‘Great War’ brought Catholics, bishops into mainstream of US society
So claims the headline for a story in the website of The Diocese of Springfield-Cape Girardeau
The Roman Catholic Church of Southern Missouri.
Well. . .
I don't really think so.
One of the temptations when you study a certain era of history, or write a lot about it, or even look into it, is to attribute things to it that exceed the boundaries of where you ought to go.
Now, don't get me wrong, war brings about a lot of first. Indeed, we've maintained here that War Changes Everything. And that's true. But it doesn't change as much as we might think.
What this article touches on is something that we tend not to think a lot about today, even though it is still with us, that being the strong prejudice against Catholics that once existed in the United States.
On that, a little background. There was once a vast amount of prejudice against Catholics in the United States. I've touched on this elsewhere, but the United States wasn't founded by a culture that wasn't tolerant of Catholicism in the first place, even if one of the colonies was, for a time, a refuge for English Catholics. Indeed, contrary to what we tend to imagine about the founding of the American colonies, they weren't religiously tolerant in general. England had gone from being a highly Catholic country prior to the reign of King Henry VIII (who no doubt always imagined himself to be a loyal Catholic of some sort in spite of everything) to being one that endured a long period of religious strife which broke out occasionally into open warfare. By the time that the English planted their first colony in North America, the English were officially Protestant but it was still whipping around from one Protestant theology to another. As noted, King Henry VIII basically thought of himself as the head of the Catholic Church in England, but still a Catholic. More radical Protestant reformers were vying for position and would soon come into control with his passing, but not before the nation became Catholic again under Mary, and then ostensible reached a "religious settlement" under Elizabeth. Even that settlement wasn't really one. Things were muddy under King James I as a struggle between Calvinist and Anglicans went on during his reign over England and Scotland. Puritans would come to be oppressed and flea to the Netherlands where they'd prove to be annoying and end up leaving later. Various English colonies were strongly sectarian, so much so that Puritans coming down out of Rhode Island later would be tried and executed. Religious tolerance was somewhat lacking early on.
Remains of the early church at Jamestown in the 1870s. This was an Anglican Church, as the settlers at Jamestown were all members of the Church of England. The Puritans (only part of the "Pilgrims") were not however, and in their Plymouth Rock settlement their church was not an Anglican one. The two groups did not get along.
Anyhow, while Catholics were present in the colonies early on (and Catholics remained in varying stages of being underground in England but very much above grown in Ireland. . .and then there's the story of English crypto Catholics which I'll not go into as it complicates the story further) they were always a minority and knew it. That might be, oddly enough, why the small Catholic population of the Colonies supported the Revolution in greater percentages than other colonists, in spite of the anti Catholic rhetoric of the Intolerable Acts. Catholics remained looked down upon in the new nation even as it adopted a policy of prohibiting a state religion which morphed into officially accepting religious tolerance (the two aren't really the same). And this continued on for a very long time.
Now, let me first note that it would be absolutely the truth to state that war, or more correctly wars, changed the view of a segments of American society and sometimes all of American society towards Catholics. But World War One wasn't really one of those wars.
The Mexican War was. By the time of the Mexican War, which ran from 1846 to 1848, lots of Germans and Irish were immigrating to the United States. Indeed, the Irish were also immigrating in large numbers to Canada and some of them from Canada to the United States. The Irish Great Famine (potato famine) commenced in 1845 and was driving millions of Irish from Eire causing a population that was already religious oppressed and living in primitive poverty to enter other lands where they were truly alien. Political conditions in Germany were in turmoil which would break out in the revolutions of 1848, something that saw large-scale Catholic emigration out of Germany as Catholics sought to avoid living in a Prussian Germany.
A large number of Catholics therefore ended up serving in the American forces during the Mexican War as enlisted men, many of whom were Irish born or born in one of the various German states. They were treated abysmally by their Protestant officers and particularly by Southern officers, who tended to detest Catholics.
They generally fought well however and their numbers caused the appointment of the first Catholic clerics to the U.S. Army. That helped bring about a new relationship between the Army and Catholics, but what really did it is that the appalling abuse of Catholic enlisted men lead a group of them to desert and join the Mexican army, which formed its own artillery unit made up of American deserters. That shock caused the Army to reevaluate what it was doing, and Catholics, particularly Catholic immigrants, found a home in the Army thereafter.
Mass hanging of captured members of the San Patricio's. The penalty for treason was death, but this would be the last act of its type and bring to an end outward discrimination against Catholics in the enlisted ranks of the U.S. Army.
That was built on during the Civil War, during which you can find several examples of very senior Catholic officers, such as Phil Sheridan. Sheridan is notable in this context as he entered West Point in 1848, hard on the heels of the Mexican War, which shows how quickly things were changing. By the time of the Civil War Catholics, and in particular Irish Catholics, were common in the Army. The enlisted career Irish sergeant was a fixture in the American Army by that time.
Philip Sheridan, one of the most famous American officers of the Civil War and a Catholic. By this time the oddity of having a Catholic general officer was gone. For that matter, William Sherman was married to a devout Catholic which is something that would have been held against him in an earlier era but was not, and he had converted to Catholicism but was not observant and sometimes disclaimed it. His son would become a Jesuit Priest.
The Civil War brought about a wider change however as American society at large remained viciously anti Catholic prior to the Civil War. Catholics may have found a place in the Army, but they were generally pretty isolated in every way otherwise. Bizarre anti Catholic literature was common accusing Catholics of all sorts of things.
Following the war, however, this largely ceased. The country didn't grow suddenly tolerant, but rather open bizarre hostility stopped. This was in part because the high degree of sectarianism also stopped due to the war. Going into the Civil War Americans not only tended to be strongly Protestant or Catholic (although the level of non observance was much, much higher than imagined, which is another story), but they also tended to strongly have opinions on other Protestant faiths if they were Protestant.
San Miguel Church in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Built between 1610 and 1625, this church is a contemporary to the Anglican church at Jamestown, but it remains in use today. This Catholic church is emblematic of the act that with the large amount of Mexican territory taken in by the United States during the Mexican War, a Hispanic Catholic population was taken in as well.
The American Civil War had come in the wake of the Second Great Awakening, although its technically outside of the time period for that which historians have assigned it and instead in what they have framed as the Third Great Awakening. The Second Great Awakening saw the rise of the a lot of American Protestant denominations including some that had strong millenialism beliefs. Catholics weren't part of this in the United States, of course. But the very strong sectarianism that came up in the period came to a bit of a hiatus due to the Civil War. Prior to the Civil War Americans were ready to cite religion in support of their fighting positions. Mexico's Catholic status had been a cited reason to fight it in some Protestant sermons prior to the Mexican War. The United States had fought a small scale war with the Mormons in the 1850s. Going into the Civil War both sides cited religious grounds for going to war, with both of those sides citing Protestant religious grounds at that.
Let's be clear. Neither the Mexican War nor the Civil War were wars over religion by any means. Protestant ministers who cited Mexico's Catholic nation status as a reason to fight it were sincere, but at the end of the day the Mexican War was fought because Mexico couldn't stomach the thought that it had lost the province of Texas and they couldn't agree to the border with the newly American Texas being where it was claimed to be by the United States. Religion didn't have much to do with that. And the Civil War was about slavery, plain and simple. There were certainly religious overtones to the positions taken by both sides in the Civil War, and religion strongly informed some of those positions, but the war itself was not a religious war which is attested to by some of the oddities of the topic on both sides of the war. The Union had huge numbers of Catholic troops including some who were outright Fenians, but that impacted those units only within them. The Confederacy, which had much higher religious uniformity than the North; it was overwhelmingly Protestant except in Louisiana and many of its senior generals were devout Episcopalians including one who was an Episcopal Bishop found itself taking a position on slavery that had already been condemned by the Catholic Church in Rome but its president toyed with Catholicism throughout his life and the Confederate cabinet included a Jewish member.
But because of the Civil War Americans really backed down on citing religion in an extreme prejudicial way like they had before. Indeed, it wasn't all that long, in spite of ongoing prejudice, that there would be a United States Supreme Court justice on the bench who was both a veteran of the Confederate army and a Catholic.
Which doesn't mean that the prejudice had ended. Well into the 20th Century to be a Catholic was to be subject to prejudice. Catholics were mostly blue collar or agriculturalist, with medicine and the law, two professions always occupied by minorities, the exceptions. They couldn't attend Ivy League schools and remain faithful to their faiths and they largely didn't go on to upper education at all.
Which was the status when the United States entered World War One.
And the status after the war as well.
St. Joseph's Polish Catholic Church, an active church in Denver Colorado today, was built in 1902 as the Polish Catholics wanted their own church separate from the southern Slavic (Balkans) Catholic church one a block away. This is a bit symbolic of the degree to which Catholics lived in ethnic Ghettos at the time, but it was also contrary to the policy of the Catholic Church to attempt to integrate all Catholics into non ethnic congregations. This church was built in 1902 just as Slavic immigration was becoming significant in the United States and obviously various diocese yielded to pressures on occasion. This same neighborhood contains a Russian Orthodox cathedral of the same vintage, reflecting the Slavic nature of the neighborhood. At the time this church was built, Poland wasn't a state and was part of both Russia and Germany.
Indeed, going into the war there were real reasons to worry about some of the Catholic populations of the United States and their receptive loyalties. At the time, Catholicism was heavily represented in Irish, German, French, Italian and "Mexican" demographics. Irish populations identified heavily with their ethnic fellows in Eire, which remained part of the United Kingdom but which was struggling with obtaining home rule and which was suffering under the long impact of religious oppression that had come to an official end only in the 19th Century. German Americans retained a strong sense of pride in their ethnic origin and openly celebrated their Germaness in various ways throughout the year. Hispanics, who were of various origins but whom most of, at that time, traced an origin to from Mexico or Spanish Mexico, were a suspect people both because of their ethnicity and because there were fears that they may sympathize with Carranza who, it was feared, might be sympathizing with the Germans.
Only French Americans, who were mostly Acadians, Cajuns, or Creole's, and Italian Americans, were not suspect. But the French population was so remote from France that it had no real sympathies with France itself and was highly concentrated in Maine and Louisiana. The Italians were recent arrivals who did sympathize with Italy, an Allied power in World War One, and were not accordingly suspect.
Indeed, the Italians were hugely celebrated during World War One in the United States. The Germans, Irish and Mexicans were worried about.
For no reason, as it turned out. They were not disloyal to the United States at all and served loyally. Prejudice against the Germans was vicious in the U.S. but the German population in the country reacted basically by burying their culture to such an extent that it was largely lost. The Irish did not do that, but their service in the Great War, including the fact that they were well represented in the Regular Army and made up the bulk of some National Guard regiments, put aside any fears that people had.
But it didn't do much, indeed anything at all, to address the ongoing prejudice that remained in the country. In that fashion, they found themselves in the same position, but to a much lesser degree, as African Americans. African Americans served very loyally during the war and, unlike World War Two, there were significant numbers of black combat officers in some all black units, but after the war, prejudice against them didn't abate at all.
It'd really take the Second World War to address all of that.
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