Catholicism and Working-Class Activism in Providence

This chapter maintains that Catholic parishes were the most accessible and important institutions in Providence's ethnic, working-class neighborhoods in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and that as such, they played critical roles in politicizing new Americans. It was at church that the largest proportion of immigrants congregated on a regular basis. Parishes functioned not only as sources of spiritual solace but also as dispensers of charity, promoters of upward mobility, and centers of neighborhood life. Priests initially promoted lay societies to foster congregational loyalties, but over time the groups also served as political organizing spaces for Catholic women and men. For many, the Church served as a place where new Americans organized for change.

Protestant London, No Popery and the Irish Poor: II (1850—1860)

‘Wanted immediately, a member of the Church of England, of devoted missionary spirit, willing “to spend and to be spent” in labouring amongst a degraded metropolitan population, chiefly Irish. A fair knowledge of the Roman Catholic controversy is desirable Unexceptionable testimonials as to personal piety, energy, and general ability will be required.… An average salary at least will be given.’Rev. S.P.D. (1853).The Protestant societies engaged in evangelizing the Irish in London were mostly staffed by laymen, but had the enthusiastic aid and counsel of the Evangelical clergy, and were only some of the institutional strands in the Evangelical Vicar's encounter with urban poverty from the early 1830s, as the Evangelical urban parish was divided into units of manageable size, and developed lay forms of district-visiting to bring under parochial supervision the huge urban slum populations: or, as the Evangelicals put it themselves, as they brought a remedy to the material and spiritual destitution of the great godless cities, and to London, the greatest and least godly of any. The lay societies needed clerical approval, patronage and protection, and the Evangelical clergy worked as hard as their laymen.