Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [502]
Communalism had its downside, however. Temperance helped respectable Anglo Protestant artisans distinguish themselves from the (putatively dissolute) Catholic poor, a source of psychic comfort at a time when the line dividing the two communities had become thinner than ever. But the depression had also galvanized New York’s Irish Catholics. They too pursued consolation in consolidation and asserted an ever greater cultural and political presence in the city. In a context of frightening economic insecurity, heightened communal sensibilities could and did easily degenerate into urban tribalism. Soon the mid-thirties dream of working-class solidarity would be drowned in a sea of ethnic and religious bitterness.
. . . AND ROMANISM
The depression had badly battered the Catholic Church. Father Varela’s Transfiguration was in particularly grim shape. Back in prosperous 1836 he and the lay trustees had borrowed tens of thousands of dollars, in small sums, from the poor people of the parish to buy a vacated Presbyterian church on Chambers Street. Now desperate parishioners, many of them out of work for months and “in the utmost distress,” implored him to return their money lest landlords seize their few pieces of furniture as payment for rent. Transfiguration itself was on the verge of being auctioned off, however, and only managed to stave off creditors by mortgaging its organ.
Bishop John DuBois was not prepared to deal with a crisis of this magnitude. Now seventy-four, he had been a priest for nearly fifty years and head of the diocese since 1826. Even before the panic, the aging Frenchman, long resented by the Irish community and hierarchy, had signaled his readiness to pass power to the immigrant-strengthened Gaels. The American bishops, accordingly, now dispatched John Hughes, a priest in Philadelphia, to aid DuBois and his flock.
Hughes was himself an Irish immigrant. The son of poor farmers, he had arrived in the United States back in 1817, aged twenty, and supported himself as a gardener while studying for the priesthood. More than ethnicity distinguished him from DuBois. Where the bishop had shied away from controversy, fearing to raise the profile of an outnumbered community, Hughes thrived on conflict and had long urged Catholics to fight for political and civil rights. With his stern mouth, muscular body, and intimidating presence, Hughes looked like a fighter. His nickname of “Dagger John” rested on more than his penchant for inscribing a stiletto-like cross next to his signature.
Two weeks after Hughes arrived in 1838, DuBois suffered a paralytic stroke, and the newcomer took effective control of the diocese. In 1842, on DuBois’s death, Hughes would become bishop, the first prelate to be consecrated in St. Patrick’s, and his elevation would mark the ascendancy of the Irish in the New York church. The dethroned French, perhaps by way of consolation, were awarded their own parish of St. Vincent de Paul in 1841.
In the fall of 1839 Hughes sailed to Europe seeking aid from wealthy Catholics. He did receive funds from the Austrian Leopoldine Society, but these were earmarked for a college and seminary—the future Fordham—and for recruiting priests and teachers for Catholic schools. The troubled New York church would have to make it on its own.
With Catholics still a small minority—the diocese had only eight of the city’s 150 churches—Hughes was convinced the community had to rally round its faith, as various Protestant sects had been doing. In 1840 Father Varela founded the New York Catholic Temperance Association; hundreds took the pledge at Transfiguration gatherings, and within a year the group had five thousand members. Hughes, however, decided to focus on the schools.
Missionary protestantism still permeated Public School Society classrooms. The King James Bible—which Catholics would not accept even when the American Bible