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Lost Classroom, Lost Community
Catholic Schools' Importance in Urban America
By Margaret F. Brinig, Nicole Stelle Garnett The University of Chicago Press
Copyright © 2014 The University of Chicago
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-12214-4
CHAPTER 1
The Vanishing Urban Catholic School
Before turning to our empirical findings and their legal policy implications, we provide a brief snapshot of the schools that we study in this chapter and the next. This chapter situates the urban Catholic schools that we study in historical perspective, with a particular focus on the experience of Catholic schools in two of the cities that we study here—Chicago and Philadelphia. (In chapter 6, we briefly discuss the much later development of the Catholic school system in the third city, Los Angeles.) We provide this abbreviated historical overview in order to explain what urban Catholic schools are and were), to shed light on the reasons why they are closing, and to begin to understand why they may be important social anchors in urban neighborhoods. In chapter 2, we provide a similar overview of charter schools.
A WORLD SET APART
For Roman Catholics living in northern and midwestern cities prior to the Second Vatican Council, parishes were more than church buildings. They were the building blocks of community life. In canon law, the term "parish" refers not simply to a particular church but rather to social and religious communities bound to a particular church. As John McGreevy has observed, these communities were all important to parish members: "Catholics used the parish to map out—both physically and culturally—space within all of the northern cities." Most parishes were (and technically still are) territorial. That is, they have geographic boundaries and are spiritually responsible for all Catholics residing within those boundaries. A smaller number of "personal parishes" are charged by Church authorities with ministering to a distinct group, frequently a non-English-speaking ethnic group (in which case they are usually called "national" parishes). Until the second half of the twentieth century, territorial parish churches (which tended until the second half of the twentieth century to be de facto Irish American and, in some cities, Italian American) were ideally placed so as to guarantee that a church was within walking distance of every home in the city. Other national parishes frequently were located within the boundaries of territorial parishes. For example, in Chicago's Back of the Yards neighborhood, which gained international notoriety in Upton Sinclair's 1920 classic, The Jungle, there were eleven Catholic churches in the space of little more than one square mile—two territorial/Irish parishes, two Polish, one Lithuanian, one Italian, two German, one Slovak, one Croatian, and one Bohemian. Until relatively recently, Catholics were obligated to attend their territorial parish, unless dispensed to attend another church.
Parish life was, in McGreevy's words, "disciplined and local"—"each parish was a small planet, whirling through its orbit, oblivious to the rest of the ecclesiastical solar system." Parishes were massive operations: Almost all included a church, a parochial school (and often a convent to house the nuns who taught in the school), and dozens of formal social organizations. Parishioners were expected to attend Mass each week, to send their children to the parish school, and to contribute socially and financially to parish life. Priests encouraged—even commanded—parishioners to purchase homes within the parish boundaries, reasoning that homeownership would promote stability and intensify commitment to, and rootedness in, the parish community. An obituary of a Philadelphia pastor read, for example, "the priest advised his parishioners, almost entirely of the working class, to strive sacrificially to buy their homes as their greatest step toward security." There is significant evidence that the strategy worked. Homeownership rates among Catholics, including poor immigrants, were remarkably high. The presence of an ethnic parish in a neighborhood tended to lead to the creation of geographic ethnic enclaves that further reinforced the connection between religious life and community. But territorial parishes commanded intense loyalty as well. Identity with a parish was so complete that, in many cities, most Catholics (and some non-Catholics) would respond to the question "Where are you from?" with their parish name rather than their street address or the name of their neighborhood. As one Chicago resident observed, "There was no reason to stretch out to any other place ... because you had that wide territory of your own people."
THE RISE OF THE PAROCHIAL SCHOOL SYSTEM
The importance of the parish school within this insular and intensely Catholic world can hardly be overstated. Beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, fueled by Irish immigration, Catholic populations in northern cities grew exponentially. For example, when the Diocese of Philadelphia was carved out of the Archdiocese of Baltimore in 1808, it encompassed the states of Pennsylvania and Delaware, as well as the western and southern portions of New Jersey. The new diocese included about 30,000 Catholics, served by eleven priests. The city of Philadelphia proper was home to 10,000 Catholics (out of a total population of 47,486) and four Catholic churches. This was an unusually high Catholic density by American standards at the time, generated in large part because many Catholics were drawn to Pennsylvania's practice of religious toleration. This number also represented a remarkable increase over the approximately 1,000 Catholic citizens present in Philadelphia in 1750. By 1851, the number of Catholics in the City of Philadelphia had grown to 170,000, served by ninety-three priests.
This period of rapid expansion for the Catholic Church in the United States also corresponded to the rise of the fledgling public, or "common," school system. At least initially, many American Catholics welcomed, and participated in, efforts to develop public schools. Until the second half of the nineteenth century, very few Catholic schools existed in the United States, and most that did tended to educate either the very rich or the very poor. For example, the Ursuline Sisters had operated a school for upper-class Protestant and Unitarian families in Boston since their arrival in 1818. (In 1834, a nativist mob burned the convent and school.) Religious orders also operated poorhouses and orphanages in major cities throughout the United States. During the early years of the nineteenth century, American bishops had, on several occasions, issued letters exhorting the faithful to establish more schools. But they did not assign anyone in particular the responsibility for carrying out the task, and, as a result, progress on the development of Catholic schools in the nineteenth century proceeded in fits and starts.
Catholics accordingly welcomed free schools for their children and assumed, perhaps naively, that their religious beliefs would be accommodated. Indeed, in the nineteenth century, efforts to cooperate in the formation of quadi-Catholic public schools were undertaken in a number of cities. Catholics lost patience with this strategy, however, when it became apparent that a Protestant ethos dominated—pervasively and intentionally—the fledgling public schools. Early common school leaders, including Horace Mann, who is widely regarded as the father of American public schools, endorsed the view that "nonsectarian" Protestant religious instruction ought to be a corner stone of the common school curriculum. Most early school reformers, including Mann, also held a deep suspicion of Catholicism. Mann, in fact, once observed that the sight of Catholics worshipping moved him to concern about the "baneful influence of the Catholic religion on the human mind." Mann's views were, for the time, relatively moderate; he at one point nodded approvingly to the formation of Catholic common schools in his native Lowell, Massachusetts. Protestant clergymen dominated the common school movement. In fact, all but one of the first eleven state superintendents of public education was a Protestant minister. Some of these leaders were virulently anti-Catholic. For example, in 1835, the General Presbyterian Assemblies commissioned Reverend Robert J. Breckenridge—who enjoys the title "Father of public education in Kentucky"—to study "the Prevalence of Popery in the West." In his final report, Breckenridge denounced the Pope as the "Anti-Christ, a man of sin and son of Pestilence" and "an apostate from God," who was corrupted by "profane exorcisms, idolatrous incantations, and unauthorized additions, mutilations and ceremonies."
Many early conflicts between Catholics and Protestants were sparked by the pervasive inclusion of mandatory Protestant devotional exercises in early public school curricula. A particularly sensational example occurred in Boston in 1859, when a public school principal was charged with assault for beating a student who refused to recite the Ten Commandments from the Protestant King James Bible. The student, Thomas Whall, was a Catholic—like three-quarters of the students in the school—and informed his teacher that his father had forbidden him to read from the Protestant Bible. Whall's pastor, Father Bernardine Wiget, had also ordered him and several hundred other boys in the Saint Mary's parish Sunday school, not to recite Protestant prayers in school. Wiget told the boys that doing so would be heresy and threatened to read the names of any boys who disobeyed him from the pulpit. A week after Whall first refused to read the required passage, the assistant principal announced that she would "whip him until he yields." Whall withstood thirty minutes until, with his hands beaten to shreds by with a rattan cane, he relented. The mayor of Boston subsequently ordered the expulsion of all students who refused to conform to the school curriculum, including the recitation of the Protestant Bible. Over the next several weeks, hundreds of Catholic schoolchildren were expelled when, on orders from the local bishop, they attempted to read the Ten Commandments from the Catholic Bible.
When the assault case reached the Boston police court, the defendant's attorney argued that the real criminals were Whall and Wiget, complaining, "Who is this priest who comes here from a foreign land to instruct us in our laws? ... [T]he real objection is to the Bible itself, for, while that is read daily in our schools, America can never be Catholic." Following a trial, the judge—who was a member of the nativist Know-Nothing Party—ruled that the school official had not committed a criminal act but had instead correctly reprimanded an insubordinate child for refusing to comply with the mandatory curricular requirements of the Boston public schools. Whall's refusal to recite the Protestant version of the Ten Commandments threatened, in his view, the "granite foundation on which our republican form of government rests."
Catholic parents seeking recourse in civil courts met a similarly cold response. For example, in 1854, the Maine Supreme Court rejected a claim that a Catholic student's expulsion from a public school for refusing to read from the King James Bible violated her religious liberty. Although the student expressed a willingness to read the Catholic Douay-Rheims Bible aloud, the court stressed the importance of a uniform public education and the need to adhere to the established curriculum. That anti-Catholic (and anti-immigrant) sentiment influenced the decision was made crystal clear in the opinion's concluding paragraph:
Large masses of foreign population are among us, weak in the midst of our strength. Mere citizenship is of no avail, unless they imbibe the liberal spirit of our laws and institutions, unless they become citizens in fact as well as in name. In no other way can the process of assimilation be so readily and thoroughly accomplished as through the medium of the public schools.... It is the duty of those to whom this sacred trust is confided, to discharge it with magnanimous liberality and Christian kindness.
The import of the court's words was clear. Mandatory Protestant devotions in public schools were necessary to assimilate and Americanize the Catholic immigrant masses. Such devotions exposed Catholic children to "the liberal spirit of our laws and institutions," which, the court implied, stood in sharp contrast to the Catholic Church's presumed deep suspicion of liberalism and democracy.
Elsewhere, the Catholic objection to the inclusion of the King James Bible in public school curricula provoked mob violence. The most spectacular of these incidents was the 1844 Philadelphia Bible Riots. In 1838, Pennsylvania—like many states—had enacted a law making the King James Bible a mandatory textbook in all public schools. Philadelphia Bishop Francis Kenrick, in response, repeatedly asked that schools permit Catholic children to read the Catholic version of the Bible in school and urged Catholic parents to remove their children from public schools that insisted on using the King James Bible. In 1843, the Philadelphia Board of School Commissioners passed a resolution allowing children to opt out of religious exercises upon the request of their parents and further permitting them to read any version of the Bible that they pleased, provided that it was "without note or comment." Those final words prevented Catholic children from reading the heavily annotated Catholic Douay-Rheims Bible, and there was no unannotated English version of the Catholic Bible available at the time. Still, Kenrick welcomed the resolution as a compromise. Nativist Protestants did not. There ensued a flurry of anti-Catholic polemics in local papers arguing that Catholics were attempting to convert public schools into "infidel" institutions. "The Bible in the public schools" quickly became a nativist rallying cry.
On May 3, 1844, Catholics clashed with a nativist mob in the city's Kensington neighborhood. After shots were fired and a young Protestant boy was killed, a riot ensued. Over the next three days, Philadelphia was a city under siege. Entire blocks of Catholic homes were burned, as were the Saint Michael and Saint Augustine churches and schools. The city's oldest church—Saint Mary's—was fortunately spared but only because the nativist mob arriving to burn it down was dispersed by military troops. After three days, the violence subsided, although the governor was forced to dispatch troops to guard all Catholic churches for the next two weeks. Violence ensued on a smaller scale in July 1844 and culminated with nativists dragging a cannon to the door of Saint Philip Neri church. The mob dispersed only after the governor dispatched several thousand soldiers to the city. Saint Michael and Saint Augustine later secured damage verdicts against the County of Philadelphia—Saint Michael was awarded $27,090, and Saint Augustine $47,433—although historians agree that the property damage resulting from the riots likely was several million dollars. A grand jury subsequently issued a statement laying the blame for the riots at the feet of the Catholics, concluding that the riots had been caused "by the efforts of a portion of the community to exclude the Bible from our public schools."
The Philadelphia Bible Riots left Bishop Kenrick convinced of the futility of compromise with public school officials and of the need to establish a comprehensive system of Catholic schools. He was not alone. Catholic efforts to secure accommodation in the public schools were almost universally unsuccessful and, more often than not, provoked a virulent anti-Catholic reaction. Moreover, the violence in Philadelphia departed in scale but not in kind from other anti-Catholic attacks. As Philip Hamburger has observed, "[I]n the 1830s, Protestants initiated the practice of burning down Catholic churches.... For decades afterwards, Protestant mobs sporadically indulged in open conflict, often stimulated by both settled ministers and less respectable but gifted street preachers ... who incited Protestants to attack Catholics and torch their houses and churches."
By 1852, when the Catholic bishops in the United States met for the first time as a "Plenary Council," they had grown weary of attempts to compromise on the school question, especially in the face of escalating ant-Catholic sentiment. At the council, Bishop Kenrick, who had been named the Archbishop of Baltimore in 1851, and the fiery Bishop "Dagger John" Hughes, who had clashed with school officials in New York City and had been forced to save his churches by arming priests and congregants, led the charge for the formation of an independent school system large enough to educate all Catholic children. Thus, Joseph Viteritti has observed, Catholic schools began "in a spirit of protest." As Bishop Hughes explained, the public school practice of putting Protestant material "in the hands of our own children, and that in part at our expense, was ... unjust, unnatural, and at all events to us intolerable. Accordingly, through very great additional sacrifices, we have been obliged to provide schools ... in which to educate our children as our conscientious duty required."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Lost Classroom, Lost Community by Margaret F. Brinig, Nicole Stelle Garnett. Copyright © 2014 The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission of The University of Chicago Press.
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