This Day in Irish-American History (Nativist Mob Burns Charlestown Convent)

August 11, 1834—A rumor that a Protestant girl was being held against her will spurred a nativist mob to go on a rampage against an Ursuline convent.

The land is now occupied by the East Branch of the Somerville Public Library, but freedom of inquiry was the last thing on the rioters’ minds—in fact, by the time they were done, burning a valuable library was one of the least of their outrages, which included destroying religious relics, ransacking the possessions of nuns and their students in the convent school, mutilating the remains of the dead in the on-site mausoleum, then torching the once-imposing building.

All of this was done with nary a move to help—even from the fire companies who’d arrived on the scene—from the crowd that watched the blaze.

The attack, part of a wave of anti-Catholic bigotry that swept the United States in the middle decades of the 19th century, also reflected the growing sense of disenfranchisement of native-born Americans who felt increasingly crowded by Irish emigrants. And this was before the great wave that came to America from the Emerald Isle following the Great Hunger of the 1840s.

The mob’s hatred also took root in class resentment and a patriarchal society’s distrust of educated women, such as the convent students and the sisters who taught them.

The event that precipitated the riot was the flight from the convent of an incoherent nun, Sister Mary John—the mother assistant—to the home of a neighbor. Before long, the convent’s mother superior, Sister Mary St. George, and Boston’s bishop, Benedict Fenwick, retrieved the exhausted nun, explaining that the recent heat wave and a heavy academic workload had induced “brain fever.”

If you know the context of American education at this time, it’s easy to see why teaching this curriculum might be a stiff challenge for Sister Mary John. The school’s students were expected to master writing, arithmetic, geometry, chemistry, botany, natural and moral philosophy, rhetoric, logic, and “use of the Globes.” Only then did they get around to learning skills that the conventional wisdom of the day felt more necessary for young women: needlework, drawing, and cookery.

Keeping students up to all these standards is difficult enough now; it was almost unheard of back then, particularly in Massachusetts, whose public schools only allowed girls to attend six months out of the year (rather than nine for boys).

So, as area residents looked up at the convent atop Mount Benedict, they wondered: why on earth are the nuns teaching these girls so much? And why on earth are so many of the students Protestants like ourselves? (No more than one-fifth of the fifty-to-sixty students were Catholic.)
The answer to these questions, in the mind of these bigots, was simple: the nuns were trying to convert the girls as a first step toward taking over Boston.

At this point, it’s necessary to mention some of the other forces whipping up the populace:

* The “pornography of the Puritan”. Historian Richard Hofstadter’s phrase was not just a nice bit of rhetoric about anti-Catholicism, but also a thrust at the peculiar predilection of descendants of Cotton Mather for lurid tales involving young Catholic women. It was a given that these novels would retail the usual charges against Catholics—the Inquisition, their allegiance to a foreign potentate (the pope), their exotic rites. But the real frisson of these horror tales was the salacious recounting of misbehavior by wanton priests and their compliant nuns. (Think what a field day these authors would have had with the Rev. Paul Shanley and Rev. John Geoghan; they wouldn’t have had to resort to fiction!) Indeed, one of these tales, involving a woman named Rebecca Theresa Reed, concerned the Ursuline convent.

* A sensational—and, of course, inaccurate—press. On August 8, the Boston Mercantile Journal ran a news item about a “mysterious lady who was being held against her will on Mt. Benedict. The item implied that she could have been tortured, even murdered. Three days later, the paper printed a small item noting that another small competitor called the story “materially inaccurate.” Obviously, someone forgot to get the message out to the rioters.

* The Rev. Lyman Beecher. Harriet Beecher Stowe sensitized Americans to the plight of slaves with the publication of Uncle Tom's Cabin. Her father was equally adept at doing so in the antebellum period. Too bad his sympathies did not lie with the Irish. The day before the riots, he was particularly energetic, preaching anti-Catholic sermons in three different churches.

* Sister Mary St. George. Yes, the Mother Superior herself. She was not the last person to react with asperity after a day of stress and physical exhaustion. (Henry Louis Gates and Hillary Clinton can relate.) But, after a period in which the convent had been subjected to unrelenting speculation—after she had already proved the falsity of the charges, to a visiting investigating committee—she’d had enough of the scruffy mob. For a long time, I could understand why Archbishop John Hughes of New York had promised “a second Moscow” (a reference to Napoleon’s disastrous Russian campaign, when the Russian city burned) if any nativist mob perpetrated outrages against Catholics. But Sister Mary St. George’s words on this occasion might have pushed things too far: the bishop, she told the mob, had at his disposal “twenty thousand of the vilest Irishmen at this command.”

All of this produced a cauldron of hatred. It is fortunate that the nuns and students slipped out of the convent before the rioters burst in—who knows what they would have been subject to by the mob?

The ringleader of the mob, a big brickmaker named John R. Buzzell, was subsequently acquitted at trial. Only a youngster was ever convicted for this role, and that youth was later pardoned.

The ruins remained visible for another 40 years. The rioters expected it to force an exodus out of Boston. Instead, all they ended up doing was a more fervent embrace by Catholics of their faith—one that had already endured centuries of abuse and injustice, in the catacombs of ancient Rome down to the hedge schools of their native Ireland.

When the Irish seized political power, in Boston and in urban political machines around the country, many were disinclined to take seriously the cries of Yankee reformers. When the emigrants had been desperate to eat, the reformers had not been forthcoming. It should not have come as a shock that so many of the new bosses learned the lessons of the Ursuline convent burning only too well.

This Day in Diplomatic History (U.S. and Vatican Establish Full Relations)

January 10, 1984—The United States and the Vatican brought to an end nearly two hundred years of contacts that ranged from semi-official to nonexistent by announcing that they would be establishing full diplomatic relations. 

The move also capped nearly four decades of American Presidents’ attempts, amid lingering anti-Catholic domestic attitudes, to create a more substantial point of contact between one of the world’s superpowers and an organization with significant moral influence in Europe and beyond.

From 1797 to the late 1860s, the U.S. kept a consulate in the Papal States. For the last two decades in this period, though it did not exchange ambassadors with the Vatican, America maintained diplomatic relations.

All of this came to an end in August 1867, when Congress prohibited the funding of any diplomat to the Vatican. 

For years afterward, virtually no sovereign basis would have existed for this in any case, as the unification of Italy resulted in the loss of most of the territory in the Papal States, as well as the pontiff’s temporal power.

That only changed when the government of Benito Mussolini signed the Lateran Treaty in 1929, when the government of Benito Mussolini recognized the sovereignty of Vatican City—a territory of approximately 100 acres—and the pope as its temporal ruler.

A decade later, Franklin Delano Roosevelt acted to communicate more closely with the Vatican and the U.S. in closer communication. 

The motive for the move was pragmatic, not idealistic: while no rabid anti-Catholic, FDR once told two members of his administration, Leo Crowley and Henry Morgenthau: “This is a Protestant country, and the Catholics and the Jews are here on sufferance."

But, with war having broken out in Europe, he needed a neutral listening post. The Vatican, which for the last quarter century had made diplomatic overtures to regimes it detested in order to maintain churches in those countries, fit the bill.

But how was Roosevelt going to accomplish this? The U.S. was only a decade past the decline of the Ku Klux Klan as a powerful and frightening force in much of the country, and Al Smith’s Presidential bid in 1928 ran into a storm of anti-Catholic sentiment.

So FDR, foxy politician that he was, hit on a stratagem: on Christmas Eve 1939, the same day he announced he’d be sending a personal representative, Myron Taylor (an Episcopalian) to the Vatican, he coupled it with a statement that he’d be pursuing closer relations with key officials from the Protestant and Jewish faiths. 

Taylor still, however, did not formally have the title of ambassador, as the post would have required a vote by Congress that FDR, with a weaker majority than at any time since he took office, might not have won.

Roosevelt’s successor, Harry Truman, deciding it was a good time to establish full diplomatic relations, announced the appointment of General Mark Clark as ambassador. He ran into the very political hailstorm that FDR had so adroitly avoided.

Opposition to the appointment had nothing to do with Clark but with the “recognition” of a religion, and the administration did not promote well the idea that he was recognizing a temporal authority, albeit once drastically reduced in power. 

The time was still not right to take on fears of anti-Catholicism: Paul Blanshard’s polemic, American Freedom and Catholic Power, a dark warning about the dangers of the religion to the First Amendment, had spent seven months on the New York Times bestseller list only two years before. Truman dropped the appointment and the idea of full diplomatic relations.

It took another three decades for diplomatic relations finally to be achieved. Having won the White House with the thinnest of margins, John F. Kennedy could not pursue the initiative without bringing to the fore the very fears about his faith that he had been at such pains to quell during the campaign.

In fact, he was temperamentally and politically inclined to avoid this at all costs. 

His entire education took place in schools more populated by Boston Brahmins than his own co-religionists, and he was somewhat detached from Catholicism. As President, his rejection of aid to parochial schools did not endear him to the American church hierarchy.

It took the son of an Irish Catholic father who had embraced the faith of his Protestant mother to establish full diplomatic relations with the Vatican. 

As with FDR and Truman, Ronald Reagan did so for reasons of realpolitik. With his attempt to undermine the Soviet Union at its height, he sought to further relations with Pope John Paul II, the most visible advocate of nonviolent opposition to Communism in Europe.

Reagan moved rapidly and, with the help of a Congress effectively in GOP control (Republicans had an absolute voting majority in the Senate and a controlling authority in the House, with the help of so-called “boll weevil Democrats”), he pushed through legislation repealing the 1867 legislation. 

The only governmental body that had qualms about the issue, in fact, was the office of his own State Department.

The world has changed several times over since the early days of the republic, with the American government and even the supposedly unchanging Roman Catholic Church altering their attitudes over the years. 

Nevertheless, in some quarters old fears don’t die, despite the facts on the ground. Witness the hysterical humanist screed on “Foreign Political Interference . . . Vatican Style.” Tomorrow, in the “Quote of the Day,” I’ll deal with another, closer to home.