Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [434]
Over the 1820s, however, the nonsectarian integrationist vision of the ‘98ers came to seem less compelling to the Irish working class packing into the Five Points. Feeling engulfed and unwanted, they were drawn instead to a defensive ethnic separatism. They preferred the pages of the newly founded and distinctly pro-Catholic weekly, the Truth Teller (1825), which routinely excoriated Protestants who viewed the urban newcomers “with the most determined hostility, hatred and contempt.” They liked the paper’s bold attacks on the American Bible Society, which distributed only Protestant versions of the Scriptures, even though Catholics indignantly refused them. Immigrants purchased their Bibles instead, patronizing newly established Catholic publishing firms like John Doyle’s on Broadway, which put out the popular edition of 1833 known as the Doyle Octavo.
Foreswearing the Shamrock Friendly Association, they turned to groups like the Hibernian Universal Benevolent Society (HUBS), organized by small businessmen and artisans of radical republican bent. Each July fourth, Hibernian painters, coopers, tailors, and cordwainers paraded proudly, displaying their ethnic insignias. Until 1830 the HUBS celebrated St. Patrick’s Day with a procession that wended its through the city’s Irish neighborhood from Harmony Hall to old St. Patrick’s Cathedral. After that its destination was Father Varela’s church on Ann Street (though a Cuban, Varela was hailed as a fellow nationalist and appointed as chaplain of the HUBS). After the parade and church services, celebrants moved on to the plebeian McDermott’s Sixth Ward Hotel for open house festivities (covered in the Truth Teller) that were in sharp contrast to the more exclusive dinners of the Friendly Sons of St. Patrick at Bank’s Coffee House or Niblo’s Garden.
In the late 1820s and early 1830s, the marchers’ ranks were rapidly reinforced. In 1827, when Britain repealed all restrictions on emigration, over twenty thousand Irish had flocked to the new world. By 1835 over thirty thousand Irish were arriving in New York each year, the majority of them poor, unskilled, male, young, and—for the first time in New York City’s long history of Gaelic immigration—Catholic. Fed by this influx, the Church expanded at an unprecedented pace. “The Catholics have a considerable establishment in New-York,” Tocqueville noted. It included such new additions as St. Mary (1826) on Grand Street, for the shipyard workers, and St. Joseph (1829) on Sixth Avenue, which served Greenwich Village contractors and builders. By 1833 Felix Varela’s mission church to the Irish had evolved into two parishes, St. James and Transfiguration—the latter centered from 1836 in a former Presbyterian church on Chambers Street. (St. Paul’s Catholic Church in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, was completed the same year.) The diocese also established a “national” parish, a multiethnic response to a multinational city. In 1833 Bishop John Dubois approved construction of the tiny but quasi-autonomous St. Nicholas Church on East 2nd Street for the three thousand resident Catholic Germans who had up till then had worshiped, unhappily, with the Irish and French.
Newly fortified, the Catholic community displayed a new feistiness in its relations with the Protestant majority. In 1834, for instance, Bishop Dubois suggested to the Public School Society that at least in PSS No. 5 (on Mott Street near St. Pat’s) it remove defamatory language from schoolbooks and allow after-hours use of the building for religious instruction, in order to “ensure the confidence of Catholic parents.” Dubois promised the trustees