9. Authoritarian Reaction

§77. RUSSIAN

AUTOCRACY

Czar Nicholas I

A. Gestures toward Liberalism (1796-1825)

Legacy of Catherine the Great. Russia had been welded into a great power by Peter the Great (1689-1725) and Catherine the Great (1762-96) . The former had taken from Sweden in 1721 the Baltic Provinces where he located his capital Petrograd with a “window on the Baltic.” The latter had annexed Catholic Poland-Lithuania in three partitions (1772-95), besides acquiring an outlet to the Black Sea by wresting the Crimea from Turkey (1774-92). Until 1918, then, large numbers of Catholics lived under Russian czardom, divided between the Latin and Oriental Rites. The czars generally pretended to be the heirs of the Byzantine Basileus and aspired to free the Turkish-dominated patriarch of Constantinople, and then to make of him a court chaplain for controlling all Graeco-Slav Christians, including, if possible, some eight million Ruthenian Uniates. And the Communist dictators have substantially returned to this policy.

Paul Petrovich (1754-1801) had been kept in leading strings by his German mother, Catherine of Anhalt, who had usurped the Russian throne after murdering his father. For greater reason than Victoria’s son, Edward of Wales, Paul sought to assert his individuality by a complete change of policy. It is true that he did not proceed far on the road to political Liberalism, although in 1797 he delivered an initial blow to feudalism by restricting the serfs’ labor for their landlords to three days a week. On the other hand, he returned to the use of torture in judicial procedure and used his power in tyrannical, erratic, and at times almost insane fashion. He came to admire Bonaparte as a strong man and to dissent from the anti-French coalition. Finally on March 11, 1801, discontented and inebriated officers slew him, with at least the foreknowledge of his heir, Alexander Pavlovich.

Ecclesiastical reorganization. By the norms of the established Greek ^{[p. 490]} Orthodox Church, however, the czar was deemed a religious Liberal by the loyal Russians. He had traveled in Italy while crown prince and had a friendly audience with Pope Pius VI—to whom he sent a fur coat for his trip to Vienna. On his accession to the Russian throne, Paul requested diplomatic relations with the Holy See and in 1797 Pius VI named Cardinal Litta as special envoy. The papal representative presented a memorial requesting fulfillment of the guarantee of Catholic freedom of cult promised by Catherine II, and re-establishment of the Catholic hierarchy seriously disrupted by her machinations. The czar proved agreeable, and worked out with Cardinal Litta an arrangement whereby the Latin and Ruthenian dioceses might be reorganized, and many churches and monasteries seized by Catherine were restored. On November 15, 1798, Pope Pius VI erected the metropolitan sees of Mohilev and Polotszk, the first to preside over five suffragan Latin dioceses, and the latter over two suffragan Ruthenian jurisdictions. Since persecution by the Russian government had ceased, many Ruthenians who had been constrained to conform externally to the Orthodox Church now dared proclaim anew their allegiance to the Holy See.

Alexander Pavlovich (1777-1825) succeeded to the throne in virtue of his father’s assassination. He long remained torn between the Liberal notions instilled by his Swiss tutor La Harpe, and the autocratic habits drilled into him by his military mentor, General Sakikony. Alexander’s almost lifelong wavering among these and other influences rendered him something of an enigma, both to his subjects and to European statesmen. Alexander seems to have been a hesitant idealist, open to new ideas even to the point of credulity, but in the last analysis arbitrary and self-willed. He would be liberal indeed—provided no one disagreed with him. His personal religious convictions veered from Greek Orthodoxy to the pseudo-mysticism of Baroness Krüdener and the Protestant Rationalism of the Bible Society. Comte De Maistre, French ambassador at St. Petersburg, introduced Catholic ideas to the court, and toward the end of his life Alexander was inclined in the same direction by General Michaud. The Jesuit Father Gagorin affirmed “off the record” that the czar had even requested the Holy See for a priest in order to receive instructions in the Catholic Faith, and that only his death prevented this. On the other hand there is the legend that Alexander did not die on December 13, 1825, as generally (and it would seem correctly) assumed, but abdicated and lived on until 1864 as “Fyodor Kuzmich,” an eccentric ascetic.

Political policies. Alexander’s brain trust, the “Informal Committee,” discussed many liberal reforms and even meditated grant of a constitution ^{[p. 491]}. In 1803 an edict regulated optional emancipation of serfs. After the Peace of Tilsit (1807) with Bonaparte had temporarily relieved the czar from foreign cares, he confided the task of liberalizing the Russian autocracy to Michael Speranski (1772-1839). In 1810 a council of state was set up to supervise administration, and legal, financial, and bureaucratic reorganization on Western models was planned. But when Speransky drafted a constitution (1812) , conservative opposition from the privileged classes secured his dismissal. The French invasion of that year obliged Alexander to appeal to the traditional elements in Russia, and after the alien peril had been repulsed, he selected the reactionary General Arakcheiyev (1769-1834) as chief advisor. The masonic-Liberal group of cosmopolites protested the czar’s conservative trend and Paul Pestel (1793-1826) organized secret societies among army officers to promote Liberalism. But Kotzebue’s murder in 1819 increased Alexander’s distrust of Liberalism, and he confessed to Metternich: “You have nothing to regret, but I have.” Thenceforward benevolent despotism became his policy in Russia, though Finland, acquired from Sweden in 1809, was granted an autonomous position under a feudal constitution.

Polish status. Acquisition of the Napoleonic puppet Grand Duchy of Warsaw gave Alexander two thirds of the former Polish territory. The Congress of Vienna confirmed this as his “Kingdom of Poland” at gunpoint: Alexander told Castlereagh: “I conquered the duchy and have 480,000 men to keep it.” Yet the new “King of Poland” essayed a liberal program which he denied to Russia itself. Under the influence of a Polish friend of his youth, Prince Adam Czartoryski (1770-1861), he conceded a constitution which provided for a Polish legislature, a separate administration and army. Polish was declared the official language, and freedom of speech and of the press proclaimed. Later, however, Czartoryski was supplanted by the brutal Novosiltsov and his secret police. Polish resentment, however, required the open provocation of Alexander’s successor before breaking into revolt.

Hierarchical organization. Toward the Catholic Church in Russia Alexander for the most part continued Paul’s comparative benevolence. He was imposed upon, however, by a Catholic quisling, Stanislaus Siestrzenceiwicz Bohusz (1730-1826) . This ambitious prelate had accepted the see of Mohilev in 1773 from Catherine II without papal sanction, and had subsequently manifested extreme Febronian tendencies. Yet in the interests of peace, Pius VI had recognized him in 1783, and retained him in 1798 as titular head of the hierarchy. The pope tried to neutralize his pernicious influence, however, by giving him a coadjutor, ^{[p. 492]} the Jesuit Bishop Benislawski. But during 1801, Archbishop Bohusz persuaded Alexander to erect a “Catholic College,” a bureau which would correspond to the Orthodox “Holy Synod” in advising the monarch. As head of this secular agency, Bohusz proceeded to name suffragans, annul marriages, and secularize monasteries without recourse to the Holy See. To give himself greater freedom he induced the czar to dismiss the papal nuncio. When, however, the archbishop who would be patriarch extended favors to the rationalist “Bible Society” in 1816, Pope Pius VII sharply rebuked him. During 1817 the pontiff took occasion of the separate political entity of “Congress Poland” to withdraw from Mohilev most of Bohusz’s subjects by erecting the new ecclesiastical province of Warsaw with seven suffragan dioceses. Thenceforward the province of Warsaw possessed jurisdiction over most of the Polish Catholics, while that of Mohilev was restricted to Russians and Lithuanians.

Catholic influences. By a curious “reverse Machiavellianism” Catherine II had imitated Frederick the Great of Prussia in protecting the Jesuits when they had been suppressed in Catholic Europe. With the tacit approval of the Holy See, the Jesuit province continued to survive in Russian Poland, and concerned itself with the national education which Russian rulers deemed necessary as a soothing syrup for Polish nationalism. This anomalous situation lasted under Paul and Alexander until 1820 when election of an international superior-general for the revived Society induced the czar to banish them—just when other lands were welcoming them back. During their Russian sojourn, however, the Jesuits had influenced Russians as well as Poles, and the French Father Sugurgue founded a Catholic academy in St. Petersburg. Count De Maistre as French ambassador favorably impressed members of the high society of the Russian capital. Not only did Madam Gallitzin return to the Faith, but a number of Russians became converts: the diplomat Koslovsky, Countess Golovin, Lord Odoyevsky, and others. Balabin, Martynov, and Gagarin entered the Jesuit Order; Count Shuvalov became a Barnabite, Wladimir Petcherin a Redemptorist, and Nathalie Narishkin a Daughter of Charity of St. Vincent. But in 1815 the Catholic academy was closed and after De Maistre’s departure from St. Petersburg conversions from the Russian aristocracy dwindled, for many had to pay for their Faith by suffering exile. But Catholicity was no longer utterly foreign to Russian religious life, and toward the end of the century a “Russian Newman,” Vladimir Solovyev, entered the Catholic Church by way of historical-theological research. ^{[p. 493]}

“Decembrist mutiny.” Alexander, having no surviving children, had designated his conservative younger brother Nicholas (1796-1855) to succeed him in preference to his unstable elder brother Constantine (1779-1831) . Although Constantine himself had agreed to this arrangement in 1822, the Liberal secret societies staged a mutiny, December 26, 1825, for “Constantine and Constitution.” Constantine promptly repudiated the uprising about which some of the common soldiers knew so little that they supposed “Constitution” to be Constantine’s wife. Czar Nicholas firmly suppressed the mutiny and used it as an object lesson for countermeasures. The incident confirmed him in his horror of Liberalism, and undeviating Autocracy became his avowed principle.

Polish revolt. The czar accordingly viewed with disfavor his “Kingdom of Poland” under Constantine’s regency, and at once began to restrict Polish liberties through Russian agents. Religious houses were forbidden to receive novices without governmental leave. In 1830 Nicholas demanded transfer of matrimonial jurisdiction from canonical to civil courts, but the Polish Diet objected. Though Constantine somewhat softened the application of the czar’s decrees, Poles formed secret societies of their own despite the submission preached to them by the Catholic hierarchy. In November, 1830, the rumor that Nicholas was about to employ Polish troops in suppressing the Belgian revolution with which they sympathized, induced Polish Liberals to rebel. In expectation of aid from the liberal regime of Louis Philippe of France, they assassinated Russian officials, drove out Prince Constantine, and asserted their independence. From January to September, 1831, they fought desperately but unsuccessfully against superior Russian forces. They were short of munitions, divided between Moderates and Radicals, and elicited little outside aid. Prince Adam Czartoryski, their one statesman, was placed at the head of the provisional government too late to prevent collapse, and he fled the country to spend the rest of his life in Western Europe trying to organize relief for Poland.

Polish repression. As soon as he had suppressed the military uprising, the czar revoked the Polish constitution and simply annexed the “Kingdom” to his Russian dominions. Russian troops were quartered in the country and hundreds of Poles executed or exiled to Siberia. Thereafter Russian czardom pursued quite consistently an attempt to exterminate Polish nationalism: its language, customs, and if possible, its religion. Religious houses were suppressed and interference in ecclesiastical discipline and cult began. Save for the brief interval (1837-38), the metropolitan see of Warsaw was kept vacant from 1829 to 1857, and ^{[p. 494]} administrators had to labor under near catacomb conditions. Gregory XVI, deceived by Russian diplomats, issued a letter on June 9, 1832, blaming the rebels and urging submission to the Russian government; later the pope admitted that he had been misinformed and told General Zamoyski that fear of reprisals against the Polish people had prompted his action. But Polish nationalism almost fused with religious loyalty to set up a solid resistance to Russian pressure; after a century of persecution, this judgment still seems correct today.

Ruthenian restraints. Nicholas I reverted to Catherine’s Caesaropapism. In 1825 Uniates were forbidden to communicate with the Holy See and a series of persecutions strove to drive them into schism. In 1828 Ruthenian diocesan organization was altered and subjected to regulation by a government bureau of religion. Large-scale confiscation of property and suppression of religious houses followed. Clerics were subjected to minute surveillance; children seized to be trained as schismatics; and any attempt at Uniate proselytism was punished with prison or exile. Mixed marriages were to be performed in the Orthodox Church and all children raised in that religion. The new archbishop of Mohilev, Caspar Cieciszewski (1827-31), protested in vain on behalf of the Latins, and after his death his see was kept vacant until 1848. Meanwhile the Ruthenian metropolitan, Archbishop Bulhak of Polotszk (1815-38), was hampered by a disloyal coadjutor, the Lithuanian Siemaszko, and other compliant bishops installed in Ruthenian sees to prepare for separation from Rome. The czar, well aware of the archbishop’s prestige among Russians of all faiths, awaited his death in 1838 to consummate his designs. Then Siemaszko and two episcopal accomplices with thirteen hundred priests published an “Act of Union” with the Greek Orthodox Church, February 24, 1839. Non-jurors were imprisoned or exiled, their churches confiscated, Catholic religious worship outlawed; externally the Uniate Ruthenian Church had ceased to exist.

Czarist propaganda tried to represent all Latin Rite Catholics as aliens who might be tolerated because they could not be integrated; all Catholics of Oriental Rites, however, were lectured on their patriotic duty to conform to the state church. Pope Gregory XVI delayed until July 22, 1842, to denounce the czar’s persecution. Nicholas was somewhat perturbed by this publicity, for he had hoped to conceal his religious discrimination from Metternich, his political ideal. This concern for his European reputation may have prompted the czar to visit Rome in 1845. His audience with Gregory XVI was stormy and produced no immediate effect. But when the new Pope Pius IX succeeded, Nicholas reached a modus vivendi in August, 1847, whereby diocesan limits were ^{[p. 495]} redefined and canonical episcopal appointments allowed to be made. Though restricted “liberty of cult” was proclaimed for both Russia and Poland, no agreement could be reached regarding free communication with the Holy See and matrimonial discipline. The czar seems to have designed the pact chiefly for propaganda purposes, for it remained almost a dead letter. Curiously, Nicholas’s pretended zeal for religion boomeranged, for his claim to exercise a protectorate over Orthodox Dissidents in the Turkish dominions became a technical cause of the Crimean War. Great Britain and France rightly judged his policy was but a blind for penetration of the Balkans and inflicted serious reverses on the Russians. Nicholas died during February, 1855, and his successor hastily (1856) extricated himself from an untenable position by what proved to be temporary territorial and military concessions.

§78. BRITISH CATHOLIC
REVIVAL

Cardinal Henry Newman

Cardinal Nicholas Wiseman

A. British Political Background (1832-65)

(1) THE VICTORIAN COMPROMISE

The 1832 Reform Act enfranchised wealthy financiers and industrialists, admitting the middle class to a share in the government with the aristocracy. Once accepted politically, however, the beneficiaries proved adamant against further extension of the vote. The ensuing regime was Liberal without being democratic. This conservative attitude characterized the first part of Queen Victoria’s reign (1837-1901) and is known as the “Victorian Compromise” between the ideas of the Old Regime and the French Revolution. Until his death in 1865 the dominant political figure was Viscount Palmerston, almost continuously as foreign secretary, home minister, or premier. Reputed “patriarch of Freemasonry,” he was bluntly anti-Catholic in attitude. Since Catholic emancipation, his power to harm was limited at home, but it was often exercised abroad, especially in Portugal, Spain, and Italy. His resolute opposition to Democracy, moreover, led him to espouse the Southern cause during the American Civil War; only Prince Albert’s intervention is believed to have averted British involvement. Finally, Palmerston was an imperialist: his defense of Don Pacifico by his “Civis Romanus sum” speech was a symptom of the reviving or “Second British Empire.”

Liberal measures included the Municipal Corporations Act, extending the 1832 reform to local government, the abolition of Negro slavery (1833); the Factory Act (1833) providing for government inspectors; and the Poor Law (1834) which constrained paupers to the grim discipline of the “workhouse” excoriated by Charles Dickens. The Education Act of 1834 seems to have been originally designed as a step toward universal secular training by offering state aid to schools permitting government inspection. But stout resistance by religious groups diverted

^{[p.
496]}the official policy to one of equal support for all schools. Publicity for parliamentary debate was granted Hansard, and in 1839 the Penny Postage Act brought the mails within reach of all. The Bank of England was chartered by parliament (1844) and came to have the sole right to issue currency as other banks gradually lost the franchise. The British Companies Act (1855) permitted formation of joint stock corporations with limited liability.

Chartism. Commoners had been forbidden (1799, 1800) to form combinations to seek higher wages or shorter hours lest “freedom of contract” be infringed. Though trade unions were permitted in 1824-1825, they were expressly debarred from agitation for these objectives. Denied legal redress, the disgruntled workingmen sought reform of the suffrage under the lead of Bentham, Mill, and Place. But national unions failed for want of good methods: workers were prone to violence and an educative campaign was poorly managed. From 1838 Fergus O’Connel demanded a workingmen’s “Charter” in his newspaper. The appeal enlisted sympathy and during the uprisings of 1848 on the Continent, British chartists demanded: universal male suffrage, uniform electoral districts, payment of parliamentary members, removal of property qualifications for office-holding, and annual elections. Mammoth petitions with five million signatures were to be presented to parliament on April 10, 1848. The alarmed ministry commissioned the duke of Wellington—with Napoleon Bonaparte’s nephew as deputyl—to organize posses to prevent violence. But the event proved a fiasco: rain dispersed the crowd and only a few petitions arrived. These were found to contain many fictitious signatures—e.g., of Queen Victoria—and the movement collapsed under ridicule. Yet a century later all of the Chartists’ demands save the last had been enacted into law. The proletariat received a modicum of panem et circenses in the Crystal Palace Exposition of 1851, first of modern exhibitions of industrial progress.

The Anglican Establishment had been reduced by Deism and Rationalism to almost a corpse during the eighteenth century. Its pompous façade became the target of an increasing number of attacks from religious Liberals, at a time when Tory political rule was being criticized by Whigs prior to the 1832 Reform Act. At Oxford University at the opening of the nineteenth century the “Noetics” led by Whately and Arnold disparaged external organization and proposed a renewal of ^{[p. 497]} Anglicanism through stress upon humanitarian social works instead of dogma and discipline.

An orthodox reaction to such attacks was not long in developing., Liberal sallies brought Conservative religious thinkers to give attention both to the foundations for their beliefs, and to the problem of revitalizing Anglicanism by renovation rather than revolution. The first leader of this reaction was John Keble (1792-1866), whose Christian Year (1826) was its initial literary manifestation. He was, however, of a retiring, scholarly disposition and withdrew to his father’s rectory soon after the start of the controversy to engage chiefly in literary argument. Forensic leadership passed to a disciple, Richard Hurrell Froude (1803-36), a romanticist, who resurrected Primate Laud’s “High Church” principles from the seventeenth century to combat the Liberals.

John Henry Newman (1801-90) entered Oxford in 1816 and at first associated chiefly with Richard Whately (1787-1863) from whom he _,derived two ideas: insistence upon the visible nature of the Church, and on its independence of the state. Newman was led to make more profound inquiries into dogmatic problems and these brought him nearer the Conservative position. About 1828 he came under Froude’s influence and imbibed some of his enthusiasm and piety. As tutor at Oriel College and Vicar of St. Mary’s (1828), Newman himself began to exercise a limited sway, attracting kindred spirits in Edward Pusey (1800-1882), Robert Wilberforce (1802-57) , and Ambrose St-John (1815-76), of whom the latter two followed him to Rome.

Erastianism, or the theory of secular supremacy in religious affairs, became the issue for the birth of the Oxford Movement. The Peel election at Oxford in 1829 marked Newman’s definitive break with the Noetics. Peel sought re-election to parliament after announcing his support of Catholic emancipation. Newman feared that this would be but a prelude to Anglican disestablishment. By prevailing on the Oxford constituency to reject Peel he provoked a clash between Liberals and Conservatives. In search of arguments, Newman turned to patristic sources. A visit to Italy, together with an interview with Dr. Nicholas Wiseman (1802-65), then rector of the English Catholic College at Rome, somewhat strengthened his patristic stand. After an illness at Naples—whence “Lead Kindly Light”—Newman returned to England in 1833 to find his fears confirmed: the triumphant Whigs were now proposing to disestablish certain Anglican sees in Ireland. Newman had come to feel that Anglicanism was a divine institution enjoying the apostolic succession of the episcopacy. Hence, he opposed the measure with all his might—and postponed Irish disestablishment until 1869, when he had ceased to be an Anglican. According to Newman himself, ^{[p. 498]} John Keble’s Sermon on National Apostasy, July 14, 1833, delivered against this Erastian ,program marked the beginning or at, least the external manifestation of the Oxford Movement.

Tractarianism. In September, 1833, the Oxford Conservatives began to publish Tracts for the Times, a series of articles by Newman and others on points of patristic tradition, apostolic succession of the episcopacy, the sacramental and liturgical system, and ecclesiastical discipline. These activities marked out Newman as active leader of the movement after Froude’s death in 1836, though from 1835 Pusey contributed more lengthy and learned articles on ritualism, in which Newman himself was but slightly interested. Anglican clerics were aroused for or against the Tractarians, and the prelates generally frowned on them lest the bogey of Romanism draw down secular strictures or disturb their comfortable benefices.

A “Via Media” theory was expounded for the first time during 1834 in Newman’s Tracts 38 and 41. According to this, although Catholics had departed far from primitive tradition by introducing novelties, Protestants erred in the opposite direction b abandonin essential truths. A purified Anglicanism wou se a safe middle course between wo erroneous extremes. ppomtment of the Latitudinarian Dr. Renn Hamp- den to a theology professorship at Oxford in 1836 provoked a storm of protest from the Tractarians against the Erastian indifference to “heresy.” Meanwhile Dr. Newman supplemented his influence by renowned sermons at St. Mary’s.

The “Branch Theory.” On his return to England in 1836, Dr. Wiseman joined Daniel O’Connell in founding the Dublin Review. His articles in this organ and his popular lectures soon established Wiseman as an effective apologist for the Catholic Church, and his prestige was augmented by his episcopal consecration in 1840. Dr. Wiseman persisted in drawing Newman’s patristic arguments to their logical conclusions. When Wiseman pointed out from St. Augustine that union with the Holy See was a patristic dogma—for “securus judicat orbis terrarum”Newman found it difficult to justify his via media position. Obsessed by the similarity of the Anglican status to that of early heretics and schismatics, he began to belabor Protestants more than Catholics, and advanced toward a “Branch Theory”: Roman, Greek, and Anglican Churches were but accidental and ritual variations of one true Christian society. In 1841 his Tract 90 tried to reconcile the Anglican Thirty-Nine Articles with the Council of Trent—an impossible task, even for Newman.

Parting of the ways. But Tract 90 had antagonized the Anglican ^{[p. 499]} hierarchy and Newman was censured. Without retracting his stand, he suspended publication of the Tracts and imposed silence on himself. Pusey and Ward, however, defended the incriminated treatise vigorously. At the same time (1841) proposal of a see at Jerusalem to be occupied alternately by an Anglican and a Lutheran gave new proof of Erastian disregard for episcopal succession, and new affront to Newman who by now excluded Lutherans and other Protestants from his “true Church.” During 1842 he retired to his Littlemore benefice, abdicating leadership of the Oxford Movement. The Tractarians now began to divide: Moderate Ritualists, led by Pusey, deemed the Branch Theory an adequate solution within the existing Anglican Establishment; Progressives, made articulate by William G. Ward (1812-82) in his Ideal of a Christian Church (1844), insisted on radical changes in Anglicanism in the direction of Rome. When Ward was censured and degraded by Anglican prelates, he led an exodus to Rome in August, 1845. Dalgairns and St-John followed, and at length Newman was received into the Church, October 8, 1845, by Padre Domenico Barberi (1792-1849), a Passionist mystic who had long sacrificed himself for the English mission.

Catholic converts. Ward and Newman headed a stream of Oxford converts, comparatively few in number, but enjoying immense prestige. None was more influential than Frederick Faber (1814-63) who brought his whole Anglican community of forty enthusiasts into the Church in 1845. Ordained to the priesthood and joining the Oratorians, he was commissioned in 1849 to found the London house, whence his sermons and books influenced many. Newman himself was ordained priest and established the Oratory at Birmingham. His Essay on Development of Christian Dogma appealed to those still hesitating at Oxford, though his justified attacks on the renegade Italian cleric, Dr. Achille, led to his fine for libel (1852) when Wiseman misplaced the documentary proofs. In 1847 promotion of Dr. Hampden to the Anglican see of Hereford and nomination of the clearly heretical George Gorham to the vicarage of Bamford Speke antagonized the Tractarians anew. This was compounded in 1850 by the disgraceful hubbub about the restoration of the Catholic hierarchy and the upholding of Gorham’s appeal by the secular Privy Council over the decision of the Anglican prelate Phillpotts. Another wave of converts to Rome followed: in 1849, Thomas Allies (18131903) , the historian, and Frederick Capes (1816-88), journalist. During 1850-51 came Henry Edward Manning (1808-92), Henry Wilberforce, Lord Fielding, Bellasis, Maskel, Monsell, John Pollen, and others. With special permission from Rome obtained by Wiseman, Manning was ^{[p. 500]}ordained priest within ten weeks of his conversion. Later he studied in Rome and founded the Oblates of St. Charles. Capes founded the Rambler in 1848; its Liberal views brought censure and Capes temporarily relapsed, but later returned to die in the Catholic Church. Cambridge University also had converts in Kenelm Digby, Romanticist; Ambrose Phillips, founder of a Trappist monastery; and George Spencer, later a Passionist. August Pugin (1812-52), converted in 1833, was a fanatical champion of Gothic architectural restoration, for which the Catholic earl of Shrewsbury (d. 1852) proved a generous patron.

Anglican ritualists. Keble and Pusey, however, remained in the Established Church to found the “High Church Ritualist” faction. Pusey’s sermons insisted on the “objective presence” of Christ in the Eucharist, while rejecting transubstantiation. He likewise introduced optional confession and many Roman liturgical practices. But Anglican prelates with but one exception emphatically repudiated such views. For a time High and Low Church parties united to denounce the Broad Church views of Williams and Wilson in their Essays and Reviews (1860) . But though condemned by the Anglican prelates, these “heretical” clergymen appealed to the Privy Council, which sustained them in 1864. During 1865, moreover, the Privy Council set aside Metropolitan Gray of South Africa’s condemnation of his suffragan Colenso’s Liberal expressions. The Tractarians took refuge in Ritualism and in 1873 some 483 clergymen petitioned Convocation for appointment of qualified confessors. Protestant indignation was aroused and in 1874 the House of Lords banned Ritualism. This was really the end of the original Oxford Movement, although controversy continued to disturb the Anglican body. Dr. Benson as primate of Canterbury effected a compromise in 1890. Pusey’s successor as Ritualist leader, Charles Gore (1853-1932), Anglican prelate of Oxford (1911-19), admitted some Liberal theological ideas. In 1928 High Church emendations of the Book of Common Prayer were rejected in the House of Commons.

Catholic growth. Since the beginning of Catholic relief (1778), life among English Catholics had shown signs of revival. Douay College in Belgium, which had been closed during the French Revolution, had been reconstituted in England for clerical training at St. Cuthbert’s and St. Edmund’s Colleges. The English College at Rome, closed in 1798, had reopened in 1818 with Wiseman as a student. Ordained in 1825, Wise- man became its lector in 1828. He later in 1840 headed St. Mary’s College-Seminary at Oscott, which he made into a “reception room” for Oxford converts. By 1840 Catholic population increase, especially ^{[p. 501]} through Irish immigration, required the erection of four new vicariates besides the existing four. By 1850 Catholics in England numbered nearly a million.

Ex Porta Flaminiana. In order to give adequate Catholic leadership and stimulate further Oxford conversions, Pope Pius IX on September 29, 1850, revived the Catholic hierarchy by creating the metropolitan see of Westminster with twelve suffragans. To Westminster he named Nicholas Wiseman, since 1847 vicar-apostolic of the London District. On October 7, Wiseman, who had also been promoted cardinal, jubilantly announced from Rome—”From out the Flaminian Gate” his pastoral was dated—that the Catholic Church had officially reappeared in a land where it had been in hiding since the deaths of Mary I and Cardinal Pole in 1558.

“No popery.” Classical scholars recalled that Roman legions used to march to conquest from the Flaminian Gate. Riding on the crest of vociferous “no popery” outbursts, Premier Russel in 1851 introduced the Ecclesiastical Titles Bill forbidding assümptron by Catholic bishops of titles of ancient sees now Anglicanized and withholding legal recognition of the new Catholic dioceses. The Lord Chancellor cited Shake- speare: “Under my feet I stamp thy cardinal’s hat in spite of pope or dignities of Church” (I Henry VI, i, iii, 49) . But shortly after his return to England, November, 1850, Cardinal Wiseman met this with an Appeal to the English People. He assured the Westminster chapter that he would claim no jurisdiction over the Abbey and would continue to pay his entrance fee; the poor of the surrounding slums would be his poi-fion. Not in vain did he call for “fair play.” The Times congratulated him on “recovering the use of the English language,” and Punch lampooned Russel as an urchin writing “No Popery” on Wiseman’s door and running away. Russel, indeed, got his bill, but dared not enforce it; it was formally repealed by Gladstone in 1871.

Catholic organization. The new hierarchy held its first provincial council in 1852, at which Newman preached a memorable sermon on the “Second Spring” of Catholicity in England. The Council reorganized discipline, but also revealed Wiseman’s somewhat cavalier attitude toward his suffragans, a breach widened when George Errington became his coadjutor in 1855. Errington opposed Wiseman’s close control of Catholic colleges and was eventually sustained by Rome. He also strove to suppress Manning’s Oblates and to dismiss Ward as lay lecturer in theology at St. Edmund’s Seminary. Though the Third Provincial Council (1859) supported Errington on many points against Wiseman, the case went to Rome which at length removed Errington (1860) . Meanwhile Newman’s efforts to found a Catholic University at Dublin (1855-58) foundered, and his proposed, chaplaincy for Catholic ^{[p. 502]} students at Oxford—where religious tests were removed in 1854—was turned down by Propaganda on the plea of Wiseman and Manning.

Discordant views. Henry Edward Manning, advancing rapidly in Wiseman’s favor, promoted introduction of Roman ways to the last detail, thus displeasing some of the elder sons of the Catholic Church in England who had lived heroically, if somewhat unliturgically, through “dungeon, fire and sword.” Bishop Errington, Wiseman’s coadjutor, put himself at the head of the disaffected group and objected to Wiseman’s alleged favoritism toward Oxford converts. The disagreement was compounded by the clash of personalities: Wiseman was brilliant, expansive, negligent of details, and by now ailing; Errington was plodding, meticulous, somewhat unimaginative—though other English bishops shared his resentment at Wiseman’s carelessness about the canonical rights of suffragans. But though his arguments against Wiseman were often justified, Errington’s continual opposition created a bad impression. Besides, the sentiments of the older Catholics tended to be “Cisalpine” on disciplinary matters and cool toward definition of papal infallibility, while Manning and Ward and many Oxford converts became violent Ultramontane and champions of a prompt definition of papal primacy. Ward’s fanaticism which desired “a papal definition every morning for breakfast” shocked Newman’s intellectual subtlety. Like his superior, Bishop Ullathorne of Birmingham, Newman tried to adopt a moderate position which caused him to be viewed with suspicion by Manning. Many of Newman’s woes stemmed from his unappreciated mediation between extreme groups. Anglicans attacked his intellectual honesty; Ultramontanes suspected him of theological Liberalism. Though Newman accepted a mandate from the hierarchy to reform the Liberal Rambler, he was associated by some with its views and soon resigned. In 1864, however, Kingsley’s assault on the veracity of the Catholic clergy elicited Newman’s devastatingly successful Apologia, which he followed with his Grammar of Assent.

Primatial succession seemed to spell victory for either group. Though Errington, by refusing to resign gracefully, had made necessary his removal by Rome in 1860, he had retired submissively to private life. At Wiseman’s death in 1865 the chapter and the majority of the English hierarchy suggested Errington as his successor at Westminster. Propaganda, indeed, proposed Ullathorne as compromise candidate, but Pio Nono overruled all suggestions by naming Manning archbishop of Westminster. With Manning, Ultramontanism won a definite triumph among the English hierarchy and clergy, and the coolness of Newman and Acton to the opportuneness of the definition of papal infallibility caused ^{[p. 503]} them to be suspect for a time. This issue awaited the Vatican Council where- Manning’s marshalling of the Ultramontanes won a decisive victory. Newman, whose chief theological defect had been lack of precise scholastic training, readily gave his adhesion to the conciliar definition, and Lord Acton also gave satisfactory evidence of submission. Glad-stone’s pamphlet denouncing the Vatican decree as an assault on secular government called forth Newman’s clarification contained in his 1875 Letter to the Duke of Norfolk. Internecine disputes died away, and in 1879 Manning supported a request for the cardinalate for Newman, and presently the man of action and the scholar were united in the College of Cardinals.

Religious inequality. All of Ireland’s troubles were by no means ended with Catholic Emancipation in 1829. Aside from political and economic grievances, glaring religious inequality persisted—the crushing burden of a tax-supported, largely unattended Anglican established religion. In 1829 this had twenty-two prelates and two thousand ministers, many of them non-resident, to be maintained at an annual charge of £ 800,000. On the other hand, the twenty-two Catholic bishops and eighteen hundred priests subsisted on alms contributed by an impoverished laity. Yet of a population estimated at eight million in 1831, there were six and one-half million Catholics, six hundred thousand Presbyterians, and only eight hundred thousand Episcopalians. Though Presbyterians also had to pay tithes, they received in rebate an annual subsidy, the regium donum.

Educational differences were likewise flagrant. Overt and Protestant proselytizing in state schools forced Catholics to maintain “hedge schools” at home and partake of foreign gratuity abroad. Though the concessions of 1782 and 1792 allowed Catholics to become licensed schoolmasters, by 1824, of 11,823 primary schools, all were under Protestant influence save 422. Dublin’s Trinity College admitted Catholics to degrees in 1793, but not to fellowships or professorships. Maynooth Seminary was opened in 1795 with governmental subsidies, which continued until 1869.

The “Tithe War” opened in 1830 with parochial resistance to collection of tithes. Armed clashes multiplied, costing the lives of eleven British officers in 1831. O’Connell, now admitted to the British parliament, took up this grievance in 1832. After an ineffective Coercion Bill and other proposals had been thrice rejected, a Tithe Commutation Act (1838) cancelled arrears, reduced existing tithe rates by twenty-five per cent, and converted tithes into a rent charge payable by landlords‑ ^{[p. 504]}who usually passed it on to the Catholic tenants in the form of higher rents.

Disestablishment could therefore be the only final solution. In 1834 Lord Grey had abolished eight Anglican sees in Ireland, and Irish moderates, led by Maguire, proposed complete disestablishment as a reward for loyalty during the Fenian agitation. The Episcopalians, after failing to justify their privileged position despite a proselytizing campaign, yielded. On July 26, 1869, Gladstone passed the Disestablish-ment Act to take effect on January 1, 1871. Episcopalianism in Ireland became a private corporation and its prelates lost their seats in parliament. Both the Episcopalian tithe and the Presbyterian subsidy ceased, though the government made generous compensations before putting them on their own.

Poor relief became an acute religious-social issue in 1838—one hundred workhouses were set up. Though most of these paupers were Catholics, Protestant administrators supervised the unpopular system and sometimes used their commanding position to force apostasy or religious neglect. After 1840, however, measures of municipal reform enabled the Irish to regain control over their local government. Poor relief supervision accordingly changed, and from 1861 the Sisters of Mercy were put in charge of some of the local bureaus by the electorate.

The Irish Famine of 1845-51 resulted from simultaneous rotting of English wheat through rain and a blight on Irish potatoes. Prime Minister Peel tried to import American corn and introduced a sliding scale of emergency prices. Finally the Corn (Wheat) Laws, a protective tariff, were repealed. But within these years some two million Irishmen had died or emigrated. Severe economic stress continued, reducing the Irish population by half during the course of the nineteenth century.

Education progressed slowly under the inspiration of the Irish Christian Brothers, founded in 1802 by Edmund Rice, and various sisterhoods. In 1831, Irish Secretary Stanley secured adoption of a national system of education, neutral in religion, but allowing “released time” for separate religious instruction. Catholics divided as to the prudence of using the project. The hierarchy having failed to reach agreement, Propaganda in 1841 left it to each bishop’s judgment to adopt the system in his own diocese. But recurrence of dangers to Faith and the determined opposition of Archbishop Cullen caused these mixed schools to decline in favor of parochial, so that by 1908 there were 482,000 pupils in denominational schools and 192,000 in the mixed schools. Though secular colleges now admitted Catholics, Propaganda deemed Catholic attendance perilous. Yet nationalistic and financial difficulties defeated Newman’s projected Catholic University at Dublin, although after his resignation the medical and science faculties survived and later achieved some sort of accreditation. Carlow Seminary had opened in 1793; Father Hand, C.M., founded All Hallows missionary seminary in 1842, and other institutions followed.

§79. AMERICAN
GROWTH

American Anti-Catholic Propaganda:

"The Shadow in Our Schools"

A. Nationalist Expansion (1817-53)

Delayed Democracy. Though by no means as reactionary as contemporary Europe, American leadership did not lack resemblances to Liberal Conservatism. Even when leavened by Jeffersonian humanitarianism, the Federalism of the Founding Fathers was scarcely challenged until the advent of Jacksonian Democracy in 1829. Jackson, however, had much of the autocrat about him, and except for his administration, the dominant branch of the government was the Senate, where Webster and Calhoun, leading spokesmen for North and South, were alike opposed to “tyranny of majority rule.” Northern industrialists, though as yet lacking the wealth and influence of their European counterparts, were not overly democratic toward immigrant workers whom they sought to retain as wage slaves. Meanwhile in the South, and for two years longer than in Russia, slavery survived and with it an aristocratic way of life. Rhode Island achieved universal manhood suffrage only in 1844 by Dorr’s Rebellion. Even in the United States, then, Democracy was far from universal in the early nineteenth century.

Nationalism, that “the government of the Union . . . is truly a government of the people,” remained a thesis of Chief Justice Marshall (180135). From this Henry Clay, spokesman for the West, drew a corollary of “Manifest Destiny” to which nineteenth-century politicians were most attentive. For Clay, “true glory . . . will finally conduct this nation to that height to which God and nature have destined it.” This came to involve not merely the “American System” of protective tariffs and internal public works at Federal expense, but domination of foreign territory. Ere long, Americans were extorting Florida from Spain, ogling Canada brazenly, warning Europe that the New World was no longer open for colonization—but themselves colonizing Texas and Oregon. Though they did arbitrate the Oregon frontier, it was only to free themselves to annex Texas. This led to war with Mexico and seizure of New Mexico and California. Here politicians and journalists paused only for breath before they shouted for Mexico, Santo Domingo, Cuba—and in 1848 even for Ireland!

Sectionalism, however, loomed to distract expansionists’ attention. A North, increasingly nationalistic, industrialized, democratic—at least in ^{[p. 506]} theory—was finding its economic interests differing from those of the South, clinging to the doctrine of “States’ Rights” in order to protect its “peculiar institution,” as slavery was euphemistically termed. Elder statesmen whose memories stretched back to the Revolution trembled; a second generation of orators sought to reconcile sections: the period opens with the Missouri Compromise (1820) and closes with that of 1850, the last found possible before contention led to blows. It may be partly true that expansion was undertaken to divert men’s minds from this domestic row—in 1860 it was proposed at the last minute that North and South join to trounce Mexico. If so, no amount of extroversion could permanently solve the issue of nationalism; it could only be postponed. After the deaths of the compromisers, Webster, Clay, and even in a sense Calhoun, a generation arose that knew not bargaining: Rhett, Seward, Sumner, Stevens. In 1861 the uncompleted dome of the Capitol in Washington was a symbol of the still insecure nature of American national unity.

Virginia’s dynasty. The statesmen of the most populous of the original states during the formative period of Federal Government enjoyed a preponderant share in its administration. Four of the first five presidents were citizens of Virginia. With the advent of the Democratic-Republicans to national control in 1800, this leadership was for a time even more marked. From 1801 to 1825 three Virginians in succession held the presidency for two terms each, the secretary of state usually succeeding as determined by a caucus of Democratic congressional leaders. By 1820 party politics seemed to have yielded to an “Era of Good Feeling.”

President Monroe (1817-25) was chief beneficiary of this era, to which his conciliatory temperament contributed. After the end of the War of 1812, it was possible to concentrate upon domestic progress. A rechartered United States Bank promised a sound currency. High tariffs were passed to protect agrarian and manufacturing interests, which, however, soon diverged on their utility. Construction of roads and canals was pushed at Federal direction. After high-handed invasions by General Jackson, Florida was yielded by Spain (1819) , and new states were organized in the Northwest and Louisiana Territories. In 1820, however, expansion for the first time encountered difference of sectional opinion. While the northern states had restricted slavery by 1800, the southern citizens were firmly convinced of its economic necessity. From the two sections emigrants carried their ideas into new areas and a rough parity between free and slave states developed. The question of Missouri’s admission as a slave state revealed passions so intense that ^{[p. 507]} Jefferson called the debate a “fire-bell in the night.” Dissension was temporarily allayed by the Missouri Compromise, which extended a line of demarcation-36° 30’—between potential free and slave territories, and admitted equal numbers of free and slave states. Until 1849 this parity was maintained to give each section equal senatorial representation capable of vetoing hostile legislation. Finally, the “Monroe Doctrine,” while assuring Latin America of opposition by the United States to Old World aggression, hinted at a possible protectorate by aggressive Anglo-Saxons in the New World.

An “Era of Bad Feeling” succeeded in 1824 when Treasury Secretary Crawford tried to perpetuate the Virginia dynasty by the caucus method. Illness, however, all but eliminated him from a race hotly contested by State Secretary Adams, War Secretary Calhoun, Speaker Clay, and General Jackson. The Democratic-Republicans dissolved into factions, and aristocratic elder statesmen were challenged by new leaders who catered to the expanding popular suffrage. The close 1824 election went to the House of Representatives, where Clay’s choice of Adams, from whom he later accepted the secretariate of state, was denounced as corrupt by Jackson’s followers.

President Adams (1825-29) , an upright statesman of the old school, conscientious and forthright, all too brusquely rejected the arts of pleasing. Though respected, he was never popular and found his administration almost paralyzed by the union of factions against him; even his farsighted project of Pan-American harmony was rebuffed. The main issue of the 1828 election became the charge of the aggrieved General Jackson that Clay had deprived him of the presidency in 1824. Jackson never proved his point by documents, but won the presidency in the first truly popular election.

President Jackson (1829-37), a strong-willed, plain-spoken military hero, thus became exponent of a new democratic revolution. He was a simple man, too easily swayed by emotion, but his intuitions were more often right than wrong. His dictatorial methods led his opponents to style him “King Andrew I” and to organize the new Whig party to check him. But Jackson’s hold on the masses remained secure. Instituting the popular convention system, he was not only re-elected in 1832, but secured the victory of his designated successor in 1836. On the axiom, “to the victors belong the spoils,” politicians replaced dynasts—though he removed but two thousand of eleven thousand officials. The president’s popular nationalism brought him alike into conflict with northern capitalism whose monopoly of the Bank of the United States he destroyed, ^{[p. 508]} and with the southern squirearchy whose threats of nullification he sternly repressed: “Our Federal Union, it must be preserved,” proved for him more than a phrase.

President Van Buren (1837-41), Jackson’s heir, reaped a harvest of his mistakes, without inheriting his force and ability. Speculation and financial experimentation ended in the Panic of 1837. Van Buren’s sound remedy, the Independent Treasury, came too late to save him from the customary blame for hard times attached to the party in power. In the 1840 election he fell before the Whigs, who had stolen Democratic political thunder with “Tippecanoe (Harrison) and Tyler too.”

Texan issue. The Mexican province of Texas, which had received many American settlers, revolted in 1835 and established a precarious independence. Lasting security could be achieved only by annexation to the United States, but this was likely to provoke war with Mexico. Annexation and its consequences became the leading issue for a decade. Southerners generally urged annexation of Texas as potential slave territory, an extension of which many Northerners had come to disapprove. The West, after some hesitation, inclined the balance toward annexation, largely from imperialistic motives. British attempts to establish a protectorate over Texas revived Anglo-American animosity, but war was averted by American annexation and the Oregon Compromise of 1846.

Harrison and Tyler (1841-45) . Though Harrison’s military reputation won the election for the Whigs, it was the semi-Democrat Tyler who conducted the administration when Harrison died within a month of inauguration. Tyler, a lesser politician, became president by accident, and was overshadowed and thwarted by the Whig leader, Henry Clay. Their antagonism nullified constructive measures and led to Whig defeat in the 1844 election. Tyler deemed the electoral result a mandate to annex Texas in the closing days of his term.

President Polk (1845-49), Democratic dark horse candidate, proved a capable war president; for Mexican resentment at ill-disguised American imperialism provoked war (1846-48). This resulted in an easy American triumph which produced the forced sale of California and New Mexico to the United States, though the Federal Government undertook Mission claims. Zachary Taylor won the 1848 election when Polk refused to run for a second term.

Taylor and Fillmore (1849-53). The Whig administration had to deal with sectional disputes about the disposition of the newly annexed territories. California’s application for statehood disturbed senatorial parity between sections, and required the 1850 Compromise which extended the division somewhat to Northern advantage, while guaranteeing Southern ^{[p. 509]} ownership of slaves wherever they might roam. Taylor opposed the Compromise, but his death in July, 1850, permitted his more pliant successor Fillmore to authorize it. In 1853 the Gadsden Purchase from Mexico completed American acquisition of contiguous territory.

Introduction. The Church in the United States was affected by this national environment. Her greatest problems usually arose from peculiarly American traits, rather than from Old World heresies. A wave of Catholic immigration now excited Protestant apprehensions of what Morse termed a Foreign Conspiracy Against the Liberties of the United States (1834). Fears of bigots erupted in recurring movements on behalf of “Native Americanism,” “Know Nothingism,” the A.P.A., and the Ku Klux Klan. And the Catholic laity’s enthusiasm for the democratic dream had still to be reconciled with hierarchy: Trusteeism reached its critical stage. Secularism in education and Liberalism in philosophy were other obstacles to missionary zeal.

“The Catholic Invasion”—thus Maynard ¹⁰ aptly described the tide of European immigration which during the period raised the Catholic population from an estimated 195,000 in 1820 to over 3,000,000 by 1860. Shaugnessy has calculated ¹¹ that between 1790 and 1850 over one million Catholic immigrants landed in the United States, and this phenomenon continued to increase without substantial modification until the beginning of immigration restrictions in 1921. During the present period the greater number of Catholics came from Ireland and Germany. Even though the total American population soared from eight to twenty-seven millions during the same span, “Native Americans” came to feel that the Catholic increase was all out of proportion for a “Protestant country” where they had hitherto been a negligible minority. But economic difficulties in Ireland and political troubles on the Continent continued to drive thousands of impoverished Catholics to the United States. Resentment turned chiefly against the Irish, who were not only the more numerous, but were not restrained by the language barrier from entering promptly into American life. While the Irish tended to congregate in the Eastern cities, according to Bishop Hughes’ belief that concentration would retain them in the Faith, McGee and others argued that they ought to “go West” to become land owners and self-employed. In the cities the Irish could use the ballot, following speedy and sometimes ^{[p. 510]} routine nationalization, raising fears of an “Irish Catholic peril” in politics. The Germans, who by 1850 constituted twenty-five per cent of the foreign born of the country, went chiefly to the farms and villages of the Midwest and provoked less opposition by their conservative ways.

10 Theodore Maynard, Story of American Catholicism (New York: The Macmillan Co., 1942), p. 276.

11 Gerald Shaugnessy, Has the Immigrant Kept the Faith? (New York: The Macmillan Co., 1925).

Americanization. “Willy-nilly the American Church had become catholic in the broadest sense. . . . The Church rendered a distinct service to the nation by the Americanization program which it fostered among its foreign-born members, even under persecution. Measured by modern standards, it was not a scientific program, but the quiet counseling of the immigrants by bishops and by the priests in the parishes, the instruction in Catholic schools, and the information imparted through the Catholic press once it got under way in the 1820’s constantly assimilated newcomers to the American way of life.” ¹²

John Tracy Ellis, American Catholicism (University of Chicago Press, 1955), pp. 50-51.

Propaganda. Early anti-Catholic papers were the Boston Recorder (1816), the Baptist Christian Watchman, and Morse’s New York Observer. Catholics retorted with Bishop England’s Catholic Miscellany (1822-60), the New York Truth Teller (1825), and the Boston Jesuit, later more diplomatically renamed the Pilot (1829) . When the ministerially supported Protestant appeared weekly in 1830, Father Hughes contributed fantastic tales under an alias, and then exposed them to the discredit of the paper. His literary controversy with the Presbyterian minister, Dr. Breckinridge (1831), attracted wide attention, fanned by Morse’s book, Foreign Conspiracy, in 1834. In the latter year began the “convent horror” series: Mrs. Sherwood’s Nun related the thrilling escape of a Turin heiress from a convent dungeon; Rebecca Reed’s Six Months in a Convent told of sadistic penances imposed on “Ursulines” by a flute-playing bishop who wanted a “bushel of gold”; finally the Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk ascribed immoral conduct and smothered infants to a Montreal convent. Though the Protestant editor, William L. Stone, investigated and asserted, “Maria Monk is an out and out impostor and her book is in all its essential features a tissue of calumnies,” such rebuttals usually received less publicity than the books.

Violence. This incitement led to attacks on Catholic institutions during the 1830’s and 1840’s. In 1834 a mob, aroused by a Congregationalist minister, Dr. Beecher, attacked and burned the Ursuline convent in Boston on pretext of rescuing a novice. In its fury the mob went on to attack Catholic buildings and desecrate the cemetery. Though Mayor Lyman led decent Protestants in a protest meeting, anti-Catholic forces ^{[p. 511]}in the state legislature repeatedly blocked measures for indemnity. The escape of the culprits was a signal for other outbreaks, especially in the East. The most serious incident was a three-day riot at Philadelphia in 1844. The attack was provoked by Bishop Kenrick’s request to save Catholic children from reading the Protestant version of the Bible and attending the sectarian religious classes in the public schools. When the city council granted the request, bigots with the connivance of police and other officials burned two churches and the seminary, plundering Irish Catholic residences, and killing thirteen and wounding fifty. The mild bishop ordered all religious services suspended until the state troops had restored order. Meanwhile in New York, Bishop Hughes’s request for a Catholic Bible and educational subsidies from the state legislature had provoked threats of similar riots. But Bishop Hughes inspired Irish members of the “Church Militant” to arm in defense of their institutions, and practically forced the authorities to provide police protection (1844) . This firm stand deterred bigots, already discredited among most Protestants for their violence, while the Oregon and Texan threats of foreign war temporarily diverted the American public’s attention.

Politics. Meanwhile Samuel Morse was electrifying America in more ways than one. Sunday and public school libraries featured his book denouncing the machinations of “Jesuit emissaries of the Holy Alliance,” i.e., Metternich’s Austrian Order. Yet the early concessions of Pius IX to Liberalism in the Papal State were saluted as signs of conversion by the Federal Government. These and the pressing need of negotiations with Catholic Mexico induced President Polk to obtain Congressional consent to the opening of diplomatic relations with the Papal State during 1848. The President had also requested the hierarchy to select two Catholic chaplains for the armed forces; they chose the Jesuits, John McElroy and Anthony Rey, to counter Mexican propaganda against the “heretical” American invaders. After the war, questions concerning church property in the ceded lands were peacefully settled with the State Department by Archbishops Eccleston of Baltimore and Hughes of New York. International litigation eventually won a judgment from the Hague Court in 1902 against Mexico for impounding the missionary “Pious Fund,” but Mexico paid little. All these negotiations led Representative Leven to warn Congress somberly: “How many Jesuit senators shall we have in the course of the next twenty years!” His misstatements were exposed by Representative Maclay of New York, and the future president, Andrew Johnson of Tennessee, also defended Catholics in Congress. But the 1850’s were to witness worse storms: “Know-Nothingism.” ^{[p. 512]}

Norfolk-Charleston schism. As early as 1804, the Norfolk trustees had ruled that: “When the priest chooses to be present at the meetings of the council, his place shall be at the right hand of the president. The priest shall never address them unless when information is asked of him by the president.” Dr. Fernandes became in 1809 leader of this board of lay despots who perpetuated themselves in office. In 1815 they demanded the removal of their pastor, Father Lucas, and when refused, denounced to Rome the “Machiavellic” policy of Archbishop Neale of Baltimore (1815-17). When they failed to obtain immediate consent to their demands for a bishop of their own, they joined hands with Dr. Gallagher and other disaffected clerics in Charleston to urge the Irish Friar Hayes to obtain consecration from the Jansenists of Utrecht and become their bishop—he refused. Archbishop Marechal of Baltimore (1817-28) placed the blame on the example of the Protestant vestry system which Fernandes and other nominal Catholics were abusing. The Holy See decided to erect Charleston into a see to which it named the brilliant John England (1820-42) . The new bishop at first had much to suffer from these trustees, but he soon devised the successful policy of appealing to the faithful to oust them. By 1824 he had prevailed on the dissenters to resign claims contrary to Catholic discipline in favor of an incorporated general diocesan fund of which the bishop would be ex officio chairman of the board of trustees. Ardent convert to things American, the bishop then drew up a diocesan constitution, providing for annual conventions of a bicameral legislature with an “upper house” of clergy, and a lower “house of lay delegates,” to whom he gave a “state of the diocese” message in reporting financial needs. This novel machinery, however, was discontinued by his successors.

Philadelphia schism. Trusteeism in Pennsylvania was complicated by German aspirations for a national church. Attempts to combat Trustee-ism by the Irish bishops, Michael Egan (1810-14) and Henry Conwell (1819-42), proved quite ineffective. The former had been resisted in the administration of his own cathedral; the latter, arriving after a tranquil interim under the German administrator, Father Barth, at once clashed with trustees. These used Father William Hogan, rector of the cathedral, as their tool. The bishop failed to secure favorable trustees and his excommunication of Hogan produced little result, for presently on Hogan’s retirement the trustees put forward a clerical charlatan, Antonio Inglesi. Despite a decision in his favor by Chief Justice Tilghman of Pennsylvania, the aged bishop wearied of the struggle. In 1827 Conwell capitulated to the trustees by granting them a veto on pastoral appointments. But in 1828 Conwell was called to Rome, and though ^{[p. 513]}allowed to retain his titular dignity, he was obliged to entrust administration to a coadjutor. When Bishop Francis Kenrick took over this post in 1830, the trustees closed the cathedral and other city churches against him, nor were they disturbed in their stand by his interdict. The bishop, who had become an American citizen, solved this impasse by an appeal to the faithful to elect new trustees, renounce their claim to nominate pastors, and yield church property to episcopal control. So wholehearted was the response of his Catholic people, that within three months the trustees themselves submitted to episcopal terms. John Hughes, the bishop’s secretary, thus learned tactics he later used as bishop of New York. After Kenrick’s transfer to Baltimore, the Know-Nothing Pennsylvania legislature in 1855 outlawed episcopal corporate control. Until an adverse court ruling in 1914 and its repeal in 1935, this statute was occasionally abused by trustees of nationalistic parishes.

New York troubles. Bishop Concanon, New York’s first ordinary, never reached his diocese, and his successor, John Connolly, found Trusteeism well entrenched. The situation was complicated by rivalry between the Irish and the French, and St. Peter’s Church and Father Malou were storm centers until the bishop’s death in 1825. Matters did not greatly improve under the third bishop, Jean Dubois (1826-40) , whose long residence in America did not absolve him in nativist eyes of a stigma of foreign birth. But his coadjutor, John Hughes, who assumed administration in 1838, had gained experience of Trusteeism. He launched a cornpaign against obstructionist trustees at a Catholic mass meeting, and within four years the trustees, whose mismanagement had bankrupted five parishes, were obliged to yield title to the bishop. During the Know-Nothing ascendancy, disaffected Catholics of the trustee party secured the Putnam Act (1855) which permitted them to overrule the bishop on the ground that he had obtained title by coercion. When Irish support of the Union was needed, however, Senator Connolly and his legal aide, Charles O’Conor, were able to have this measure repealed (1863), and replaced by a model incorporation law explicitly giving the ordinary preponderant control.

New Orleans litigation. The deeply rooted French patronage system in Louisiana had permitted Padre Sedella to defy his superiors at the cathedral. Even after his death in 1829, the trustees obtained an act of the state legislature (1837) allowing them to mortgage the cathedral against the will of Bishop Blanc. The head of these trustees, a masonic grand master, was determined to resist the bishop’s spiritual as well as his temporal authority. In 1842 the trustees refused to accept the bishop’s nominee as rector, though under threat of interdict they pretended to receive him while denying him real rule. To the bishop’s rebukes they retorted with a $20,000 suit for libel: he had termed them “schismatics,” ^{[p. 514]}which of course they were not. Finally in 1844 the State Supreme Court, in the case of the “Wardens of Church of St. Louis versus Antoine Blanc, Bishop of New Orleans,” decided that the patronage law was abrogated and the Church disestablished in Louisiana; hence the trustees had no standing in civil law. In litigation involving other parishes the bishop was less fortunate, but by 1845 the worst was over.

General settlement. The foregoing were but the more notorious cases of Trusteeism. Pursuant to instructions from the Holy See, the First Provincial Council of Baltimore had decreed in 1829: “We most earnestly desire that no church shall be erected or consecrated in future unless it is assigned by a written document to the bishop in whose diocese it is to be erected. . . . We further declare that no right of patronage of any kind which the Sacred Canons recognize now belongs to any person, congregation of laymen, board of trustees, or any other persons whatever in this province.” Advised by Attorney-General Taney of Maryland, later chief justice of the United States Supreme Court, Archbishop Whitfield of Baltimore obtained from the State of Maryland in 1834 the first act recognizing a Catholic bishop as a “corporation sole.” This system safeguarded episcopal jurisdiction while assuring the proper transmission of diocesan property from one ordinary to his legitimate successor. It avoided possession by the bishop in fee simple of diocesan property to be transmitted by will, a mode that could lead to confusion of diocesan and private funds, as occurred in Cincinnati in 1888. The corporation sole method was imitated in Chicago (1845) and in California (1852) , and presently became the most common procedure. The Roman Curia in 1911, while permitting this method, preferred as the ideal a “parish corporation” system.¹³

‘S Patrick Dignan, History of Legal Incorporation of Catholic Church Property in the United States (Washington: Catholic University of America Press, 1933).

Secular public schools. About 1840 Horace Mann of Massachusetts initiated the trend to the public school in place of the Congregational religious schools hitherto prevailing in New England. The new institutions were patterned on foreign models, according to the theories current in Switzerland and Prussia. Mann himself adapted Cousin’s report on Prussian education to American needs, and his views were endorsed by many immigrants from northern Europe. A curriculum designed for an agrarian civilization was gradually adapted to an industrial one, stress being laid on immediate proficiency for business or the trades. Practical aspects of life were emphasized, and one of the chief incentives offered a student was the potentially increased earning power of graduates. Undoubtedly the American public school system aimed at “democracy of opportunity” and “preparation for life,” but religion was increasingly ^{[p. 515]} excluded from any influence upon the curriculum. The effect of this trend on religious instruction in non-Catholic schools is graphically depicted by Cubberly: ¹⁴ in 1775, “Bible & Catechism”; in 1825, “Good Behavior, Manners & Morals”; in 1850: “Manners & Conduct”; in 1875, “Conduct”; and by 1900 the column is blank.

“Ellwood Cubberly, Introduction to the Study of Education (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1925), p. 17.

Parochial schools. To counteract this secularization, the Baltimore provincial councils directed the clergy to set up “necessary schools . . . in which the young are taught principles of faith and morality” (1829) . Father Conelly incorporated his parochial school at Lowell, Massachusetts within the public school system in 1831, retaining religious instruction in his own hands, but the town abrogated the arrangement in 1852. When Governor Seward of New York in 1840 proposed state aid to denominational schools, Bishop Hughes strongly endorsed the move by requesting subsidies for Catholic schools. But by 1842 this project had foundered in a deluge of bigotry. For Catholics, therefore, there seemed no other alternative than the costly course enjoined by the First Plenary Council of Baltimore in 1852 that, “schools be established in connection with all the churches.” By 1840 there were about two hundred parochial schools, but in 1866 the Second Plenary Council, deploring the “indifferentism” of some public schools, decreed once again the “erection of parochial schools.” Before 1870, however, parochial education remained on a small scale and most of the teachers were lay.

Transcendentalism appeared about 1820 as an American phase of the Romantic Movement. Once Puritan orthodoxy had been broken down by Unitarianism and Universalism, the rugged Yankee was open to new ideas, good or bad. Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-82) gave secular America a slogan of rugged self-reliance: “Let man stand erect, go alone, and possess the universe.” Henry Thoreau (1817-62) extolled the pioneer, Herman Melville (1819-91) the explorer, and Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-64) made New England articulate in literature. These and others of the group had their center at Boston and Concord was their inspiration.

“The Concord Movement,” then, is a possible name for the trickle of converts from Transcendentalism to the Catholic Church, almost simultaneously with the Oxford Movement in England. These converts and their associates did something to dispel the idea that the Catholic religion was a fetish of low-caste immigrants, but was belief able to satisfy the “native Americans” and even the hardheaded Yankee. Among these converts, Orestes Brownson (1803-76) became a militant Catholic lay publicist after his conversion in 1845, the year of Ward and Newman.^{[p. 516]}

His friend, Isaac Hecker (1819-88) , in 1858 founded along with four fellow converts, the Paulists, whose convert-making techniques soon became renowned in America. Hawthorne’s daughter, Rose Hawthorne Lathrop (1851-1926), became a Catholic, and after her husband’s death, a Dominican nun. Cornelia Peacock of Philadelphia was converted with her husband, Pierce Connelly, an Episcopalian minister. They separated to enter the religious life. Despite his relapse, she persevered to found the Sisterhood of the Holy Child Jesus for the education of children.

European aid. Missionary organization in Europe continued to be an indispensable support of the Church in the United States. The leading institutes that helped the American mission were Pauline Jaricot’s Society for the Propagation of the Faith, which contributed $6,000,000 between its foundation in 1822 and its transfer to Rome a century later; Kaiser Franz’s Leopoldinen-Stiftung, established in Vienna in 1828, which sent missionaries and $700,000; and the Bavarian Ludwig-MissionVerein (1838), that besides missionaries and church supplies, contributed $900,000 between 1844 and 1917. It is perhaps not idle to remark that the real value of these sums is not to be computed in contemporary monetary figures. Missionary interest was promoted in the United States by Bishop Charles Forbin-Janson, associated with the Lyons Propagation of the Faith Society and the Holy Childhood, whom the pope sent on a tour of American missions (1839-41). Since much of this foreign aid went to immigrants, nativists like Morse saw in the agents of foreign societies emissaries infiltrating American institutions. The fact that many American prelates had to go to Europe on begging tours was also taken as evidence of the subjection of the hierarchy to alien domination.

Domestic missions. In 1818 Venerable Felix de Andreis (1778-1820) led the first contingent of the Congregation of the Mission to Missouri, and he was closely followed by Blessed Philippine Duchesne (17691852), who introduced the Religious of the Sacred Heart to St. Louis. Father de Andreis and his successor Rosati, presently first bishop of St. Louis, founded a seminary at Perryville which furnished priests for both the secular and regular clergy laboring throughout the West and on Negro and Indian missions. The Indian missions were the special care of Father Pierre De Smet, S.J. (1801-72) from 1838 forward. He had arrived at Florissant, Missouri, in 1823 with other Jesuits, who opened St. Louis University in 1829. In Iowa, Matthias Loras, first bishop of Dubuque, and Father Samuel Mazzuchelli, O.P., were famous missionaries, while in the area of the Great Lakes, Frederick Baraga (17971868), subsequently bishop, displayed outstanding zeal. The Texan mission was reopened during the 1840’s by Vincentian missionaries, of whom the future bishops, Timon and Odin, were prominent. ^{[p. 517]}

Foreign missions. Even at this early date Americans sought to open a foreign missionary field. When Liberia was established in West Africa as a haven for emancipated slaves, the American hierarchy sought volunteers to undertake their care. Pioneer American missionaries included Edward Barron, who became episcopal vicar apostolic of Guinea (184246), Father John Kelly of New York, and Denis Pindar, lay catechist. The latter died in Africa in 1844; the priests were eventually forced to return by the oppressive climate and as yet unsurmounted tropical diseases.

Metropolitan reorganization. The stupendous growth of Catholic population was barely paralleled by the increase of sees from 6 in 1815 to 43 in 1860, and of priests from 150 to 2,235. Until 1846-53, all these sees were part of the original province of Baltimore. In 1846 Propaganda somewhat hastily erected the archbishopric of Oregon City, later Portland, on the glowing report of the Canadian, Bishop François Blanchet. When later in the same year an Anglo-American pact incorporated the area within the United States, the American hierarchy was displeased. The incident prompted a general reorganization of metropolitan provinces in the United States. St. Louis was made an archbishopric in 1847, Cincinnati, New Orleans, and New York followed in 1850, and San Francisco in 1853. These six new provinces, with Baltimore, provided for an American domain enlarged by the Mexican cession and the Gadsden Purchase. The arrangement endured until the next general metropolitan reorganization in 1875, Baltimore being accorded an honorary precedence in 1858.

The First Plenary Council of Baltimore in 1852 terminates this period with an assembly of a large part of the new hierarchy. The Council was chiefly concerned with confirmation and codification for national use of the legislation of the previous seven provincial councils of Baltimore, and the second canon extended these provincial decrees to the new ecclesiastical provinces. The resolutions of the Sixth and Seventh Councils adopting the feast of the Immaculate Conception as the patronal feast for the Church in the United States, and petitioning definition of the dogma were soon to be heeded. Rosati’s Baltimore Ceremonial was made obligatory. Parochial schools and seminaries were again earnestly demanded. Waning Trusteeism was castigated, but the Council under the presidency of Archbishop Francis Kenrick was silent on the question of slavery, as indeed might be expected from that prelate’s 1841 edition of his widely normative Theologia Moralis which, while deploring Negro slavery, still advised obedience to existing laws and docility. On these matters, Catholics were men of their times.

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