 Issues in the Encounter |
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Ethnic Identity and an American Church One of the principal challenges confronting the American church at the end of the nineteenth century was coping with ethnic diversity. Representatives of several white ethnic groups, French Canadians, Poles and particularly the Germans, complained that they did not have representation in the hierarchy equal to their numbers in the laity. German Americans, for example, made up about one quarter of the Catholic people in 1900, but only one seventh of the bishops. Those groups also felt that Irish Americans who dominated the hierarchy, pressured them to shed their native languages and customs, and forced them to Americanize. Twice German Americans protested to Rome about their treatment by Irish American and other English speaking bishops. In 1886, Father Peter Abbelen, spiritual director of the School Sisters of Notre Dame in Milwaukee, went to Rome and presented a memorial complaining that the rights of German American parishes and their priests were mistreated in several cities. Archbishops James Gibbons, John Williams of Boston, John Ryan of Philadelphia and even Michael Corrigan of New York, sent letters denying Abbelen's claims. The Vatican responded by confirming certain rights of national parishes, but rejected Abbelen's call for appointments of separate vicars general for each ethnic group, Gibbons argued that Abbelen's claims would lead to a "war of the races" within the Church and warned that "the charges of our enemies that we are a religion of foreigners will be vindicated." Four years later, in 1890, Peter Paul Cahensly, a German businessman long involved in charitable work with immigrants, presented a similar memorial to the Pope. Gibbons, Ireland, and several other bishops in the United States again lobbied against it and the Pope rejected the memorial's calls for appointment of bishops for each ethnic group.
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