few English-speaking parishes in an area dominated by German Catholics and other ethnic Catholics in national parishes. After many decades as a small-town parish of this kind, population growth after the Great Depression made it into a “social parish,” a comprehensive social environment for Catholics. This period lasted well into the 1970s (in part through the long tenure of one pastor), but it eventually surrendered to multiple social forces that made its community less tight and cohesive. By the 1980s, a more “decentralized parish” came to birth, which by the late 1990s had slipped into the “shared parish” era when parishioners began to share their church with an immigrant community from Latin America.

There is a temptation to think of intercultural relations, one of the major themes of this study, as a product of the shared parish era at All Saints. But long before that epoch began, encounters, perspectives, and clashes between cultural groups shaped the parish community at All Saints. In the description of the history of the parish that follows, intercultural perspectives offer a frequent lens through which to view the unfolding story. Though certainly not the only lens, this one raises consistent questions about the negotiation of religious and cultural identity in Havenville, even from its earliest days. But these issues take the fore in the era of All Saints as a shared parish.

Village Church in the Protestant Midwest, 1860–1940

The Context: Roman Catholic Parishes in the Midwest

The United States is, even today, a nation of regions, and All Saints Parish and Havenville belong squarely in the history and traditions of the midwestern states. Originally known simply as “the West,” the area first opened to Anglo-American settlement when parts of it were included in the Northwest Territory in 1787 and in the Louisiana Purchase from France in 1803.¹ The first Catholics in the area were French missionaries, and up to the nineteenth century, all of the mission parishes were French. Maryland Catholics moved across Kentucky into Ohio and established a parish there in 1818.² Several midwestern indigenous peoples, including Potawatomis and Miamis, became Catholics in large numbers. All were removed from the region by the federal government, often brutally and sometimes accompanied by their priests, between the 1830s and the 1850s.³

From the middle of the nineteenth century onward, Catholicism grew rapidly across the Midwest, due mostly to immigration. Nevertheless, both dioceses and parishes often covered great swaths of territory. A constant shortage of priests meant perennial challenges with the clergy—itinerant priests, clergy suddenly defecting to other dioceses and locales, and priests in their frontier isolation struggling with alcoholism and gambling. The clergy situation in dioceses and parishes remained as unstable in these early years as church finances did. On the brighter side, despite a national peak of anti-Catholicism in the 1840s, the Midwest did not suffer as much as in the northeastern cities. Suspicion of Catholics was not absent, but in the Ohio Valley, for example, the multitude of different Protestant religious groups established a moderate acceptance of religious pluralism advantageous even to Catholics and Jews.⁴

Although some Anglo-American Catholics did settle in the Midwest (and in Havenville), Irish and German immigrants dominated midwestern Catholicism in the mid-nineteenth century. Both settled in what became the larger cities—Cincinnati, Chicago, and St. Louis. In general, the Irish were disproportionately urban in their patterns of settlement, the men employed as low-wage workers on the railroads, canals, and in the factories, and the women working as domestics.⁵ About a quarter of the Germans who came settled in agricultural areas.⁶ So many Germans settled in the Ohio and Mississippi River Valleys that the area between Milwaukee, St. Louis, and Cincinnati became known to historians as the “German triangle.” A pattern developed among Catholic parishes for these Irish and German immigrants. Ethnic or national parishes—parishes for single ethnic or language groups, established either de jure (by church law) or de facto (by circumstance)—dominated the cities, while the rural areas, with fewer concentrated immigrant communities, sported a mix of territorial and ethnic parishes.⁷

Irish migrants frequently formed national parishes, but these parishes often morphed to accommodate other cultural groups. Irish Catholics spoke English and disproportionately supported Americanization, that is, faster accommodation to the Anglo-American culture. At the same time, Irish-American Catholicism decisively shaped Catholicism in the United States. Irish and Irish-American prelates dominated the episcopacy for decades, and Irish-American Catholic culture became the foundation of the twentieth-century American Catholic counterculture.⁸ In the rural Midwest, however, German Catholicism remained in ascendency. Indeed, the most enduring and salient form of nineteenth-century parish life in the Midwest was the German parish.

German national parishes became significant sites to reconstruct and enact a unique German Catholic identity for the United States. This identity-producing effort worked in part though social boundaries. Social boundaries can be defined as “a categorical distinction that members of a society recognize in their quotidian activities and that affects their mental orientations and actions toward one another.”⁹ German parishes established social boundaries over and against Anglo-American Protestant institutions, especially the public school system. Large numbers of German parishes had German-language (or bilingual) parochial schools, and German Catholics initially resisted reconciling arrangements with the public school system. Midwestern German bishops argued for requiring Catholic schools in every parish.¹⁰ German Catholic identity was further cemented by the marking of boundaries with German secular liberal thought (such as that associated with the revolutions of 1848). German priests encouraged parish missions and local societies to combat liberalism. Finally, German Catholic parishes resisted the Americanization efforts of Irish Catholic prelates. For many German Catholics, there was an explicit connection between the preservation of language and culture and the endurance of Catholic faith. “Language saves faith” was the catchphrase.¹¹ German cultural practices and language also permeated the network of societies and organizations in the parishes: devotional confraternities, mutual-aid societies, trade organizations, and music and theatre groups.¹²

The twentieth century brought historic challenges to this state of affairs. World War I made German cultural identity suspect in the larger society, and many though not all parishes ceased their German-language activities. Yet even without that dramatic event, changes were afoot. By the beginning of the twentieth century, Germans no longer constituted one of the major groups migrating to the United States. The industrial economy of the German state had grown, especially in comparison to the still agriculturally dominant economies and politically developing states in eastern and southern Europe. These nations now provided the major migration flows to the United States.¹³ As the generations raised in the United States grew in influence, it became more and more common to hear one sermon in English and one in German, though this provoked no little consternation on the part of previous generations of German Catholics.¹⁴ Nevertheless, the German parish did not disappear. Social boundaries remained, but they were recalibrated; in effect they became “blurred.”¹⁵ The focus on protecting cultural and linguistic identity gave way to the management of cultural memory—for example, with anniversaries, parades, and other demonstrations of heritage and pride. Herbert Gans famously called this “symbolic ethnicity.”¹⁶

By the beginning of the twentieth century, southern and eastern European Catholics had begun developing ethnic parishes in midwestern cities, but these Poles, Italians, and many other groups still had less influence in the rural Midwest. The national experience of southern Italians in that era, however, still merits attention. Perhaps more than any other group of European migrants, they were characterized negatively by the larger society in ways parallel to the Mexican community of the late twentieth century. Classified in scholarly publications as genetically inferior to northern Europeans, Italians suffered from urban overcrowding, gang violence, discrimination, and economic exploitation. Roman Catholic religious leaders spoke of the “Italian problem.” They found themselves sometimes consigned to the basement of a church they themselves had built.¹⁷ Priests complained about scant church attendance. The saint festivals, or feste, however, drew great numbers to church and to the streets. Initially, many dioceses experimented with “duplex parishes” for Italians—a predecessor to the shared parish of today. Eventually, ethnic parishes run by Italian religious orders like the Pallottines and Scalabrinis worked more successfully.¹⁸

In any case, ethnic parishes—mostly German—remained the dominant approach to parish life in the Catholic Midwest through most of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In 1900, for example, a Kentucky bishop sent the Propaganda Fide, the Vatican congregation that supervised U.S. Church appointments, a profile of the Port Jefferson Diocese where All Saints Parish is located. He counted 141 parishes, 39 without resident priests, and only 17 of the parishes English-speaking.¹⁹ Nevertheless, by the end of World War II, the ethnic or national parish was on the wane for multiple reasons. There were first of all ecclesial reasons: bishops shied away from permitting them. Yet the bishops themselves were influenced by larger societal changes.

American society itself underwent a process of “boundary blurring” through the mid-twentieth century. Multiple factors weakened the social boundary between the mainstream Anglo-American culture and various immigrant cultures. Economic transformation meant some jobs previously filled by Catholic immigrants disappeared. Their children sought other, higher-status work as new migrants—African Americans from the South, Puerto Ricans, Mexicans—filled many low-paying jobs. Higher education received substantial government help and became available to the children of Catholic immigrants. Suburbanization, promoted by federal law, brought home ownership to working-class whites—a good many of whom were Catholic—though less to African Americans or Hispanics.

Cultural factors also contributed to the boundary blurring. Nativism and xenophobia, the latter provoked by World War I, jump-started a strong society-wide drive for the Americanization of immigrants. At the same time, the war made the assertion of German cultural identity unsavory, inspiring many German parishes to downplay their Germanness. Military service and patriotic unity during World War II intermingled Catholics and Anglo-American Protestants. At the same time, Hitler’s anti-Semitism made discrimination less acceptable to Americans, though even anti-Catholic forms of discrimination did not disappear entirely.²⁰ Finally, the National Origins Act of 1924 and other 1920s restriction laws had a dramatic stifling effec...