Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [619]
By the late 1850s there were seventy-six missions in the metropolis, almost saturating the working-class quarters, yet for all this earnest activity, there was a growing sense that it was little more than an expensive dead end. A vigorous and self-assured workingclass culture seemed to shrug off evangelical efforts as easily as did Middle Eastern Muslims. In 1855, when New York’s population was 629,924, there were only 138,678 communicants in metropolitan churches.
And of these over half, 78,488, were Catholics, a statistic not calculated to warm Protestant hearts. The Irish, long inured to proselytizing by British Protestants, kept evangelicals firmly at bay—a task made easier by the missionaries’ obvious disdain for what they regarded as a cult of medieval superstition and idolatry. (In their determination to guard Christian souls from the clutches of Rome, evangelicals forbade inmates of their homes and shelters to see a priest, even if they were on their deathbeds.) Catholics boycotted “Old Pease’s School,” cursed the redoubtable ladies of the LHMS, and threatened bodily harm to representatives of the Tract Society.
Besides such grass-roots opposition, the evangelicals had the Catholic hierarchy to contend with. Redeeming the poor from “bondage” to Protestant charity was “the noblest work for Catholic charity,” said their spokespaper Freeman’s Journal, and the Church set out to establish a rival aid network. In 1846 Father Varela, pastor of Transfiguration, introduced the St. Vincent de Paul Society to New York City; other parishes quickly established chapters or started their own missions. In 1849 the Sisters of Mercy opened a House of Mercy, which accommodated two hundred destitute women each evening and gave food and clothing to great numbers of the needy. That same year Archbishop Hughes, infuriated that Protestant hospitals blocked priests from visiting Catholic patients, got the Sisters of Charity to launch St. Vincent’s Hospital. (The German Sisters of the Poor would follow suit with St. Francis Hospital.) St. Vincent’s charged a modest admission, in part to remove the stigma of receiving charity, and by 1858 a physician at New York Hospital admitted that “most of our domestic servants prefer” St. Vincent’s.
Catholic and Protestant elites saw eye to eye, however, on the evils of demon rum, being dispensed (as of 1849) at 5,780 licensed liquor groceries, porter houses, taverns, and fancy saloons. The New-York Temperance Society and Bishop Hughes alike welcomed Cork’s famous Father Theobald Mathew to Manhattan, where he spent much of a year preaching against alcohol and inspiring formation of the Roman Catholic Total Abstinence and Benevolent Society. Even pleasure-loving Knickerbocker patricians listened more attentively now to temperance claims that “the cheap wines of France” had been responsible for “insubordination and revolution” in 1848.
Yet here too reformers found themselves up against formidable opponents, starting with the immigrants themselves. When advocates opened a mission next door to a German beer garden in 1860, its outraged customers “evinced their displeasure by throwing water into the open windows, shouting, making noises in the hall, casting stones against the door, and other disorderly conduct; so that the aid of the police became necessary.” In addition, alcohol purveyors ranging from merchant importers to waterfront barkeepers mobilized into a formidable pressure group—the Liquor Dealers Protective Union had eight hundred