Church History
Chapter 13 The Church in North America: A Style of Its Own
Part One: Mission Territory (pages 257-265)
A. Review Questions
1. Where did the Spanish missionaries work? Where did the French missionaries work? The Spanish missionaries worked in the Southeast (what is now Florida), in the Southwest (primarily New Mexico), and in California. The French priests worked among the Native Americans --- preaching to them, educating them in Western customs, and sometimes protecting them from exploitation.
2. Describe how the Spanish and French missionaries viewed, and acted toward, the Native Americans? The Spanish friars tended to view Native Americans as barbarians and sought to make them accept European ways. The French missionaries were considerably more respectful of the Native American culture, but still they tended to misunderstand and demean it, referring to the native people as “savages” and “barbarians.”
3. Describe how Native Americans viewed, and acted towards, the missionaries. Native Americans had mixed reactions to the missionaries. Some tribes, like the Hurons, remained open to Christianity; other tribes showed unyielding hostility. Almost all Indian people recognized the foreign religion as a threat to their own religious traditions and way of life. They were quick to understand that the missionaries represented the front line of foreign domination.
4. How did the treatment of Native Americans by Spanish traders frustrate the work of Christian missionaries in the Southwest? Shortly before 1600, when a pueblo of Indians stood in the way of the colonists, the Spanish governor enslaved some of the Indians and mutilated others, cutting off a hand or a foot. This callous brutality made missionary work almost impossible, but the Franciscans stayed on even when the colony itself failed.
5. What were the successes of the California missions? What were the failures? Some friars led wisely, but others demeaned the Indians, treating them as slaves. The Indians’ labor, a favorable climate, and the friars’ agricultural know-how combined to make the California missions an agricultural and economic success.
6. What Christian values were illustrated in the brief life of Blessed Kateri Tekakwitha? At age twenty, she was baptized Catholic by a French Jesuit missionary. Kateri suffered greatly for her conversion; she was abused and ostracized by her relatives and tribe…She devoted the rest of her short life to helping people in need.
7. Describe the geographical domain (area) of France and Christianity by the end of the 1600s. By the end of the 1600s, French trappers, traders, and missionaries had extended the reach of France and Christianity to the south and west of New France. They had traveled the Great Lakes, and they had explored west to the Mississippi River and south on that river to the Gulf of Mexico, near the site of a later French colony that would be known as New Orleans … French forts and villages sprouted up along the Ohio and Mississippi rivers and on the shores of the Great Lakes.
8. Describe the no-win situation often felt by Indian converts? A story from the Fox Indians, of the Great Lakes region, describes the no-win situation often felt by Indian converts: “Once there was an Indian who became a Christian. He became a very good Christian…Then he died. First he went to the Indian hereafter, but they wouldn’t take him because he was a Christian. Then he went to Heaven, but they wouldn’t let him in because he was an Indian. Then he went to Hell, but hey wouldn’t admit him there either, because he was so good. So he became alive again…
9. How did European disputes cause conflict between the French and English living in the New World? Part of the hostility was because France was Catholic while England was Anglican and Protestant. Eventually the French-English conflict crossed the ocean … Invaded by English settlers, French Catholics in the colony of Acadie refused to give allegiance to the king of England. As a result, many French Canadians were deported to various English colonies to the south, forced to leave behind their homes and farms. A large number who fled from English rule went all the way down to what is now the state of Louisiana, where many of their descendants, known as Cajuns, still live today.
10. Describe the history of Catholics in the Maryland colony. Catholics in England had an opportunity to escape discrimination when King James I gave Lord Baltimore, a Catholic, land for an American settlement that was named Maryland. The Maryland colony welcomed anyone who wanted to live there, and it passed an Act of Toleration, granting freedom of worship to all --- an unusual move for that era.
11. Why was the American Revolution good news for Catholics? As the British American colonists grew determined to break away from England, bigotry against Catholics decreased in the interest of unity in fighting Britain. After the American Revolution (in which Catholics played a significant part), the new Constitution’s Bill of Rights gave to all U.S. citizens the freedom of worship.
B. Vocabulary: none
C. Key Concepts, Events, Dates, People and Places
a) John de Brebeuf French Jesuit known for his sensitivity to the natives (captured by Iroquois and an agonizing death: run a gauntlet and beaten, stripped, fingers chewed and nails torn out, while still alive he was set on fire, cut off his nose and lips, put a hot iron down his throat, scalding water over his head, scalped him and cut off his feet, stripped him of his flesh while still conscious, cut open his chest, removed his heart and ate it)
b) Saint Augustine the first permanent Catholic settlement in what would later be the United States
c) Santa Fe the second permanent Catholic settlement within the area of what is now the United States
d) Junipero Serra Spanish Friar who began missionary activity in California
e) Isaac Jogues Jesuit who in the 1600s lived for six years among the Hurons in the Albany area of N.Y.
f) Marie Guyart a French widow who joined the Ursuline order, journeyed to the New World as its first woman missionary
g) Francis Xavier de Montmorency Laval appointed first bishop of Quebec
h) Treaty of Paris France gave Canada over to English rule
i) Quebec Act gave French Canadians freedom to practice their religion and to hold elective offices
j) Charles Carroll a Catholic statesman who was one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence
k) Kosciuszko and Pulaski Polish soldiers who came over from Europe to join in the struggle for independence
l) Lafayette French general in the war for independence
Part Two: A Distinctly American Church (pages 266-270)
A. Review Questions
12. Why was John Carroll’s election as the first Catholic bishop in the United States significant? Through his organization of American territory into dioceses, his establishment of Saint Mary’s Seminary and Georgetown College, and his support of religious order founders like Elizabeth Seton, Carroll brought order and direction to the U.S. church.
13. What difficulties did Bishop Carroll face in establishing order in the U.S. Catholic Church? Many priestless congregations had been running their own affairs and were not eager to have a bishop tell them what to do. Also, from 1790 to 1860, U.S. law required that every church congregation have a lay board of trustees that was responsible for church debt payments, pastors’ salaries, and the hiring and firing of church personnel…Many U.S. Catholics, in the fervor of the new national democracy, wanted the church to be run democratically too… Bishop Carroll’s task was to maintain the support of dedicated Catholics while also taking firm control of church government.
14. Explain the numerous accomplishments of Bishop Carroll. Despite the difficulties, Carroll succeeded in planting a church that could grow in the United States. He was thoroughly American in style and spirit, committed to the principles of democracy and of separation of church and state, but he was always completely loyal to the Vatican. Under his leadership, the U.S. Catholic population grew from thirty thousand in 1790 to two hundred thousand in 1815.
15. What contributions did Elizabeth Ann Seton make to U.S. Catholicism? She founded the Sisters of Charity, a religious order whose members established schools that set the patterns for the Catholic parochial school system in the United States.
16. Describe the effects of the expansion of U.S. territories on the lives and hardships of the Catholic clergy. Many of those frontier people, especially the German and Irish people, were Catholic immigrants so missionaries went with them. A number of the priests were French, and from among them came the pioneer bishops. Their dioceses spread over immense distances, so the bishops, as well as the few priests that there were, practically lived in the saddle, riding from one settlement to the next to give the sacraments and instruct the people. The clergy lived a hard, impoverished life and often went hungry to serve the Catholics who were their responsibility.
17. Explain Sister Blandina’s plan/scheme to rebuild the schoolhouse without money? I borrowed a crowbar and went on the roof, detached some adobes and began throwing them down…The first person who came towards the schoolhouse…when he saw me at work…exclaimed, “For the love of God, Sister, what are you doing?” …How many men do you need, Sister? … Our assets are good will and energy.
18. List three significant Catholics, and their variety of ministries, involved in settling the frontier. Rose Philippine Duchene, of the Sacred Heart order, Cornelia Connelly, founder of the Religious of the Holy Child; Katherine Drexel, who started the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament and opened more than fifty houses of sisters to care for poor blacks and Indians in the South and southwest; and Rose Hawthorne Lathrope (daughter of author Nathaniel Hawthorne) who started an order to care for people with incurable cancer. Religious brothers and priests, such as Holy Cross Brothers, De La Salle Christian Brothers, and Franciscans played significant roles in education on the frontier…
19. What was the response of the church to the western expansion of the U.S.? As the boundary of the United States gradually moved westward to the Rocky Mountains and down to Santa Fe from Oregon, Catholic missionaries went out to the new lands.
B. Vocabulary: none
C. Key Concepts, Events, Dates, People and Places
m) Sisters of Charity founded in 1809 it was the first religious order to originate in the United States
n) Father Pierre Jean De Smet a Belgian who was among the first to work with the Plains Indians whose land was being invaded by U.S. settlers
Part Three: An Immigrant Church (pages 271-276)
A. Review Questions
20. When were the three waves of European immigration and what groups composed them? The first wave of immigration, from about 1830 to 1860, was composed mainly of Irish; the second, from 1860 to 1890, of Germans; the third, from 1890 to the 1920s, of Italians and eastern Europeans.
21. What is nativism? Why was there bigotry against Catholics? Nativism is a form of prejudice against immigrants. In the 1800s and 1900s, it was applied especially to Catholic immigrants by the “native-born” Protestant majority in America. As the number of Catholics in the United States increased, the English-speaking Protestants became afraid of the Catholic immigrants; rumors and even publications by educated persons circulated claims that the Vatican and the Catholic immigrants were conspiring to take over the United States.
22. What are several ways Catholics demonstrated concern for workers and the poor? Cardinal James Gibbons wrote to Pope Leo XIII and went to Rome on behalf of the Knights of Labor union. Pope Leo then came out with his encyclical Rerum Novarum, which asserted workers’ rights to just wages and decent working conditions. Mother Frances Cabrini founded a community of sisters to teach Italians in the parochial schools, to care for homeless children, and to nurse in hospitals. Organizations like the Saint Vincent de Paul Society made it possible for Catholics to help one another with donations of clothes and furniture to the needy.
23. Why did some ethnic groups want their own churches? Some ethnic groups wanted to practice their religion just as they had learned it and to preserve their native language. For many immigrant families, passing on the religious heritage was accomplished through their native language and culture. Different ethnic groups also had their own emphasis in Catholicism.
24. Why did German parishes ask Rome to form German dioceses in the U.S.? What was the response? German churches were the centers of their communities … German Catholicism, like the Catholicism of other ethnic groups, had its own emphases. [German parishes, for example, stressed excellence in church music. The parish choir was respected, and membership in it was considered an honor…interparish Catholic choirs put on magnificent concerts…loved processions through their neighborhoods …published their own newspapers … schoolteachers taught in] German…parishes supplied a sense of tradition from the old country. Pope Leo XIII turned down their requests, he stressed that nationality should not be the basis of decisions in the church, but that the church would take care of the needs of each ethnic church.
25. What changes were requested in public schools in Philadelphia and New York? What was the response? In 1844, a bishop of Philadelphia asked the school authorities if Catholic public school students could read the Catholic version of the Bible instead (of the King James version) [the answer was a full-scale riot. In the violence, three Catholic churches and a number of private homes were burned, and thirteen people were killed.] In New York [in the 1840s and 1850s, about one-third of the Catholic children were in schools run by the Catholic Church.] Catholics there asked for a share of public school money, [but the state legislature denied the request, saying that no financial help could be given to religious schools. Their request also brought heated reactions from many Protestants, causing the archbishop of New York to station armed guards around Catholic churches to discourage riots from breaking out.]
26. According to Bishop Peter Vay’s account what are the challenges facing Hungarian immigrants? What are their only safeguards? More than half the population of Chicago are foreigners … The Hungarians are chiefly employed as butchers in the slaughter-houses, and as blacksmiths and carpenters in the Pullman establishment. … Set adrift in that great city, without knowing the language, without friends or any one to advise them, these poor folks are at the mercy of chance. … The church and the school are their only safeguards.