In 1800 the Catholics were a small minority everywhere except Maryland. Immigration from Ireland and Germany gave them millions of adherents from the 1840s to the 1880s. Then came millions more from Italy, Poland and Eastern Europe, as well as French Canada. Large numbers of priests and nuns came from Ireland and France. The Irish soon dominated the clergy church, with a great majority of bishops by 1900. As the immigrants arrived new parishes and diocese were created. Rebuffed in efforts to obtain government funds for schools, the Catholics set up a parochial school system largely staffed with nuns. It reached about a third of the children. They also set up colleges. There were few Catholics in the South, apart from Louisiana. However they were well represented in the nation's cities, mill towns and mining centers. Anti-Catholic politics flared briefly in the 1850s, but the Catholic voters surged into the Democratic Party and Irish Catholic politicians played increasingly dominant roles in Democratic machines in Boston, New York, and other major cities. Devotional practices included daily rosary prayers, regular attendance at Sunday Mass, and special roles for devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary and favorite saints.
Immigration During the 19th century, a wave of immigrants from Ireland, Germany, Italy, Eastern Europe, and elsewhere swelled the number of Roman Catholics. Substantial numbers of Catholics also came from French Canada during the mid-19th century and settled in New England. This influx would eventually bring increased political power for the Roman Catholic Church and a greater cultural presence, led at the same time to a growing fear of the Catholic "menace."
Between 1820 and 1860, the Irish constituted over one third of all immigrants to the United States. In the 1840s, they comprised nearly half of all immigrants to this nation. American Catholics were not exactly happy to see the new immigrants. Not only did the exponential growth set off nativist alarms among Protestants, they presented problems for the existing Catholic parishes. The wave of immigration from Ireland led to tension between the Irish and the French-dominated American Catholic Church. French Catholics were contemptuous of the Irish.
Later this dynamic would be repeated in the post-Civil War period with the Irish in positions of power, and the new immigrants coming from places such as Naples and Sicily. These new immigrants shared little in common with their Irish Catholic co-religionists other than their faith.
Many Catholics stopped practicing their religion or became Protestants. However, there were about 700,000 converts to Catholicism from 1813 to 1893.
Archdiocese of Baltimore Maryland was originally settled by English Catholics. Thus the diocese of Baltimore achieved a pre-eminence over the other dioceses in the U.S. Under Bishop John Carroll it was established as a diocese on November 6, 1789, and was established an Archdiocese on April 8, 1808.Peter Guilday, The Life and Times of John Carroll: Archbishop of Baltimore, 1735-1815 (1922),
In 1858, the Sacred Congregation of the Propaganda, with the approval of Pius IX "Prerogative of Place" was conferred on the Archdiocese of Baltimore. This decree gave the Archbishop of Baltimore precedence over all the Archbishops of the United States (but not Cardinals) in councils, gatherings, and meetings of whatever kind of the Hierarchy (in conciliis, coetibus et comitiis quibuscumque) regardless of the seniority of other Archbishops in promotion or ordination.
Baltimore became the host for eleven councils where American bishops met to coordinate their work.Peter Guilday, A History of the Councils of Baltimore, 1791-1884 (The Macmillan Company, 1932).
Catholic revival Historian John McGreevy identifies a major Catholic revival that swept across Europe, North America and South America in the early 19th century. Historians call it “Ultramontanism.” shorthand for a cluster of shifts that included a Vatican-fostered move to Thomistic philosophy. This was nurtured in the world of Catholic parishes, schools, and associations, whose members understood themselves as arrayed against, and morally superior to the wider American society. For parishioners it meant a much deeper piety that emphasized miracles, saints, and new devotions such as, compulsory Sunday attendance, regular confession and communion, praying the rosary a devotion to the Blessed Virgin, and meatless Fridays. There was a deeper respect for bishops, and especially the Pope, with more direct control by the Vatican over selecting bishops and less autonomy for local parishes. There was a sharp increase in Mass attendance, religious vocations soared, especially among women. Across urban America Catholics set up a parochial school system using the newly available nuns, and funding from the more religious parents. Intermarriage with Protestants was strongly discouraged, and only tolerated if the children were brought up Catholics. The parochial schools effectively promoted marriage inside the faith. By the late 19th century dioceses were building foreign language elementary schools for Germans and other language groups, but raising large sums to build English-only diocesan high schools, which had the effect of increasing ethnic intermarriage and diluting ethnic nationalism. Leadership was increasingly in the hands of the Irish, whose leaders worked closely with the Vatican and in turn promoted Vatican supremacy that culminated in Papal infallibility proclaimed in 1870.John T. McGreevy, Catholicism and American Freedom: A History (2003) pp 12-28, 129.
Beginning in the 1840s, although outnumbered by the German American Catholics, Irish American Catholics comprised most of the bishops and controlled most of the Catholic colleges and seminaries in the United States.
Parochial schools: the funding issue In 1840-1842 Bishop John Hughes in New York City led a political battle to secure funding for the Catholic schools. He rallied support from both the Tammany Hall Democrats, and from the opposition Whig Party, whose leaders, especially Governor William H. Seward, supported Hughes. He argued Catholics paid double for schools—they paid taxes to subsidize private schools they could not use and also paid for the parochial schools they did use. Catholics could not use Public School Society schools because they forced students to listen to readings from the Protestant King James Bible which were designed to undermine their Catholic faith. With the Maclay Act in 1842, the New York State legislature established the New York City Board of Education. It gave the city an elective Board of Education empowered to build and supervise schools and distribute the education fund. It provided that no money should go to the schools that taught religion, so Hughes lost his battle.Martin L. Meenagh, "Archbishop John Hughes and the New York Schools Controversy of 1840–43" American Nineteenth Century History (2004) 5#1, pp. 34-65, 10.1080/1466465042000222204 online He turned inward: he founded an independent Catholic school system in the city. His new system included the first Catholic college in the Northeast, St. John's College, now Fordham University. By 1870, 19 percent of the city's children were attending Catholic schools.Diane Ravitch, The great school wars: A history of the New York City public schools (1975) pp 3–76.Joseph McCadden, "New York's School Crisis of 1840–1842: Its Irish Antecedents." Thought: Fordham University Quarterly 41.4 (1966): 561-588.
In other cities as well Catholic parochial schools began as a reaction against a growing publicly funded school system that was essentially Protestant. In 1839 and 1840, the American Bible Society pledged that "the Bible would be read in every classroom in the nation". In what was then a predominantly Protestant country, this was generally understood to be the King James Version of the Scriptures.
In 1875, Republican President Ulysses S. Grant called for a Constitutional amendment that would mandate free public schools and prohibit the use of public funds for "sectarian" schools. Grant's motivation was rooted in his fear of a future with "patriotism and intelligence on one side and superstition, ambition and greed on the other" which he identified with the Catholic Church. Grant called for public schools that would be "unmixed with atheistic, pagan or sectarian teaching."
Republican Senator James G. Blaine of Maine had proposed such an amendment to the Constitution in 1874. The amendment was defeated in 1875 but would be used as a model for so-called "Blaine Amendments" incorporated into 34 state constitutions over the next three decades. These amendments prohibited the use of public funds to fund parochial schools and are still in effect today although a 2002 Supreme Court ruling partially vitiated these amendments. As of March 2009, no state school system had changed its laws to allow state funds to be used for this purpose.
Plenary Councils of Baltimore
In the latter half of the 19th century, the first attempt at standardizing discipline in the American Church occurred with the convocation of the Plenary Councils of Baltimore.
Slavery debate
Two slaveholding states, Maryland and Louisiana, had large contingents of Catholic residents. Archbishop of Baltimore, John Carroll, had two black servants - one free and one a slave. The Society of Jesus owned a large number of slaves who worked on the community's farms. Realizing that their properties were more profitable if rented out to tenant farmers rather that worked by slaves, the Jesuits began selling off their slaves in 1837.
In 1839, Pope Gregory XVI issued a Bull, entitled In Supremo. Its main focus was against slave trading, but it also clearly condemned racial slavery:
We, by apostolic authority, warn and strongly exhort in the Lord faithful Christians of every condition that no one in the future dare bother unjustly, despoil of their possessions, or reduce to slavery Indians, Blacks or other such peoples.
However, the American church continued in deeds, if not in public discourse, to support slaveholding interests. Some American bishops misinterpreted In Supremo as condemning only the slave trade and not slavery itself. Bishop John England of Charleston actually wrote several letters to the Secretary of State under President Van Buren explaining that the Pope, in In Supremo, did not condemn slavery but only the slave trade.
One outspoken critic of slavery was Archbishop John Baptist Purcell of Cincinnati, Ohio. In an 1863 Catholic Telegraph editorial Purcell wrote:
"When the slave power predominates, religion is nominal. There is no life in it. It is the hard-working laboring man who builds the church, the school house, the orphan asylum, not the slaveholder, as a general rule. Religion flourishes in a slave state only in proportion to its intimacy with a free state, or as it is adjacent to it."
During the war, American bishops continued to allow slave-owners to take communion. During the Civil War, the American hierarchy was so fearful of local schisms that the bishops were reluctant to speak out on behalf of abolition.
African-American Catholics
Because the antebellum South was predominantly Protestant, most African-Americans who adopted Christianity became Protestant. However, there have been African-American Catholics since colonial times. Irish, Italian and Eastern European Catholics and their clergy often excluded blacks from local parishes. Many blacks simply felt more at home in their birthright Protestant churches, where adaptable liturgies and ministerial opportunities meant that black Christians could worship their own way more readily than in Latin-rite Catholicism.