Imagine you're a Catholic in the 1840s...

Assistant Editor

What was it like to be a Catholic in the year the Albany Diocese was formed?

Rev. Gerald Fogerty, SJ, a professor of religious studies and history at the University of Virginia, will speak on Feb. 28 on the history of the Albany Diocese in the context of American Catholic history. As a preview of his remarks, he recently spoke with The Evangelist about Catholic customs of 1847:

Q: What was it like to be an immigrant to the Albany Diocese in its founding days?

Father Fogerty: What would the immigrants face? First of all, a horrible sea journey. In 1848, 88,000 Irish came across to New York, and 32,000 died on the way. They were crammed into ships that would take lumber across to Ireland and then load up with immigrants to come back. The ship usually would carry 100 more passengers than they had room for. If the ships usually would hold 400 to 450, they would put 500 to 550 of them stacked in there. And it was usually open -- traveling steerage was not pleasant in the 19th century.

When they got to New York, after 1850, they were put in quarantine. Many times, people went to quarantine and died. As the name implies, it was to check people out for disease. Two of the diseases were typhus and cholera because of the bad conditions, plus whatever they brought with them from Ireland.

If they got to New York, survived being bilked by these people who promised to get them jobs and so on -- if they managed to get through their first few days, they would have to get passage up to Albany. When they got there, people weren't really honest in the jobs they'd been promising.

Q: What were Catholics up against at that time in terms of prejudice?

Father Fogerty: When the immigrants came here, there was a combination of two prejudices. One of them was against foreigners. If you read what they write about the Irish, it sounds like some Southern racist talking about the blacks of the day. That added to the anti-Catholicism. The Church had to protect the immigrants.

Then the difficulty was that to a great extent, Catholicism was privatized. You didn't talk about religion or politics. Once people moved into the middle class, religion was very much part of their private life. There was a great deal of anti-religious feeling around, which was sometimes focused on Catholicism, because we're the big boys on the block. There used to be virulent anti-Catholicism.

The whole "foreign-ness" added to the existing prejudice against Catholics to begin with. Despite the fact that Maryland was founded by Catholics, after 1690 there were laws against Catholics in Maryland. It was not that pleasant. Immigration added to the prejudice. In Albany, there wasn't that much; but in Philadelphia, there were riots. They had to call out the militia. There were 14 people killed in the summer of 1842 when they attempted to go to New York to have a rally against Catholics.

Being a Catholic was not popular, and it was not just polite disagreement. It many times took the form of violence. One of the Church's roles, therefore, was to protect immigrants -- and their faith.

Q: How were American Catholics different from European Catholics?

Father Fogerty: One of the distinctive qualities of American Catholicism was that it was a blend of everything from Europe. This would lead at times to friction between ethnic groups in the Church -- between Germans and Irish; later on between Germans and Irish combined against the Poles and Italians. As each group came, even within the Church, there were problems.

American Catholicism was distinctive on two levels. Rome got very suspicious as early as 1853 about the growing independence of the American bishops. They suspected schism. The other quality of American Catholicism is that there was never any legal restriction on the Church -- there was a social restriction, but nevertheless the law never prohibited the exercise of Catholicism. As a result, there's a type of Catholicism that grew up in this country very much conscious of religious liberty, dialogue with Protestants, cooperation with Protestants and so forth.

Q: What kind of religious observance would a typical Catholic of 1847 have practiced?

Father Fogerty: Within the cities of Albany, Schenectady, Troy, they would have had Mass every Sunday. When you get to the outlying areas -- in the 1850s, two-thirds of the land was still farmland -- there were efforts to start missions. It was not unusual to have Mass maybe once a month. Sometimes, the priest would have Mass on Monday or Tuesday. You were obliged to support the Church, support the pastor and so on.

Q: What about receiving the sacraments?

Father Fogerty: Until 1953, with the change in fasting regulations, most people went to Mass every Sunday, but they didn't go to Communion more than once a month.

It's right in the 1840s and '50s that they started having parish missions throughout the country, and one purpose of that was to get people back active in the Church, those who had not been to Confession and so forth. I would suspect in the 1850s that if people went [to Communion] every two months, it would be a lot. That would be for an active, practicing Catholic.

Q: Were there any differences between local ethnic groups of Catholics?

Father Fogerty: The Irish had one advantage -- in Ireland, they were used to supporting the Church, because the Church was outlawed; so when they got here, they had no problem supporting the Church.

The Church was state-supported [in Germany], which presented somewhat of a problem for them here. It presented more of a problem when the Italians came. They thought these American priests were trying to rob them. They had no idea of the fact that the state was not supporting the Church. The Italians became famous for not supporting the Church, because their tradition had not prepared them for it. The Irish had the advantage of coming from a situation where the Church was outlawed, so in fact there was already a separation of Church and state.

Q: What would the life of a priest have been like?

Father Fogerty: The Roman collar came about in 1884. [Until then, priests dressed as other locals did.] For the most part, the priest would be very much a man of the people. He had a better education, but he was living with his people. He probably came from the same social background.

Because a priest was well-educated, he would automatically be seen as one of the leaders of the community -- but it was not an easy job. In some of those outlying areas, the priest would ride by horseback. You had the plank roads; there were more plank roads in New York State than in any other state in the 1840s. Then you had the railroads; but, of course, they ran between major cities, so [to reach] these rural villages, the priest rode a horse or a stagecoach.

Many times, the housekeeper -- often a cousin or sister -- was really running the shop, if the priest was away for a couple of days, riding his circuit. If you got a message in the middle of the night that someone was dying 30 miles away, that was a bit of a trip.

(Father Gerald Fogerty, SJ., will speak on the history of the Albany Diocese, Feb. 28, 7:30 p.m., at the Hart Theater of the Empire Center at the Egg, Albany. Free tickets are available by calling your parish or 453-6670.)

(02-13-97) [[In-content Ad]]