Below Fourteenth street we have, therefore, fourteen churches, most of them very large, surrounded by a dense Catholic population, and crowded with overflowing congregations. A very large proportion of our Catholic population is in this part of the city.
Between Fourteenth and Eighty-sixth streets we have fifteen churches: St. Columba's and St. Vincent de Paul's (French) in the Sixteenth ward, St. Francis Xavier's and the Immaculate Conception in the Eighteenth, St. Francis's (German), St. John Baptist's (German), and St. Michael's in the Twentieth, St. Stephen's and St. Gabriel's in the Twenty-first, Holy Cross, Assumption (German), and St. Paul's in the Twenty-second, St. Boniface's, St. John's, and St. Lawrence's in the Nineteenth. Above Eighty-sixth street we have St. Paul's, Harlem, and the Annunciation and St. Joseph's (German), Manhattanville. [Footnote 61]
[Footnote 61: Of these churches, St. Teresa's, Immaculate Conception St. Michael's, St. Gabriel's, St. Boniface's, Assumption, St. Paul's, and St. Joseph's (German), are comparatively new; and a very large cathedral, capable of containing 10,000 persons is building. St. Stephen's is also being enlarged to a capacity of 5,000, and a church has been purchased for the Italians.]
After the old Catholic fashion of jamming and crowding, all these churches might allow somewhere near 200,000 persons, or two-thirds of the adult Catholic population, to hear mass on any one Sunday, if they should all attempt to do so on the same day. Judging by the way churches are crowded, we would suppose that more than two-thirds attend occasionally; and of those who do not, the majority neglect it through poverty, discouragement, indolence, and a careless habit, or some other reason which does not imply loss of faith. As to confessions and communions, they flow in a ceaseless stream throughout the year, as if the paschal time were perpetual. In cachone of our churches there are from 100 to 500 communions every week, and a much greater number on the principal festivals. Probably the usual number of communions in the city, on any Sunday taken at random, is not short of 5,000. At least 8,000 children receive first communion and confirmation every year; and from 40,000 to 50,000 are instructed every week in the catechism, the Sunday schools varying in their numbers from 500 to 2,500.
The Catholic population is increasing at the rate of at least 20,000 a year. New York is now about the fourth city in the world in Catholic population, and bids fair, in a few years, to rank next to Paris in this respect.
The Catholic institutions for education, strictly within the city limits, are:
1. Two colleges, St. Francis Xavier's and Manhattan colleges, the first conducted by Jesuits, and the second by Christian Brothers.
2. Two academies for boys and twelve for girls.
3. Twenty-one parochial schools for boys, and twenty for girls, the whole containing about 14,000 pupils.