USA > Massachusetts > Commonwealth history of Massachusetts, colony, province and state, volume 5 > Part 47
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THE BURNING OF THE URSULINE CONVENT (1834)
Beginning with some minor disturbances in 1829, the anti- Catholic agitation increased until five years later it brought forth the famous "burning of the Charlestown convent." The Ursuline nuns, originally settled on Franklin Street, Bos- ton, had been transferred by Bishop Fenwick in 1826 to a more commodious location, in what is now the eastern part of Somerville but was then included in Charlestown. Here on a hill called "Mt. Benedict" (in honor of the bishop), with a splendid view of Boston, the harbor, and environs, there arose a handsome convent and boarding school, surrounded by gardens and terraces, greenhouse and vineyards. As the gentle sisters of St. Ursula were known to be highly cultivated women and accomplished teachers, and as such opportunities for the education of girls were rare enough in New England at that time, the school soon came to be largely frequented, mainly by the daughters of wealthy Protestant families.
In the summer of 1834 public attention was attracted to this flourishing and peaceful institution, first by a "whispering campaign" started by an imaginative and mendacious girl
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(Rebecca Reed), and then by the fact that one of the nuns, broken down by over work in teaching, had left the convent, in a state of delirium, and gone to the house of a friend, though it was true that as soon as her reason returned she promptly and voluntarily went back to Mt. Benedict, full of regret for what she had done. The wildest stories soon circulated about the attempted flight and forcible recapture of the "mysterious lady," who was now supposed to be im- prisoned in the convent. "In the popular mind, the building on Mt. Benedict became a very labyrinth of dungeons, crowded with instruments of torture and every iniquity." Placards summoned the "brave and free" to "unshield the avenging sword" and "leave not one stone upon another of that curst nunnery."
On the evening of August 11, 1834, a band of fifty of the "brave and free," well disguised and equipped with tar bar- rels, muskets, stones, and a barrel of rum, descended upon the convent. A huge bonfire and the clanging of the firebells brought thousands of people to the spot, though none of the spectators, the firemen, or the selectmen of Charlestown made any serious attempt to interfere with the ghastly scenes that followed. While terror and confusion reigned inside the building, the dauntless superior faced the mob bravely, per- haps too defiantly, at any rate fruitlessly.
About midnight, the howling, swearing, menacing crowd burst into the convent. The place was sacked from top to bottom; even tombs were desecrated, the sacred vessels stolen, the consecrated Hosts from the tabernacle profaned and strewn about; and then the building, the first fruits of Catholic educational enterprise in New England, went up in a roar of flames. By a hair's breadth the nuns and their pupils effected their escape, and made their way, pursued across the fields, to sheltering homes around Winter Hill. So ended what a Protestant historian has called "this most outrageous assault upon a house occupied solely by ten feeble women and fifty terror-stricken children." "Never," he adds, "at least in New England, has there been a more cowardly performance."
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EFFECTS OF THE DESTRUCTION OF THE CONVENT (1834-1835)
Catholic feelings over the event can be imagined. Crowds of Irish laborers on the Worcester, Lowell, and Providence railroads started for Boston, vowing to defend the nuns, and doubtless with blood in their eyes. But on the evening fol- lowing the tragedy Bishop Fenwick assembled his people in the cathedral and preached from the text, "Love your enemies. Do good to them that hate you, and pray for them that persecute and calumniate you." So successful was he in calming and controlling his flock that the crisis passed off without an act of retaliation on the Catholic side.
Law-loving Protestants were no less indignant than Catho- lics. Meetings of protest were held in Faneuil Hall, Cam- bridge, and Charlestown, led by men like Edward Everett, Judge Story, Harrison Gray Otis, and T. H. Perkins. A citizens' committee in Boston, headed by Charles G. Loring, investigated the affair and brought in a report completely vindicating the Ursulines and their school and roundly con- demning the outrage.
But the ensuing judicial proceedings showed that by no means the whole community shared such opinions. Of the nine persons brought to trial for participation in the attack, eight were acquitted, whether because of the partiality of the jury or through the force of excited and misguided public opinion. Only one conviction was obtained; and that in the case of a boy of seventeen, who had taken part in the affair simply as a lark. Bishop Fenwick promptly headed a success- ful petition for his pardon, and the Ursulines joined in the request. In the end, then, no one was punished. The State, notwithstanding persistent efforts, refused to grant an in- demnity. The Ursulines, after a brief attempt to start up their school again in Roxbury, an attempt thwarted by the continued hooliganism and threats of violence to which they were subjected, retired to Canada.
THE DARKEST YEARS (1834-1837)
The years immediately following this affair were the most trying period in the history of Catholicism in Massachusetts.
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This was the time when Catholic churches were so frequently threatened that the bishop, despairing of aid from the au- thorities, authorized his people to prepare to defend them- selves; when the men of St. Patrick's, Northampton Street, had to turn out well armed night after night to guard their church against incendiaries; when the bishop's life was men- aced; when the anniversary of "Mt. Benedict" was celebrated by shooting him in effigy; when the Washington Artillery re- vived "Pope Day"; when the Pilot office had to be put un- der police protection ; when Boston elected a "Native Amer- ican" mayor (Thomas A. Davis).
The climax was reached in 1837. On June 11 came the "Broad Street Riot," when a mob attacked the Irish quarter of Boston with such fury that that section would probably have been wiped out but for the prompt action of Mayor Samuel A. Eliot in bringing out the militia. On Sept. 12 there was a new outbreak, when the "Montgomery Guards," a newly- formed Irish-American militia company, were grossly insulted by other units of the militia' at a muster on Boston Common, and pelted with missiles and insults by the crowds in the streets as they marched back to their armory near Faneuil Hall. These events, at any rate, seem to have produced a reaction in public opinion. Henceforth the anti-Catholic and Nativist agitation appeared for a while to die away. Nat- urally it did not fail to leave more or less lasting results. Of Bishop Fenwick, whose calm and forbearing course throughout the crisis cannot be too highly commended, it can only be said that his spirit was broken and never revived.
For the rest, the events of those years left a twofold result. "On the one hand, by identifying the term 'Catholic' with 'Irish,' they narrowed the Church socially, and checked the stream of American conversions, to which Bishop Fenwick had looked forward with confidence. On the other hand, they solidified the Irish Catholics, with whom the sense of race wrongs gave powerful support to religious constancy."
THE AGE OF THE PIONEER PRIESTS (1830-1860)
In spite of all opposition, the Church was making steady and notable progress. This was the time when the Catholic population, hitherto confined mainly to a few towns along
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the coast, began to penetrate all over the State. Crowds of Irish immigrants, who went out to labor on the canals, the turnpikes, the new railroads, or in the mills so rapidly spring- ing up at that time, remained settled in the Merrimac, the Blackstone, and the Connecticut valleys, and in the towns of the Cape and the Berkshires.
In their track followed a little band of indefatigable priests, eager to bring the rites, the sacraments, and the consolations of their religion to every wandering sheep. This was the great age of the "pioneer priest." Something of a halo still clings to the memories of such fine exemplars of that class as Fr. James Fitton, who, during twenty-five years of missionary labors, scoured nearly the whole of New England; Fr. Mat- thew Gibson, the chief upbuilder of the Church in the region around Worcester; and Frs. John D. Brady and Bernard O'Cavanaugh, the first apostles of the Berkshires.
In most Massachusetts communities the history of Catholic origins is much the same story. First the time when the people might have to trudge half a day's journey to hear Mass in some distant town, or a priest might come from forty miles away to visit a single sick bed. Next, a priest arrives to organize more or less regular services, and wanders from "shanty" to "shanty" and from "pit" to "pit" to hunt for Catholics. He gathers them around him for Mass, at first in all kinds of places-in the largest cottage, in the "boarding- house," in the "machine-shop," in a barn, in the open air, under a tree. Presently a resident pastor is assigned to the place ; and a disused Protestant church is bought or, more commonly, a new edifice is built, at the cost of what brave sacrifices from poor congregations and what trials and anx- ieties for pastors we shall never fully realize. Plain little wooden structures they were for the most part, those first Catholic churches, which have since almost everywhere been replaced by the far larger and more imposing brick or stone churches of the later nineteenth century.
While at the outset a certain hostility was sometimes evinced by non-Catholics, and still more an immense curiosity to see and hear the first "popish" or "Paddy priest" that appeared among them-as if he had been some new wonder of nature-on the whole rural Massachusetts seems to have
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BISHOP FITZPATRICK
received the Church with more tolerance than did the cities. It is pleasant to recall the very numerous cases in which Protestant churches lent their buildings for holding Catholic services, or in which generous Protestants donated land or money for the first Catholic churches.
By the end of Fenwick's episcopate (1846), the number of Catholics in Massachusetts had grown from 3,500 to 55,000; the number of churches from 4 to 40; the number of priests from 5 to 44 (as compared with the situation at Cheverus's departure). The organization and administration of the diocese had been set on a sound basis by Fenwick's firm and prudent management. Education, in which he was especially interested, had been advanced by the establishment of the first Catholic college in New England, Holy Cross, at Worcester (1843), an institution of which the bishop was the founder but which he at once turned over to the Jesuits. A beginning of Catholic effort in another field was the orphan asylum conducted by the Sisters of Charity, now located in Cambridge, whose long and honorable history goes back to 1831.
BISHOP FITZPATRICK (1846-1866)
Fenwick was succeeded by John Bernard Fitzpatrick (born in Boston in 1812, the son of Irish immigrants), who had already been his coadjutor since 1844. The new bishop was a man of majestic presence, tall, dignified, and handsome. Of the character and attainments which had brought him to the episcopate at such an early age, Brownson, no mean judge, declares that he was "the soundest theologian," "the most perfect master of the spiritual life," and "one of the ablest as well as most modest men" he had ever known. Un- fortunately, Bishop Fitzpatrick appears to have overtaxed his strength by excessive work during the first half of his episcopate, so that during the second half he was pretty much an invalid, and he died relatively young.
The Fitzpatrick era coincides with the high tide of Irish immigration, which attained enormous and unprecedented pro- portions during the famine years from 1845 to 1847, and continued steadily down to the '60s. Naturally the Church grew by leaps and bounds. If under Cheverus the
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Catholics in this Commonwealth had been little more than a handful, and under Fenwick only a small minority, under Fitzpatrick they became one of the largest religious bodies. In Boston they already formed about two fifths of the popu- lation. Between 1846 and 1866 the number of churches in- creased from 40 to 109; the number of priests from 44 to 119; and the number of Catholics from 55,000 to about 200,000. The period also saw the introduction of new religious orders and a considerable development along charitable and educa- tional lines; notably the first parochial schools, and the open- ing in 1863 by the Jesuits of Boston College, a second institution of higher studies.
KNOW-NOTHING TIMES (1854-1860)
Inevitably, perhaps, the striking growth of the Church during the '50s brought on a new outburst of anti-Catholic feeling, expressed this time through the "American" or "Know-Nothing" political party. The sudden rise of this organization and its spectacular triumph in the State election of 1854 have been related elsewhere in this work. Aided, of course, by many factors besides the religious issue, the Know-Nothings had succeeded in electing their candidates for governor and for every seat in the legislature, save for three in the lower house. For the next three years (1855- 1857) Catholics in Massachusetts enjoyed the privilege of living under the rule of a State party whose first principle was hostility to their religion and whose most immediate aim was to exclude all of them from public office.
Characteristic of the affronts inflicted at that time was the Election Sermon, preached before the governor and the General Court at the opening of the session of 1857 by the Rev. John Pike, which was one long diatribe against "that infallible Church which has covered many an island and main- land with ignorance, crimes, and wo," with incidental jibes against the "barbarism" that still enshrouded all those parts of Ireland that had not been happily "torn from their old faith"-a sermon thankfully received and printed at the expense of the Commonwealth.
Nevertheless, in a practical way not much was done to save
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the State from the "Romish peril." The sole "achievements" of the Know-Nothing administration along this line were to disband the Irish-American companies of the militia, and to appoint a committee to "visit and examine theological semi- naries, boarding-schools, academies, nunneries, convents, and other institutions of a like character" (1855). This "nunnery committee," or "smelling committee," as the irreverent styled it, visited the Jesuit college at Worcester and two convents at Roxbury and Lowell. Unfortunately no scandals could be discovered, though the committee displayed an inquisitiveness and suspiciousness equalled only by their thirst for good whiskey and by the freedom from conventional restraints that led one of them to carry around with him on this moral crusade a lady inaccurately described as "his wife."
Outside the legislation halls, the campaign against "Roman- ism" went merrily on for a few years, whether organized or spontaneous. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, on a public occasion in 1888, declared that he had got his first lesson about religious liberty from watching the burning of the Charlestown convent, and his second when "in the Know- Nothing days I saw procession after procession of Protestants march through the streets then occupied by Irish Catholics, with torchlights and having every form of insulting banner in their hands, and making every effort to taunt these Catho- lics out of their homes and bring them into a street fight, which from the self-control of these naturalized citizens they failed to do." One familiar figure in these "No Popery" parades, as another witness relates, was a crazy man known as the "Angel Gabriel," who generally led the way "mounted on a white horse and blowing a bugle, while troops of wild- eyed fanatics hallelujahed in his wake."
Those times were filled with unpleasant episodes: attacks and threatened attacks upon Catholic homes, churches, and cemeteries; the blowing up of the church in Dorchester (1854) ; boycotts against Catholic storekeepers and laborers; Catholic priests denied access to public institutions ("I'll allow no Paddy superstition to go on in a house under my control," declared the superintendent of the almshouse in Fitchburg) ; Catholic children in the public schools severely beaten by teachers for refusing to use the Protestant Bible. One inci-
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dent of the kind last mentioned, the "Wall case" of 1859, attracted so much attention that it led to a reform of religious practices in the public schools and also to the election of the first Catholics on the Boston School Committee.
The Civil War cleared the atmosphere. Then, as in all other wars, the Catholics of Massachusetts demonstrated that they yielded to none of their fellow citizens in patriotism and courage, or in examples of extraordinary individual heroism. Two regiments that went to the front were so distinctively composed of men of Irish blood and Catholic faith that they were allowed by the State to carry the Green Flag along with the Stars and Stripes. For nearly a quarter of a century thereafter religious animosities in Massachusetts seemed very largely forgotten.
ARCHBISHOP WILLIAMS (1866-1907)
On Bishop Fitzpatrick's death (Feb. 13, 1866), the Rt. Rev. John J. Williams, who had been his vicar-general, was appointed his successor. The new bishop, like his predeces- sor, had been born in Boston (1822), and was the son of Irish immigrants. During an unusually long tenure of office he was to show himself in all things a model shepherd of his flock, and by wisdom, gentleness, and modesty to win the esteem and affection of the whole community.
Soon after his accession the ecclesiastical geography of Massachusetts was fixed substantially in the form it has since retained. The diocese of Boston, which originally included the whole of New England, had been reduced by the cutting- off of Connecticut and Rhode Island (1843) and then of Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont (1853) so as to em- brace only Massachusetts. The rapid growth of the Church now necessitated the erection of the new diocese of Spring- field (1870), made up of Worcester, Hampden, Hampshire, Franklin, and Berkshire Counties. In 1872 a part of south- eastern Massachusetts (the Counties of Bristol, Barnstable, Dukes, and Nantucket, and the towns of Marion, Mattapoisett, and Wareham in Plymouth County) was also detached from Boston to enlarge the new diocese of Providence. In 1904 this same area was organized into a separate diocese, Fall River, the third to be erected within the limits of Massa-
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GROWTH OF THE CHURCH
chusetts. In 1875 Boston was raised to the rank of an arch- bishopric, the metropolitan see of a province which included all New England.
GROWTH OF THE CHURCH (1866-1907)
The old cathedral on Franklin Street, the cradle of Catholi- cism in this Commonwealth, had been sold in 1860, abandoned both because of its small size and because of its location in a district now given over entirely to business. Its replacement by a structure adequate to new needs and to the position which Boston had attained in the Catholic world, involved many years of planning and labor. December 8, 1875 the newly created archbishop had the pleasure of dedicating the new Cathedral of the Holy Cross on south Washington Street, a huge edifice in the early English Gothic style, which in size surpasses many of the cathedrals of Europe and which at that time was considered a triumph of American architecture.
An achievement which probably lay even closer to the archbishop's heart, was the foundation of St. John's Ecclesi- astical Seminary in Brighton (opened 1884). This was dis- tinctly his personal work, and by it he at last provided an institution for the training of candidates for the priesthood -a need which the diocese of Boston had been relatively slow to meet.
Limits of space preclude any attempt to describe the enor- mous progress made by the Church along other lines during this long episcopate-the multiplication of religious orders; the attempt, beginning after the Third Plenary Council of Baltimore in 1884, to establish a parochial school in every parish capable of maintaining one; and the rapid growth of charitable institutions-for which the decade 1860-70 was preeminently the "era of foundations."
This expansion was made possible largely by the fact that Catholic immigration continued at flood tide. If the Irish were no longer coming in such numbers as during the "Great Immigration" after the famine, their places were taken from the late '60s onward by the French Canadians, and after 1880 by Italians, Poles, Lithuanians, and Portuguese. For the State as a whole between 1866 and 1907 the number of churches grew from 109 to 487; the number of priests increased from
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119 to 1035; and the number of Catholics swelled from about 200,000 to well over 1,200,000. By the latter date the Cath- olic Church had come to outnumber all other religious bodies in Massachusetts taken together.
THE SCHOOL QUESTION (1888-1889)
The one serious issue that arose during this period between the Church and a section of the non-Catholic community re- lated to the school question. The rapid development of paro- chial schools after 1884 gave rise in some quarters to fears that a large proportion of the youth of Massachusetts would henceforth receive an education inferior to that given by the public schools; or at least one that would tend to keep them apart from their fellows, and to hamper the great work of assimilating and Americanizing the now so heterogeneous pop- ulation of the Commonwealth.
In 1888 and 1889 bills were brought in before the legisla- ture providing for the inspection and supervision of all private schools by the local school committees, though it was clear that the framers of this legislation had only Catholic schools in view and that some of its supporters were animated by very hostile intentions. Indeed, the bill of 1889 would have placed the very existence of each parochial school at the mercy of the local school committee; and its provisions were so drastic that, had it ever become law, it might have plunged Massachusetts into a veritable Kulturkampf. Behind this measure stood the newly formed "A.P.A." (American Pro- tective Association), whose principles, aims and language were strongly reminiscent of the Know-Nothings. Arrayed on the other side were such liberal Protestants as President Eliot of Harvard, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, and Ed- ward Everett Hale, who argued that the proposed legislation would violate the rights of parents and freedom of conscience, and that nothing could be worse for civic peace and harmony than to have each community annually convulsed with re- ligious antagonisms at every election of a school committee. After two years of excitement, controversy, and protracted hearings before legislative committees, the measures in ques- tion were dropped; and the existence and free development of the parochial schools have never since been called in question.
From a photograph by Canlin, Boston
HIS EMINENCE, WILLIAM CARDINAL O'CONNELL
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In more recent years a few outstanding issues in which freedom of conscience was involved have been settled without serious difficulty. Catholics have secured laws recognizing the right of their clergy to enter all State, city, and town institutions at all times for the purpose of celebrating Mass, hearing confessions, and visiting the sick. And the law now guarantees the right of every minor ward for whom the State finds a home to be brought up in the faith of its parents. In general, it may be said that the Catholic Church now enjoys in Massachusetts the fullest liberty that it could possibly desire.
CARDINAL O'CONNELL, SECOND ARCHBISHOP OF BOSTON (1907)
Archbishop Williams' successor, now His Eminence William Cardinal O'Connell, was born in Lowell, Dec. 8, 1859. Edu- cated in the public schools of his native city, at St. Charles' College (Baltimore), Boston College, and the American Col- lege at Rome, he was ordained to the priesthood in the Basil- ica of St. John Lateran, June 8, 1884. There followed eleven busy and fruitful years of parish work in Medford and the crowded West End of Boston; six years as rector of the American College (1895-1901) ; five years as Bishop of Port- land, broken only by an important, delicate, and highly successful mission to Japan as extraordinary envoy of Pope Pius X (1905). Then followed the calling of the still youth- ful prelate to Boston to become coadjutor-bishop (1906), and within a year to succeed to the archbishopric. In 1911 he was raised to the rank of cardinal, being the third Amer- ican to receive what is, save for the Papacy itself, the highest dignity in the gift of the Catholic Church.
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