Exhibit Review: “Catholics in New York 1808-1946”

In early December, I decided to take a “staycation” in the New York metro area, catching up on necessary tasks and, for a couple of days, seeing cultural sites. One of the latter was the Museum of the City of New York.

Despite my longtime interest in history, I had stayed away from this institution because of the way it spun the controversy surrounding its mid-1990s “Gaelic Gotham” retrospective of Irish-Americans in the city into a dispute over political correctness rather than what in fact it was—an argument about scholarship and museum governance. My annoyance over this issue was so pronounced that I refused to support the institution for a long time thereafter.

Several years ago, however, the leadership of the museum underwent a transition, leaving me more disposed to see a topic there of compelling interest. Catholics in New York 1808-1946 fit the bill perfectly, dealing not just with religious, urban, and political history but also, for me, with personal history, since my mother’s side of the family were part of the New York Archdiocese for most of the first half of the 20th century.

Catholics, of course, were in New York before 1808. But that year marked the official designation of the Archdiocese of New York by the Vatican, so it serves as a useful measuring point to measure progress over the years in numbers and influence.

The luck of the Irish was with me the day I visited the museum. As I approached, camera crews from “Gossip Girl” were all around the place. Praise be to God--admission was free! I put the nine dollars I saved toward purchasing the companion book for the exhibit—and, faithful reader, I took back (at least for 24 hours) all the negative thoughts I’d ever had about why teenagers were wasting their time with this show.

The exhibit, which opened in mid-May, ended on New Year’s Eve, and I was only sorry I didn’t see it sooner. Excerpts from interviews with several notable New York Catholics (still-practicing and lapsed) played on a small TV monitor, including with veteran journalist Pete Hamill (who noted that his own writing was influenced by Mass, “which is essentially a three-act play”) and educator Frank Macchiarola.

An unexpected source of humor came from one of the interviewees, Sister Nancy Callahan, who as a youngster startled her parents with the rather stark difference in her alternative career plans: “Well, I’m going to become a nun or an interior decorator!” (She also movingly notes that they told her that if things didn’t work out in the convent, she could always come home.)

Along the way, I learned several facts I hadn’t realized before:

* The venerable city institution St. Vincent’s Hospital was established by Archbishop John Hughes in November 1849. I guess he wanted to make sure it was run by someone he trusted, because the operation was headed by Sister Angela Hughes, the archbishop’s own sister.

* The great Olympic runner Jesse Owens came to national prominence in 1934 at races held in NewYork under the Catholic aegis.

* In 1849, the Irish “apostle of temperance,” Fr. Theobald Mathew, traveled around the city, where he administered “the pledge” of abstinence from liquor to 20,000 people.

Longtime readers of this blog know my intense fascination with the first Roman Catholic nominee of a major American party, New York Governor Al Smith, so I was glad to see material on him, including photos, clippings about his battle against bigots in his 1928 Presidential race, and even an award he won in grade school for (naturally!) elocution.

All kinds of artifacts fill the exhibition—not just the usual photographs and cartoons, but also medals, clothes, communion cards, and the like. They all serve a purpose, however: to show how the faith underlay just about every aspect of its adherents’ lives—school, the workplace, hospitals, and politics. (The imperative to look out “for the least of mine” played out in the social welfare legislation pioneered by Smith and Albany colleague Robert Wagner and later implemented on a mass scale as part of the New Deal.)

I especially enjoyed the interactive map of archdiocesan parochial schools in 1945. I had fun typing into the screen the names of parochial schools that my mother and her siblings had attended (e.g., St. Charles Borromeo in Manhattan), seeing how many students had been enrolled at the end of the war. Several older exhibit visitors enjoyed this even more, as they had attended these very schools. I can only imagine the stories that my mother and her deceased and surviving siblings might have shared had they seen this.

You cannot absorb history without noticing how much certain aspects of the past play out, in different contexts, in the present. Only a couple of days after I visited this exhibit—which noted how Catholics built up their own social institutions in the hostile New World environment—came the news that Bernard Madoff had exploited similar Jewish philanthropic activities.

Especially after viewing the “Catholic New York” exhibit, I could only read with sympathy Wall Street Journal reporter Lucette Lagnado’s piercing examination of the conundrum faced by these Jewish charities. She quotes a comparison by a Jewish-American historian, Jonathan Sarda, of the affluent Orthodox Jewish community of New York to "a kind of shtetl -- a very wealthy shtetl."

Having read similar references to “the Catholic ghetto” of parallel institutions before the election of John F. Kennedy, I understand all too well not only the desire to belong that makes one want to tear down these social enclosures, but also the nostalgia for solidarity and the longing for “the kind of more humble, more individual tzedakah, or personal charity” that informs Ms. Lagnado’s piece.

The same day, I also saw at the museum an exhibit on the photography of Southern author Eudora Welty. At some point, I may write also write about this exhibit (which is still ongoing as of this writing).

In the meantime, since I have taken the museum to task in the past, I think it only fair to commend it now for this exhibit, and, in particular, take note of those most crucially involved with it. Deborah Dependahl Waters served as curator, with Sarah Henry acting as contributing curator and the historian Terry Golway (who also edited the companion volume) acting as curatorial consultant.