Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [893]
The Church of Our Lady of Mount Carmel was the first Italian-built church in Manhattan. But because it was situated on the border with the Irish and German community, and the bulk of the funds for its construction had come from older immigrants, Italians were sent to the basement to worship. La Madonna too, her gown now covered with precious stones, was placed in la chiesa inferiore.
This exile to the lower depths rubbed against Italian sensibilities—already raw from their dealings with Irish foremen and contractors, or with Irish nuns who placed Italian parochial school children in the rear of the room. In part as spiritual defiance, the festival, and others that now sprouted around the city, grew to enormous proportions by the 1890s. Thousands flocked to the food and games, bands and dancing, costumes and parades. The gathering also provided a stabilizing center for dislocated migrants, and by parading La Madonna through the neighborhood’s streets and parks they put their cultural stamp on a piece of the alien New York world.
The archdiocese remained dismayed by the cult’s “pagan” quality, its barefoot faith, its flashy street religiosity. They resented the dominance of the Mount Carmel society over the festa, correctly seeing it as a lay challenge to ecclesiastical control over immigrant religious life. They were also unsettled by feast-day inversion of patriarchal proprieties. Normally, Italian street life was dominated by men, who milled in front of their regional and social clubs, playing boccie and card games, but during the festa of La Madonna women commanded the streets. Finally they feared the festa would hinder Italians’ Americanization, a concern shared by German Jews vis-à-vis their Russian coreligionists.
In 1887 Archbishop Corrigan called for clerical reinforcements. He asked Rome and religious orders for additional Italian priests and encouraged the Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart to work here. With the pope’s particular blessing, Mother Frances Xavier Cabrini arrived with a few sisters in 1889, founded an orphanage, and opened Columbus Hospital in 1892. New Italian parishes were established, joining Mount Carmel and the Franciscans’ 1866 Church of St. Anthony of Padua in Greenwich Village. Corrigan authorized eight Italian churches, including the Scalabrinians’ Saint Joachim on the Lower East Side’s Roosevelt Street in 1888 and the Jesuits’ Missione Italiana della Madonna di Loreto, established in 1891 on Elizabeth Street.
Still, the disconcerting 115th Street festa continued. The matter was referred to higher levels. Unfortunately for Irish prelates, the decisive precincts were in Italy. In the next decade East Harlemites petitioned Pope Leo XIII to elevate their Mount Carmel shrine to the dignity of a sanctuary under the special protection of the Virgin. Only two such existed in the New World: Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico and Our Lady of Perpetual Help in New Orleans. The pontiff would decide that the devotion met two of the formal requirements for coronation: evidences of favors granted the devout by the Virgin and popularity of the cult. Leo waived the third criterion, antiquity, perhaps on the grounds that in New York, where everything moved so fast, twenty years was the equivalent of two hundred in Europe. More likely, Leo was well aware that the crowning asserted the authority of the Roman-centered papacy over Irish-American prelates, and in America’s most modern city to boot. And so, before an enormous crowd in Jefferson Park, the Madonna of 115th Street would receive her crown, made in New York out of the melted-down golden rings, brooches, and family heirlooms contributed by grateful