Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [598]
This state of affairs was reproduced in New York City. Many immigrants were ignorant of the simplest Catholic rituals and skipped even Sunday Masses; those inclined to go couldn’t afford pew rents, an American invention. Most hewed instead to rituals like wakes—festive and largely social events that left no room for a priest. The metropolitan hierarchy and the more affluent and anglicized among the laity were eager to church the immigrants, to be sure, but Catholicism was even weaker in New York than in the old country: here there were only eight churches, and one priest for every eight thousand Catholics.
John Hughes, self-proclaimed “bishop and chief” of the Irish community, set out to transform this situation. With considerable assistance from the international Catholic community, he succeeded brilliantly in welding his scattered and dispirited countrymen and women into a coherent body. One of the first great “brick and mortar” priests, Hughes embarked on a mammoth building program, particularly in the uptown industrial wards into which his would-be parishioners were moving. He provided churches for the railroad builders who settled in Harlem and Yorkville villages, built the Church of Annunciation at Manhattanville (1853) for the Hudson River Railroad crews, and erected St. Paul’s on 59th Street for the shantytown squatters on the city’s western edge in 1858. By the 1860s nine new Catholic churches had been organized between 14th and 42nd streets, the overall total had gone from eight to thirty-one, and plans had been set in motion to erect a spectacular new St. Patrick’s Cathedral on Fifth Avenue.
Nor were outlying areas neglected. St. Raymond’s, established in 1843, was the first Catholic church in the Bronx. In southern Brooklyn, St. John the Evangelist was founded in 1846, with services held in nearby stables until its tall wooden structure at 21st Street off Fifth Avenue was dedicated in 1851. Two years later Brooklyn became a separate diocese under Bishop John Loughlin.
German Catholics presented a special problem. Hughes opposed “national parishes.” He want to preside over a unified community, not a congeries of ethnic ghettoes. Nor was Hughes comfortable with the Germans, whose piety was of a fervent counterreformation variety. Nevertheless, when the Germans pushed to construct their own churches and use their own language, Hughes did not stand in their way. In 1844 Manhattan Redemptorists raised the Church of the Most Holy Redeemer, whose original wooden structure was replaced in 1851 with what German New Yorkers called their “cathedral,” and indeed Most Holy Redeemer’s 250-foot tower dominated the Kleindeutschland skyline. In all, seven German churches were established by 1860, along with mutual aid groups independent of those provided by the Irish-dominated Catholic hierarchy.
Hughes’s second priority was to train a cadre of priests and nuns. To this end he built St. John’s College (later Fordham) on 106 acres near the Village of Fordham, twelve miles north of the city, newly accessible by railroad. Opened in 1841, presided over by the Rev. John McCloskey (later, New York’s first cardinal), St. John’s began preparing young men from wealthier Irish families for the priesthood and other professions. Hughes knew, however, that he had neither the priests nor the money to sustain such an institution, so he turned to the Jesuits, his worries about allowing such