Day 27. November 6, 2006
Movement 3. Jesus Christs
Lecture 13. Panis Angelicus: Jesus and Nineteenth Century Catholicism
Catholicism came to the Atlantic seaboard in the mid-17th century with English Catholics seeking refuge in Maryland. Given a small number of American Catholics and French Catholic support for the American Revolution, anti-Catholic discrimination in America remained relatively muted until poverty and famine in Ireland in the 1830s and 1840s sent a flood of Irish Catholics across the Atlantic. Large numbers of German Catholics began to arrive about the same time. Assimilation came slowly. Catholicism in Victorian American was characteristically urban, Irish, and poor. Like the denominational structures that divided Protestantism, Catholics were divided by ethnic and national groups. As American Catholicism grew, it spawned nativist critics. It also inspired many converts, partly because marriage required conversion. Also, Catholicism offered release from the demands of the religious marketplace and from the aesthetic barrenness of Protestantism, adding color, sound, and smells to the American religious experience. Moreover, the Catholic Jesus incarnated a special role for the western world illustrated both by Mary's protection of Mexico and the western hemisphere and by the large population of patron saints that accompanied Catholic immigrants.