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he Mormons were not the only pre-Civil War group
subject to intense prejudice. Catholics, Jews, and African American Protestants
also faced hostility from the dominant culture. In response to discrimination,
Catholics, Jews, and free black Protestants formed fraternal lodges, benevolent
associations, and mutual benefit societies which allowed them to preserve a
distinctive group identity.
No church grew more rapidly or faced more bitter
hostility than Roman Catholicism. Numbering no more than 25,000 in 1776,
Catholics grew to 1.75 million in 1850, making them the nation's largest
religious group and the country's first truly multicultural church.
During the colonial period, Catholics constituted
a tiny minority, just one percent of the population, concentrated in three
colonies: Maryland, Pennsylvania, and New York. In 1776, there were just six
priests in the American colonies and not a single bishop.
Massive immigration from Ireland and Germany
between 1820 and 1860 dramatically increased the size of the Catholic church,
from 195,000 to 3,103,000, but also generated ethnic tensions within the
church. Following the Revolution, the church had been led primarily by English
Catholic families from Maryland and by French Catholics. As the composition of the American Catholic
population changed, Catholics of German and Irish ancestry wanted priests of
their own background.
During the pre-Civil War era, Catholics faced
intense hostility and even violence. The evangelical Protestant revivals of the
1820s and '30s stimulated a "No Popery" movement. Prominent northern
clergy, mostly Whigs in their politics, accused the Catholic church of
conspiring to overthrow democracy and subject the United States to papal
despotism.
Popular fiction (such as Maria Monk's Awful
Disclosures of the Hotel Dieu Nunnery in Montreal [1836], which sold 300,000
copies before the Civil War), offered ficticious descriptions of priests
seducing women during confession and nuns cutting infants from the womb and
throwing them to dogs. A popular children's game was called "Break the
Pope's neck."
Anti-Catholic sentiment culminated in mobs
rioting and the burning f churches and convents. In 1834, after a vicious
anti-Catholic sermon, a Protestant mob burned the Ursuline Convent in
Charlestown, Mass. A decade later,
after Philadelphia's Catholic convinced the city's school board to use both the
Catholic and Protestant versions of the Bible in schools, a vicious riot
erupted in the nearby suburbs of Kensington and Southwark.
The advent of massive immigration from Ireland
and Germany after 1845 led to renewed anti-Catholic outbursts. Native born
workers blamed Irish and German Catholics for increases in poverty and crime
and briefly supported the anti-Catholic Know Nothing political party.
The Catholic church responded to Protestant
hostility in a variety of ways. Concerned that many immigrants were only
nominally Catholic, the church established urban missions and launched
religious revivals to strengthen immigrants' religious identity. Catholics responded to the intensification
of Protestant reform activities in the 1850s by establishing a separate system
of benevolent societies, hospitals, orphanages, and sanitoriums, as well as
trade schools and houses of protection for single working women. Discrimination
in public schools, where many teachers used texts that portrayed the Catholic
church as a threat to republican institutions, led Catholics to establish a
separate system of parochial schools,
beginning in New York in the early 1840s.