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Catholic Borderlands
Mapping Catholicism onto American Empire, 1905â?"1935
By Anne M. Martínez UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS
Copyright © 2014 Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8032-7409-9
CHAPTER 1
An American Catholic Borderlands
The Spanish Past in the United States
In 1907, Richard Aumerle published a short fictional piece in Extension Magazine. "Juanita" told the story of John Barr, an Irishman tramping the Southwest for fifty years, who traveled with a young Mexican girl, Juanita. "Where or by what queer ways Juanita had come to be his, does not appear. It would have required an extravagant stretch of imagination to have fancied any relationship between them," Aumerle wrote. And yet, from the time Juanita was two or three years old till she was eighteen, she accompanied Barr on his travels. Juanita was portrayed as shy, wild, and impulsive, while Barr was moody and unsociable. When Father Corbin came to town, Barr suggested the priest make his way back to whence he came.
Barr was "the old West, dying fast," and Corbin was determined that Barr ought not die without knowing the faith. Barr rebuffed the priest on multiple occasions, but he got the message that he was the past and the Catholic town being established down the hill was the future. He also understood that the time had come for him to "free" Juanita. When he broached this topic with her, she was angry and realized that Father Corbin was the influence pushing for change. Juanita was determined to eliminate Corbin, even if it meant killing him. Predictably, Corbin and Juanita met on opposite sides of a river, with a log bridge between them and rising rapids below. Juanita shot Corbin while falling into the river and was rescued by him, as witnessed by Barr. "Juanita did not quite understand it to be looking up into the forgiving eyes of this man whom a moment ago she had wanted to kill." Barr's response upon witnessing all of this was, "We're needin' you Father." And thus, both Juanita and the old West were saved.
Extension Magazine, the official publication of the Catholic Church Extension Society of the United States of America, was one of the most widely read monthly magazines in the United States in the early 1900s. The Extension Society, established in 1905, was designed to serve remote populations throughout the United States, living largely off the contributions of relatively well-off Catholics through special collections and memberships in the society, which included Extension Magazine. The magazine existed explicitly to raise funds. Priests in remote, rural parishes, some reached by railroad cars, motor chapels, or even horseback, wrote compelling narratives and shared testimonials of conversion and service to the most needy of America's Catholics and potential converts. Extension Magazine featured articles and images of these remote and impoverished communities and, in the case of American Indian and Eskimo communities, substantial photo layouts. The goal was to inspire donations for churches, schools, and liturgical needs for missions in the rural South and West.
Aumerle's Father Corbin bore a striking resemblance to an Extension Society priest. "The Bishop had given him this corner of the state—territory enough for two eastern dioceses—to do what he could for stray Catholics, to put up a little church here and there with what the miners could give him and what assistance he could get from the East." The illustrations accompanying these stories reflected the heroic nature of home mission work: a priest pulling Juanita from the rapids, or in another story, a small chapel glowing in the dark forest, where Illiniwek Indians were rescued from the warring Chippewas by a persistent and forgiving priest. Photos of Euro-American missions showed chapels or schools built with Extension Society funds, while those of black, American Indian, and Mexican missions showed how civilized they had become with proper attention.
Francis Kelley, through Extension Magazine, revised the American narrative of the taming of the West and its peoples to a Catholic narrative about saving communities of color from Protestant proselytizers who had no qualms about snatching children from the arms of their parents—in this case, the Catholic Church. This chapter charts the separation of white immigrant faithful from their black, American Indian, and Mexican counterparts in the pages of Extension Magazine. It examines the rhetoric and imagery of conversion and the civilizing mission presented through testimonials, short stories, and images. These reports were important in racializing blacks, American Indians, and Mexicans to northeastern Catholics who had interacted with Italian, Slavic, or Polish immigrants but were unlikely to encounter Mexicans or American Indians in their daily lives. This chapter also marks the beginning of the Extension Society's project, when Kelley laid the groundwork for his expanded mission beyond U.S. borders. The foundation for this work was the mapping of the social and geographic space of the U.S. Southwest, which drew on the Spanish Catholic past, thereby legitimizing Catholic ownership of an American narrative of civilizing the land and the people of the West.
The Extension Society converted the civilizing mission from Protestant Americanization to a renewed embrace of Catholicism with a distinctively American bent. U.S. Catholics were provoked into action by the work of Protestant proselytizers with Mexican immigrants in the Southwest. The home mission work of the Extension Society gave them an outlet to address the Mexican situation and affirm their own identities as American Catholics. This Catholic taming of the West hints at Kelley's broader project, which followed American expansion into former Spanish territories to ensure that former Spanish subjects remained Catholic. This Catholic project within the broader American imperial project helped establish the Catholic Church as an American institution. Genealogically, the Protestant-Catholic tensions and rivalry of England and Spain were passed on to the United States and Mexico. This chapter excavates the layers of U.S. history and historiography that have clouded our understanding of Catholicism, Mexico, and the ultimate intersection of the two—Mexicans in the United States.
U.S. Catholic history tells the story of foreign missionaries through the mid-nineteenth century but takes a dramatic turn late in the century to the "native" diocesan structures, particularly in urban northeastern and midwestern dioceses. Catholics continued to live in rural and remote areas of the United States, but they have received scant attention in the historical literature. This chapter, much like the Extension Society and Extension Magazine, bridges these distinct U.S. Catholic bodies.
U.S. Catholic history in this era is largely the story of urban immigrant Catholics and the development of Catholic school systems. Without a doubt, Catholics were a predominantly urban and northeastern population. But as these urban Catholics became better established in major cities, they built their own infrastructure of organizations, presses, and projects. What little has been written about rural Catholics in the early twentieth century emphasizes the work of Protestants reformers to Americanize outlying populations. Urban Catholics, led by Kelley and the Extension Society, saw a place for themselves in a broader American story: a Catholic history of the West, South, and Southwest shows the maturing Catholic discourse, which envisioned a national role for Catholics in shaping more remote areas of the country. Catholics were in the borderlands of American empire, working to counter the Protestant national project with a Catholic errand into the wilderness.
Home Missions in a Missionary Land
In America, some of the first ripples of "this new evangelization" began nearly a hundred years ago, when a penniless priest embarked on a cross-country begging circuit.
—Catholic Church Extension Society, Family Appointment Calendar, 20028
Until 1908 the United States was officially designated "mission" territory, meaning it had received the gospel relatively recently. The Catholic Church Extension Society of the United States of America, the U.S. home mission society, was tasked with bringing the faith far and wide in this young nation and its territories. Kelley's success in converting the civilizing mission from one of Protestant uplift to one of Catholic defense was shaped by the society's status within the American church as well as Kelley's role in building the Extension Society.
Francis Clement Kelley, born in 1870 on Prince Edward Island, Canada, became one of the most influential Catholic priests in the United States in the first half of the twentieth century. During his first assignment, in Lapeer, Michigan, Kelley found that his own and surrounding rural parishes suffered from a lack of funding to sustain churches and schools. In 1905 he approached Archbishop James Quigley of Chicago with a plan to support such struggling rural parishes by calling on better-off, mostly urban parishes for financial support. The Extension Society was established in 1905 to serve remote populations throughout the United States, with Kelley as president its first nineteen years. The fact that Kelley skirted his own bishop in Detroit suggests his desire to think about this problem on a national rather than a local scale. The society was a joint effort of the archbishop of Chicago, the archbishop of Santa Fe, the bishop of Wichita, and several Illinois Catholic bishops. Catholic leadership from the East was noticeably absent from this project. Chicago, the largest and most stable diocese in "the West," was the natural home for the Extension Society. As part of the thriving Archdiocese of Chicago, the Extension Society was able to gain a national and even international audience, giving Kelley national and international stature as a Catholic spokesman and statesman in spite of his low rank within the Catholic hierarchy.
The generation of bishops leading the U.S. Catholic Church shaped dioceses into a more orderly and efficient era in the first two decades of the twentieth century. The Catholic Church was in a process of reorganization. As it grew rapidly in the United States, Rome was more and more aware of how complicated its very existence was. There was frequent competition from Protestant communities and pressure from politicians to limit the scope of the Catholic Church.
Bishops were charged with the unique task of making U.S. Catholics seem American to the Protestants while assuring Rome that they were still Roman Catholics—a precarious balancing act. In the early twentieth century, U.S. Catholics struggled to establish themselves as both American and Catholic in a Protestant-dominated nation. Immigrants faced challenges to their legitimacy as true Americans. As Catholics, the prejudice against them multiplied. Catholic bishops in the United States faced pressures from the Vatican and from the American public in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. There was concern that a peculiar form of Catholicism was developing in the United States. Pope Leo XIII's 1899 apostolic letter to the U.S. Catholic hierarchy, Testem Benevolentiae Nostrae, cautioned U.S. Catholic leaders that "Americanism" was threatening the unity of the church and confusing earthly liberty with the eternal version offered through the faith.
Bishop Peter J. Muldoon of Rockford, Illinois, reported at the Second Missionary Congress, more than a decade later, the expectation that the Catholic Church in the United States attend not only to the spiritual needs of immigrants but to their material needs as well. Within the church, Americanists sought assimilation of immigrants and embraced the constitutional protection of religious freedom as an opening for the Catholic Church in the United States. Conservatives were more cautious and wanted to protect the flock from the dangers to the soul lurking in the United States. Extension Magazine came into being in 1906, in the midst of these simmering tensions.
At the turn of the century, mission societies were being created in the United States, and American provinces of foreign mission societies were established. As mission territory, and given the great geographic expanse that needed attention, U.S. territories were magnets for Catholic missionaries. As early as 1909, Kelley sought to establish an American Board of Catholic Missions to coordinate and oversee the varied Catholic missionary efforts. The board did not win approval of the U.S. bishops until 1919, and it was formally inaugurated in 1925 with Kelley, then bishop of Oklahoma, as a member. Through Extension Magazine, Kelley did manage to centralize much of the reporting on U.S. Catholic missions, and he distributed funds widely in the name of American Catholics. In some dioceses, the Extension Society was the only domestic missionary organization allowed to visit to raise fund or have special collections.
In 1918, Kelley wrote that the society was formed to assist small missions and parishes in "pioneer sections." In its first thirteen years the society focused on building churches and schools—an amazing seventeen hundred structures from 1905 to 1918. It purchased pews, chalices, altars, and whatever else was needed to turn a "dry goods box with a cross" into a church. The society also provided railroad and motor chapels to those dioceses that had Catholics spread far and wide—particularly in the plains states and the far West. Extension worked collaboratively with dioceses and orders to man the mobile chapels and serve as many Catholics as possible. The society did not provide the personnel to reach remote Catholics. Rather, it provided funds and vital publicity and, most importantly, used Catholics missions to create and sustain an American Catholic ethos of giving to less-fortunate Catholics here in the United States.
Extension Magazine, the official organ of the Extension Society, had a rapidly growing audience in its first decade. The magazine frequently contained short stories that produced narratives of faith and conversion of morally impoverished populations in the South, West, and even the rural Northeast on occasion. Kelley fancied himself a novelist and sought to cultivate a cadre of young Catholic writers. He soon found, however, that the most compelling stories came from those "in the field." Extension featured articles and photos of remote, impoverished communities and the heroic priests who served them. The magazine was the major source of fund-raising for the society, with personal appeals coming not only from Kelley but also from priests in need around the United States and its territories. Testimonials from those serving communities around the country reported the quantity and quality of Catholics in their assigned territories. Priests and brothers described in painstaking detail the lack of appropriate chalices and vestments, let alone churches or schools. They requested funds for projects such as building or repairing churches or attracting an order of sisters to start a school. Through short stories, testimonials, and editorials, Kelley outlined for Extension readers the perils of life in the West, marking the presence of an America Catholic borderlands.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Catholic Borderlands by Anne M. Martínez. Copyright © 2014 Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS.
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