A more interesting study than the wealth of the church is the growth of the Catholic population in the United States, though, in the absence of reliable or complete statistics on this subject, we are not able to give an entirely satisfactory or exact statement of the facts. The “number of sittings,” to use the phrase of the official reports, given in the United States Census, is of scarcely any assistance in determining the religious statistics of the country. The number of Protestant church sittings, for instance, was in 1870 19,674,548, whereas the membership of all the Protestant sects of the country was only about 7,000,000; and it is well known that, while in most Protestant churches many seats are usually unoccupied during religious service, in the Catholic churches the same seat is frequently filled by three, or four, or even five different persons, who take it in succession at the various Masses.
Ninety-one years ago Father Carroll set down the Catholic population of the United States at twenty-five thousand, and he may have fallen short of the real number by about ten thousand. In 1808, when episcopal sees were placed at Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Bardstown, the Catholic population had increased to about one hundred and fifty thousand. In 1832 Bishop England estimated the Catholics of the United States at half a million; but in 1836, after having given the subject greater attention, he thought there could not be less than a million and a quarter. Both these estimates, however, were mere surmises;
for Bishop England, who always exaggerated the losses of the church in this country, not finding it possible to get the data for a well-founded opinion as to the Catholic population, was left to conjecture or to arguments based upon premises which, to say the least, were themselves unproven. The editors of the Metropolitan Catholic Almanac for 1848, basing their calculations upon the very satisfactory returns which they had received from the thirty dioceses then existing in the United States, set down our Catholic population at 1,190,700, and this is probably the nearest approach which we can make to the number of Catholics in this country at the time the great Irish famine gave a new impulse to emigration to America. From 1848 down to the present day the increase of the Catholic population has been very rapid, it having risen in a period of twenty-eight years from a little over a million to nearly seven millions. The third revised edition of Schem’s Statistics of the World for 1875 gives 6,000,000 as the Catholic population of the United States, and the American Annual Cyclopædia for 1875 reckons it as more than 6,000,000; and from a careful consideration of the data, which, however, are still imperfect, we think it is at present probably not less than 7,000,000. This remarkable growth of the church here during the last thirty years must be attributed to various causes, by far the most important of which is beyond all doubt the vast immigration from Ireland; to which, indeed, we must also chiefly ascribe the progress of the church during this century in all other countries throughout the world in which the English language is spoken. No other people could have done for the Catholic
faith in the United States what the Irish people have done. Their unalterable attachment to their priests, their deep Catholic instincts, which no combination of circumstances has ever been able to bring into conflict with their love of country; the unworldly and spiritual temper of the national character; their indifference to ridicule and contempt; and their unfailing generosity—all fitted them for the work which was to be done here, and enabled them, in spite of the strong prejudices against their race which Americans had inherited from England, to accomplish what would not have been accomplished by Italian, French, or German Catholics. Another cause of the more rapid growth of the church during the last quarter of a century may be found in the more thorough organization of dioceses, congregations, and schools, by which we are better able to shield our people from unhealthy influences, and thus year after year to diminish our losses; while the increasing number of converts to the faith helps to swell the Catholic ranks. Of 22,209 persons who were confirmed in the diocese of Baltimore from 1864 to 1868, 2,752, or more than 12 per cent., were converts; and our converts are generally from the more intelligent classes of Americans. The efforts to arrest the progress of the church, which now for nearly half a century have assumed a kind of periodicity, may be placed among the causes which have added to her strength. These attempts are made in open violation of the religious and political principles which are the special boast of all Americans, and the only arguments which can be adduced to justify them are drawn from fear or hatred. Whenever we have been
made the victims of lawlessness or fraud, as in the burning of the Charlestown convent and the churches of Philadelphia, or in the spreading “Awful Disclosures” throughout the land, the sympathies of generous and honest men have been attracted to us. And when Protestant bigotry has made an alliance with a political party in order to compass our ruin, it has merely succeeded in forcing the opposing party to take up throughout the whole country the defence of the Catholics. Thus during the brief day of the “Know-nothing” conspiracy large numbers of Protestants, for the first time since the Reformation, were led to examine into the history of the church, with a view to defend her against the traditional objections of Protestantism itself. In fact, in a country which looks with equally tolerant complacency upon every form of belief or unbelief from Atheism to Voudooism, from the Joss-House of the Chinaman to the Mormon Tabernacle and breeding caravansary of free-love, to imagine that there can be either decent or reasonable motives for exciting to persecution of the Catholic Church is sheer madness; nor can we think it less absurd to suppose that the good sense and justice of the American people will allow them to commit themselves to a policy as inconsistent as it would be outrageous.
However this may be, there can be no doubt but the repeated and unprovoked attacks made upon the Catholics of the United States by fanatics and demagogues have helped to increase their union and earnestness; and this leads us away from the growth of the church in her external organization to the consideration of the development of her spiritual and intellectual life.
And here we are at once struck by the similarity between her progress and that of the country itself, which has been diffusive at the expense of concentration and thoroughness. Nevertheless, no attentive observer can fail to be struck by the intense and earnest religious spirit by which the great body of the Catholics of the United States are animated, as well as the readiness with which they co-operate with their priests in promoting the interests of religion. Nowhere do we find greater eagerness for instruction in the truths of the faith, or greater willingness to make sacrifices in order to give to the young a religious education, than among the Catholics of this country. Our priests are, as a body, laborious, self-sacrificing, and disinterested, and are honestly struggling to make themselves worthy of the great mission which God has given them in America.
Our position in this country hitherto has turned the thoughts of our best minds to polemical and controversial writing, which, though useful and even necessary, has only a temporary value, since it is addressed primarily to objections and phases of belief which owe their special significance to transitory conditions of society and opinion. Controversies between Catholics and Protestants which forty years ago attracted general attention and produced considerable impression, would now pass unnoticed; for the simple reason that Americans, in the confusion of sects and religious opinions, have come to realize that Protestantism has no doctrinal basis, and is left to trust exclusively to religious sentiment. Dogmatic Protestantism is of the past, and the most popular preachers are those who appeal
most skilfully to the religious instincts without requiring the acceptance of any religious beliefs. Most of our best writers have been men whose arduous labors left them but little time for study or literary composition, and their works frequently bear the marks of hasty performance; but they will nevertheless not suffer from comparison with the religious writings of American Protestants. The ablest man who has devoted himself to the discussion of religion and philosophy, or probably any other subject, in the United States during the last hundred years is Dr. Brownson, all of whose best thoughts have been given to the elucidation of Catholic truth; and though there was something wanting to make him either a great philosopher or a great theologian, or even a perfect master of style, we know of no other American of whom this may not also be justly said; unless, perhaps, we may consider Prescott, Hawthorne, or Irving worthy of the last of these titles. And though we Catholics have no man who is able to take up the pen which has just fallen from the hand of Dr. Brownson, none who have the power which once belonged to England and Hughes, we are in this not more unfortunate than our country, which no longer finds men like Adams or Jefferson to represent not unworthily its supreme dignity; nor any like Webster, Clay, or Calhoun, whose minds were as lofty as their honor was pure, to lend the authority of wisdom and eloquence to the deliberations of a great people.
During the hundred years of our independent life the external development of the church, like that of the nation, has been so rapid that all individual energies have to a