The Catholic World, Vol. 01, April to September, 1865: A Monthly Eclectic MagazineVarious
Religion
The Catholic World, Vol. 01, April to September, 1865: A Monthly Eclectic Magazine
Various
Catholic Church -- Periodicals
Thus, in the course of twenty-six years, we see eight new sees
erected, making the number of bishops in the United States thirteen.
The number of the clergy amounted in 1830 to 232, and in 1834 probably
exceeded 300. At the date of the next official returns (1840) there
were 482 priests and three more bishoprics--those of Natchez, Miss.,
and Nashville, Tenn., both established in 1837, and that of Monterey
in California, a country of Spanish settlement which had recently been
annexed to the United States. [Footnote 3]
[Footnote 3: Monterey was not a part of the United States until
1848, nor a bishop's see until 1850. In place of it we should
substitute Dubuque, made a see in 1837.--ED. C. W.]
But this increase was not comparable to that which followed between
1840 and 1850. In ten years the number of bishops was doubled by the
erection of fifteen [seventeen] new sees. In 1840 there were sixteen;
in 1850 thirty-one [thirty-three]. The growth during this period was
most perceptible in the North and West. Among the new sees were
Hartford, Conn., Albany and Buffalo, N. Y., Pittsburg, Penn.,
Cleveland, O., Chicago, Ill., Milwaukee, Wis., St. Paul, Minn., Oregon
City and Nesqualy, Oregon, and Wheeling in Northern Virginia. The
others were Little Rock, Ark., Savannah, Ga., Galveston, Texas, and
Santa Fé, New Mexico. [Footnote 4] The clergy in 1850 numbered
1,800, having considerably more than doubled [nearly quadrupled] their
number in ten years.
[Footnote 4: And San Francisco and Monterey--ED C. W.]
Thus we see that the Church was pressing hard and fast upon the old
New England Puritans. They soon began to feel uneasy, and to oppose
sometimes a violent resistance to her progress. In some of the States,
especially Connecticut and New Hampshire, there were laws against the
Catholics yet unrepealed; so that the dominant party had more ways of
showing their hatred of the Church than by mere petty vexations. In
Boston things went so far that a nunnery was pillaged and burned by a
mob. It is from this time that we must date the origin of the
Know-Nothing movement, directed ostensibly against foreigners, but
undoubtedly animated in the main by hatred of Catholicism and alarm at
its progress. The fretting and fuming of this political party was the
last effort of Puritan antipathy. The Church prospered in spite of it;
so the Puritans resigned themselves to witness her gradual aggressions
with the best grace they could assume.
{7}
Ten new sees were established between 1850 and 1860, and eight of
these were in the North or West--viz., Erie, Newark, Burlington,
Portland, Fort Wayne, Sault St. Marie, Alton, and Brooklyn. Two were
in the South--Covington and Natchitoches. There were thus in the
United States, in 1860, forty-three bishoprics, with 2,235 priests.
Let us now see how many Catholics were embraced in these dioceses, and
what proportion they bore to the total population.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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