from Maine to Florida, from New York to California.
Bishop England, though inclined to exaggerate the losses of the church in this country, was certainly not mistaken in holding that during the period of which we speak, though there was an increase of congregations, there was yet a great falling away of Catholics from the faith in the United States.
Unfortunately, the want of priests and churches cannot with truth be said to have been the greatest evil, especially in the early years of the organization of the hierarchy. A spirit of insubordination existed both in the clergy and the laity. “Every day,” wrote Bishop Carroll, “furnishes me with new reflections, and almost every day produces new events to alarm my conscience and excite fresh solicitude at the prospect before me. You cannot conceive the trouble which I suffer already, and the still greater which I foresee from the medley of clerical characters, coming from different quarters and of various educations, and seeking employment here. I cannot avoid employing some of them, and soon they begin to create disturbances.” There were troubles and scandals in nearly all the larger cities, which in some instances were fomented by the priests themselves. The trustee system was a fruitful cause of disturbance, threatening at times to bring the greatest evils upon the church; especially as there seemed to be reason to fear lest the dissensions between the clergy and the laity might serve as a pretext for the intermeddling of the civil authority in ecclesiastical affairs. Except in the two or three colleges of which we have spoken, there was no Catholic education to be had; and for a long time the few elementary
schools which were opened were of a very wretched kind. Indeed, we may say that it is only within the last quarter of a century that many of the bishops and priests of this country have come to realize the all-importance of Catholic education.
Another unavoidable evil was the mingling of various nationalities in the same church, giving rise to jealousies, and frequently to dissensions; and to this we may add that the very people to whom above all others the church in this country is indebted for its progress met with peculiar difficulties in the fulfilment of their God-given mission. This fact did not escape the keen eye of the first bishop of Charleston.
“England,” he says, “has unfortunately too well succeeded in linking contumely to their name [the Irish] in all her colonies; and though the United States have cast away the yoke under which she held them, many other causes have combined to continue against the Irish Catholic more or less to the present day the sneer of the supercilious, the contempt of the conceited, and the dull prosing of those who imagine themselves wise. That which more than a century of fashion has made habitual is not to be overcome in a year; and to any Irish Catholic who has dwelt in this country during one-fourth of the period of my sojourn it will be painfully evident that, although the evil is slowly diminishing, its influence is not confined to the American nor to the anti-Catholic. When a race is once degraded, however unjustly, it is a weakness of our nature that, however we may be identified with them upon some points, we are desirous of showing that the similitude is not complete. You may be an Irishman, but not a Catholic: you may be Catholics, but not Irish. It is clear you are not an Irish Catholic in either case! But when the great majority of Catholics in the United States were either Irish or of Irish descent, the force of the prejudice against the Irish Catholic bore against the Catholic religion, and the influence of this prejudice has been far
more mischievous than is generally believed.”[125]
We must not omit to add that many of the early missionaries spoke English very imperfectly and were but little acquainted with the habits and customs of the people among whom they were called to labor; while the five or six bishops of the country, separated by great distances from their priests, rarely saw them, and consequently were in a great measure unable to control or direct them in the exercise of the sacred ministry. The French missionaries, who in their own country had seen the most frightful crimes committed in the name of liberty and of republicanism, found it difficult to sympathize heartily with our democratic institutions; and from Ireland very few priests came, because the French Revolution had broken up the Continental Irish seminaries from which she drew her own supplies.
The purchase of Louisiana from France in 1803 added little or nothing to the strength of the church in the United States, since, owing to the wretched French ecclesiastical colonial policy, which did not permit the appointment of bishops, the Catholic population of that province, a large portion of whom were negro slaves, had been almost wholly neglected. What the state of the church was in Florida at the time of its cession to the United States may be inferred from the fact that in the whole province there was but one efficient priest, who at once withdrew to Cuba, and afterwards to Ireland, his native country. In the early years of the present century Protestant feeling in this country was much more earnest and self-confident than at present—in the
simple days of camp-meetings and jerking revivals and childlike faith in the pope as Antichrist, and in priests and nuns as Satan’s chosen agents; when the preachers had the whole world of anti-popery commonplace wherein to disport themselves without fear of contradiction. The universal feeling of pity for those who doubted the supreme wisdom of our political institutions was bestowed with not less boundless liberality upon all who failed to perceive that American Protestantism was the fine essence and final outcome of all that is best and purest in religion. Catholic opinion, on the other hand, was feeble, unorganized, and thrown back upon itself by the overwhelming force of a public sentiment strong, fresh, and defiant. We were, moreover, still under the ban of English literature that for three hundred years had been busy travestying the history and doctrines of the church, to defend which was made a crime. There were but few Catholic books, and those to be had generally failed to catch the phases of religious thought through which American Protestants were passing. It was more than thirty years after the erection of the see of Baltimore that the Charleston Miscellany, which Archbishop Hughes called the first really Catholic newspaper ever published in this country, was founded; and fifty years after the consecration of Bishop Carroll there were but six Catholic journals in the United States.