Render Unto Rome_ The Secret Life of Money in the Catholic Church - Jason Berry [17]
In 1834 a nun wandered out of Charlestown’s large Ursuline convent, where sixty young ladies studied under a dozen Parisian-trained Irish sisters. In a state of mental collapse, the woman ended up at her brother’s house; she returned to the convent apparently of her own accord. As gossip coiled through the town, a Congregationalist minister named Lyman Beecher whipped up emotions already fed by lurid newspaper stories of the “kidnapped” girl in the nunnery. He accused the pope of wanting to colonize the Mississippi Valley. Town selectmen marched to the convent, demanding entry to investigate; a mob overran them, drove out the women, and set the place on fire. As the convent burned down, drunks fed a bonfire with books and furniture, dancing about in nuns’ habits. Boston Protestants expressed outrage, but few rioters were arrested. A sham trial ended with no one convicted. In 1836 another mob torched most of the Irish neighborhoods. Violence ripped through Irish ghettos of New York, Philadelphia, and Detroit as roiling nativist fears targeted people who had fled deep hardship back home.22
A fungus that ravaged Ireland’s large potato crop led to mass starvation and a diaspora of 3 million people between 1845 and 1870.23 Thirty-nine percent of people born in Ireland no longer lived there by 1890; most of the emigrants fled to Britain, North America, or Australia. In the decade after 1846, ships bearing 130,000 Irish arrived at Boston. “Our country is literally being overrun with the miserable, vicious and unclean paupers of the old country,” the Bunker Hill Aurora railed in 1848. As the Irish crept up from harbor streets toward triple-decker apartments on Bunker Hill, Protestants were moving back toward Somerville or across the bridge into Greater Boston. In 1880 the archbishop began a system of Catholic schools for Boston.24 As Charlestown became heavily Irish, Boston’s Italian population doubled, between 1881 and 1886, to 220,000. When Peter Borré’s grandparents put down stakes in the 1880s, the Irish outnumbered the Italians three to one. Charlestown in the early 1900s was still heavily Irish.
Boston in the late 1930s used federal funds to build a housing project close to the Mystic River in Charlestown. The demolitions phase burdened St. Catherine of Siena’s pastor with the task of “reconstructing a parish which was depopulated and nearly obliterated,” according to a parish history. “On his shoulders came all the misery and distress of seeing hundreds of his faithful parishioners forced to leave their homes and dispersed throughout greater Boston.”25
Charlestown after World War II was still largely Irish and working class. A culture of young Townies clashed with the cops and gangs from other neighborhoods. Charlestown lay in a congressional district that in 1946 drew twenty-nine-year-old John F. Kennedy as a candidate; handsome and rich, he lived in a fine hotel on Beacon Street. Kennedy downplayed his patrician gloss by shaking hands after dawn with shipyard workers and climbing the stairs of triple-deckers to meet stay-at-home mothers, emphasizing his service in World War II. Kennedy presented a check for $650,000 on behalf of his family to Archbishop Richard Cushing for a hospital in Brighton to be named for his brother Joseph Kennedy, who had gone down in a plane in World War II.26 JFK won over a large share of Townies in winning the election. In April 1961, he welcomed fellow members of the Bunker Hill Council of the Knights of Columbus to a reception on the White House lawn, where they thrilled at “jawing with their President.”27
Cushing became a cardinal and legendary fund-raiser as Boston Catholics gained prosperity. By 1967 he had overseen $300 million in construction projects, which included three hundred elementary or high schools, plus eighty-six new parishes. His insurance plan for archdiocesan property “saved his