Southern Crucifix, Southern Cross: Catholic-Protestant Relations in the Old South
232
Southern Crucifix, Southern Cross: Catholic-Protestant Relations in the Old South
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Overview
In sharp contrast to many long-standing presumptions about mistrust or animosity between these two groups, this study proposes that Catholic and Protestant interactions in the South were characterized more by cooperation than by conflict. Andrew H. M. Stern argues that Catholics worked to integrate themselves into southern society without compromising their religious beliefs and that many Protestants accepted and supported them. Catholic leaders demonstrated the compatibility of Catholicism with American ideals and institutions, and Protestants recognized Catholics as useful citizens, true Americans, and loyal southerners, in particular citing their support for slavery and their hatred of abolitionism. Mutual assistance between the two groups proved most clear in shared public spaces, with Catholics and Protestants participating in each other’s institutions and funding each other’s enterprises. Catholics and Protestants worshipped in each other’s churches, studied in each other’s schools, and recovered or died in each other’s hospitals. In many histories of southern religion, typically thought of as Protestant, Catholicism tends to be absent. Likewise, in studies of American Catholicism, Catholic relationships with Protestants, including southern Protestants, are rarely discussed. Southern Crucifix, Southern Cross is the first book to demonstrate in detail the ways in which many Protestants actively fostered the growth of American Catholicism. Stern complicates the dominant historical view of interreligious animosity and offers an unexpected model of religious pluralism that helped to shape southern culture as we know it today.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780817386290 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Alabama Press |
| Publication date: | 11/28/2012 |
| Series: | Religion and American Culture |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 232 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Southern Crucifix, Southern Cross
Catholic-Protestant Relations in the Old SouthBy Andrew H. M. Stern
THE UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA PRESS
Copyright © 2012 The University of Alabama PressAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8173-1774-4
Chapter One
Living Together
In 1782, a French immigrant to America named Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur published his Letters from an American Farmer. Crèvecoeur had arrived in North America in the 1750s and traveled throughout the colonies before settling in New York. A keen observer of American life and a nominal Catholic, he was no doubt aware of the discriminatory laws under which his coreligionists suffered. But Crévecoeur's depiction of religious life in America suggested that law did not necessarily reflect common practice. "When any considerable number of a particular sect happen to dwell contiguous to each other," he explained, "they immediately erect a temple, and they worship the Divinity agreeably to their own peculiar ideas. Nobody disturbs them." After all, "if they are peaceable subjects, and are industrious, what is it to their neighbours how and in what manner they think fit to address their prayers to the Supreme Being?"
Crèvecoeur asked his readers to imagine walking with him down an ordinary American country lane. On one side, they would pass a Catholic farmer who prayed to God, believed in transubstantiation, raised wheat, and offended no one. A mile later, they would pass a German Lutheran who prayed to the same God, believed in consubstantiation, tended his fields, and likewise scandalized no one. Further on, they would pass a "seceder," a Calvinist, and an array of believers in any number of other sects. The one thing these people had in common was that they were all too busy to worry about the theology of their neighbors. They patronized whatever place of worship happened to exist in the area, even a Quaker meeting house, and socialized without discrimination.
Crèvecoeur's vision of American religious life was too idyllic. In his time, as throughout American history, many people were passionately interested in what their neighbors believed and how they worshipped. Crèvecoeur's assumption that American tolerance grew from religious indifference also ignored deep currents of religiosity, manifest in awakenings and revivals. As a rough sketch, however, Crévecoeur's depiction of the American farmer has much to recommend it. Discriminatory laws and religious violence may stand out in the historical record, but tolerance and even friendships figured much more prominently in the everyday lives of countless Americans. And what Crèvecoeur observed in 1750 would be equally true a century later, at least in the South.
Elite Catholics
In the South, most Catholics toiled anonymously as laborers in cities and along the railways and canals, but a few made their way into the upper echelons of society. There they enjoyed not only acceptance but also warm and enduring friendships with their Protestant peers. Among the affluent and the educated, religious differences often faded into the background and ancient prejudices lost their power to divide.
One of the leading Catholics of Charleston, South Carolina, was Joanna England, who had accompanied her brother Bishop John England from Ireland in 1820. She assisted her brother in his ministry, taking over the last page of his diocesan newspaper, the United States Catholic Miscellany, and providing many translations for its pages. A devout Catholic, she befriended prominent Charlestonians of all faiths and helped ease her brother's entry into society. Charleston's second bishop, Ignatius Aloysius Reynolds, later complained of his predecessor, with a hint of envy, that "he had an accomplished sister to introduce into society, for this and other reasons he was, as far as possible for him as a bishop, a man of the fashionable world." South Carolinians mourned when Joanna died of fever in 1827, at only twenty-seven years old. An obituary published in the Courier bemoaned that "we have lost an ornament to our communion, and to society in general," and it praised the departed as "pious, without pretension; religious, without bigotry; learned, without pedantry; dignified, without ostentation." The Mercury eulogized her "youth, grace and intelligence" and mourned the silencing of a heart that had "throbbed with the finest impulses."
Another young Catholic lady Pauline DeCaradeuc enjoyed similar esteem. DeCaradeuc's paternal ancestors had arrived in Charleston in 1792 as refugees from Santo Domingo, and her maternal grandfather had emigrated from Italy in 1809. In 1840, her father purchased a 450-acre plantation named Montmorenci near Aiken. Pauline grew up in affluence, received her education from nuns, and regularly attended Most Holy Trinity Church in Augusta, Georgia. Her family's wealth, status, and culture earned them the respect of upper-class Protestants, and Pauline's wide circle of friends and admirers included such luminaries as the future Confederate general John Bell Hood. Pauline was intensely devoted to her faith—she almost decided to join the Ursuline order—but like her father, who regularly conversed with the local Episcopal priest, she had a host of Protestant friends. Her religion proved to be a hindrance only when it came time to marry. "My faith has kept back a good many from seriousness," she noted in her diary, but "all this only increases my ardent love for it." She viewed the hesitation of her Protestant beaux with humor: "what a romantic struggle between love & religion, I could have, if the affair were only mutual," she wrote after being informed that one prominent suitor intended to propose if only she would convert. In the end, love conquered even that obstacle, and in 1866, Pauline married a non-Catholic named Guerard Heyward, the scion of one of South Carolina's oldest families.
Elite Catholic women claimed a place in southern society and helped make Catholicism respectable. The Catholic community in Washington, Wilkes County, Georgia, owed its existence largely to the intercession of Kate Teliaferro Semmes, the wife of the planter Thomas G. Semmes. Thomas Semmes had received his education at Georgetown College, while Kate had studied with the Sisters of the Visitation in Georgetown. Upon settling in Washington, Kate offered her home for Mass in 1835, and several years later, her family donated a lot for a stone church, which they populated with family members, many of them converts. But she not only helped Catholics create a spiritual home, she also helped them feel at home in a new land. Wilkes County was a bastion of aristocratic Protestantism, but Kate won a place in society. Largely through her patronage, other Catholics, many from Ireland, also gained acceptance. In 1840, when Bishop England came to town to lay the church's cornerstone, a large crowd of non-Catholics appeared at the ceremony and invited him to preach in the local Methodist church. Over a decade later, Bishop Francis Gartland of Savannah visited Washington and noted in the parish registry that he had lectured to a largely non-Catholic audience. Kate Semmes was gone by that time, having moved with her family to Mississippi, but the relations she had helped forge between Catholics and Protestants endured.
Wealthy Catholics won praise for their refinement and generosity. Mary Boykin Chesnut of South Carolina complimented a play that the Semmes and Ives families of Richmond put on as "beautiful beyond words." Noting that both families were Catholic, she added that they "understand how to get up that sort of thing." A Protestant minister in New Orleans praised Stephen Poydras, a patron of the city's orphan asylum, as a "pious, upright, self-denying, humble, generous man." He described in similar fashion a member of a respected Creole Cathol ic family: "I have not seen, in the whole course of my life, a more charming woman." At the death of Julia Rowan Sneed, the daughter of Chief Justice John Louis Taylor of North Carolina, the local paper in Salisbury described her as an "intelligent, accomplished, and highly esteemed lady," praising her for the religious training she imparted to her children and concluding that "a purer spirit has seldom breathed on earth, or winged its triumphant flight to the bosom of God." Obituaries revealed disregard for ecclesiastical differences. Non-Catholic papers eulogized Catholics, and the Miscellany reciprocated for Protestants. Two editions in 1826, for example, ran an obituary and tribute for William Crafts, a Protestant lawyer, author, and politician, who had supported the Catholic-run Philosophical and Classical Seminary in Charleston.
Friendship and prejudice could coexist. In 1828, Bishop England noticed that the Female Episcopal Society had published a "Protestant Catechism shewing the principal errors of the Church of Rome." England observed, however, that many of the women had Catholic friends. In an open letter to Episcopal Bishop Nathaniel Bowen, he wondered whether they really believed what they had published. If they did, "how could they associate with Roman Catholics?" If they did not, how could they publish material "of the most defamatory nature, and the most insulting and degrading to the great majority of the Christians now in the Universe?" England suggested that he was confident that mutual respect would overcome the prejudice.
Ordinary Folks
Southern Protestants extended their welcome to ordinary Catholics. MaryAnne McManus, for example, was a native of Ireland who had immigrated to Kentucky in the late eighteenth century. After Indians killed her husband, she managed to raise four children by herself, giving each an education and turning them into "respectable citizens and exemplary Christians." When she died, "persons of all religious denominations, and every rank, assisted at the long and august ceremony of her obsequies" at Bardstown's cathedral. The outpouring of affection reflected broader patterns of mutuality that transcended religious differences.
Even Irish Catholics—often stereotyped by Protestants as ignorant, superstitious, and violent—attracted favorable comment. "The Irish race are endowed with eloquence, courage, enthusiasm, reverence, and sensibility," a Methodist bishop from North Carolina declared. A Protestant minister in New Orleans praised the Irish for their "many generous and noble traits of character" and blamed British oppression for any flaws in their national character. He argued that America had nothing to fear from the growth of Catholicism and that immigrants such as the Irish fueled the nation's prosperity. A paper in Alabama recommended a book entitled Sketches of the Irish Character as a Christmas present for its readers, praising the author for her "fine appreciation of the feelings of her country people as well as the wit and humor which sparkle on their surface." The paper reported that Irish workers in New York had raised $80,000 for the starving in Ireland: "What a fact is this! and what volumes does it speak in favor of the strong indications and generous hearts of the Irish!" The paper urged its readers to remember such generosity whenever they should hear "of excesses committed under the impulse of despair or starvation by the wretched peasantry of Ireland." Of course not all Irish immigrants were Catholic, but in the popular imagination Irish and Catholic were largely synonymous, so praise of Irish virtue invariably elevated Catholic immigrants.
Catholics and Protestants formed such intimate relationships that intermarriage posed a conundrum for Catholic priests, who did not always know what to do when Catholics wanted to marry non-Catholics or to celebrate their marriages before non-Catholic ministers. Was it proper, moreover, to deny Christian burial to someone who had "knowingly and very willingly, married an infidel or non-baptized person; who passed all his life in such concubinage, and, at the death, at his own request, asked for absolution"? "These cases," one priest reported, "are not rare." During the Jubilee of 1827, church officials reported that many Catholics "who in the heat of passion had transgressed the laws of the church, by sacrilegious contracts of marriage" presumably had returned "sincerely penitent." But what should priests do when Catholics' non-Catholic spouses died? One bishop came up with a solution by blessing each grave individually rather than consecrating the entire cemetery. He recognized that this was not ideal but concluded that because mixed marriages were so common, it would be "unpleasant and odious" to end the practice.
The church registers reveal that intermarriage was indeed common. The Cathedral of the Assumption in Louisville, for example, recorded 299 marriages between 1835 and 1843, and 57 of them involved a non-Catholic. The register of Spring Hill College, a Catholic college just outside Mobile, recorded the church affiliations of students and sometimes of their parents, who were often of mixed denominational allegiance. Southern Catholics often counted many Protestants among their friends and even their relations. In fact, whenever Catholics and Protestants happened to be neighbors, they generally got along "as happily ... as if they were all of the same creed."
Common Causes
In March 1827, the courthouse of Augusta, Georgia, filled with people who gathered to discuss the suffering of the Irish. Mayor Robert Raymond Reid opened the meeting, which passed a resolution denouncing "such a system of persecution for conscience' sake" as existed in Ireland. Bishop England detailed the persecution suffered by the Irish while "doing ample justice to the liberal portion of the Protestants of Ireland, who have deprecated the continuance and frequently defeated the operations of the atrocious code of penalties."
Southerners raised money for the Irish. Several cities established chapters of the "Friends of Ireland." In six months, Charleston raised almost $2,000 for Irish emancipation and aid for Irish emigrants, whereas a chapter in Savannah voted to give money to an Irish school. The Savannah Friends of Ireland publicized the ecumenism of their efforts. "There are among us people of all denominations; Jews as well as Christians; Protestants as well as Catholics; members of the Episcopal Church as well as those denominated dissenters in England," they proclaimed, all united in "the great and common cause of charity and religious toleration throughout the whole world."
Catholics were grateful for Protestant support. In September 1828, the Miscellany announced: "We find the genuine spirit of Carolinian liberty in full vigor regarding the state of Ireland." The paper saw the religious dimension of humanitarian aid: "The descendants of the exiled Hugunots [sic] advocating the cause of Catholics! This is an example of a most praiseworthy description; this is indeed taking a lead in the race of genuine liberality." The Irish members of the Charleston Friends of Ireland expressed "their deep feelings of gratitude to the native citizens of these United States ... for the cheering encouragement, liberal aid, and benevolent sympathy exhibited by them," and they pledged to repay the debt by always supporting civil and religious liberty. Such support presented to the world "the very gratifying spectacle of Protestant liberality and kindness" toward Catholics.
In early 1847, a women's society in Mobile held a public dinner with entertainment as a fundraiser for Ireland. The Mobile papers published, free of charge, a priest's offer to transfer donations to Ireland, and one paper endorsed him: "those who are disposed to contribute may rely on their charities being forwarded safely and promptly." That winter, citizens of New Orleans imposed on Henry Clay, who was visiting the city, to address a meeting held for the relief of the Irish. Clay noted that any suffering people had a claim to Americans' sympathies, but particularly the Irish, who had been America's friends "in all the vicissitudes of our national existence," whose sons had fought shoulder to shoulder with Americans in every battle "from Quebec to Monterey," and whose nation was "so identified with our own as to be almost part and parcel of ours—bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh." Ireland became a cause célèbre in the South. A thief who stole $260 from a business in Charleston left a note claiming that he intended to send the money to Ireland.
Catholics and Protestants joined in support of other causes. In 1824, they raised money for the Greek rebellion against the Turks. Bishop England spoke at Charleston's city hall and earned the assembly's thanks with a donation of $50 from the Philosophical and Classical Seminary. A few days later, a collection at the cathedral netted $93. A Methodist writer praised England's support for the Greeks: "No address that in the course of a long life I have ever heard, afforded me such heartfelt satisfaction." Sixteen years later, Catholics rallied along with Protestants behind a similar cause, this time in defense of the Jews facing persecution in the Ottoman Empire. At a public meeting, England helped pass a resolution calling for an end to the Jews' oppression and asking the president to intervene with other world leaders.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Southern Crucifix, Southern Cross by Andrew H. M. Stern Copyright © 2012 by The University of Alabama Press. Excerpted by permission of THE UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA PRESS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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