Catholics Make a Home in Minnesota

Archbishop John Ireland and American Catholicism

Perhaps more than any other individual, Archbishop of St. Paul John Ireland (1838-1918) put Minnesota on the map of American and global religious history in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Born in County Kilkenny, Ireland, but growing up in the emerging city of St. Paul, he was tapped to enter the priesthood by Bishop Cretin and eventually ordained bishop himself in 1875. By the time his position was elevated to Archbishop of St. Paul, Ireland had established himself as an articulate leader of Americanist Catholicism, and a lightning rod for opponents.

“There is no conflict between the Catholic Church and America. I speak beneath this Cathedral dome as an American citizen no less than as a Catholic bishop. The Church is the mother of my faith the guardian of my hopes for eternity America is my country the protectress of my liberty and of my fortunes on earth. I could not utter one syllable that would belie however remotely either the Church or the Republic and when I assert as I now solemnly do that the principles of the Church are in thorough harmony with the interests of the republic I know in the depths of my soul that I speak the truth.”In a famous address to American Catholic leaders in Baltimore, Ireland declared

Ireland’s views were in part a strategic response to anticatholic critiques in either its more virulent or more insidiously moderated forms. Within anticatholic sentiment was the belief that Catholics could not be patriotic citizens for their divided loyalties, and this was perhaps especially leveled at immigrants. Contrary to this belief, Ireland held that Catholics could be patriotic and that including the Catholic church would benefit political and social institutions in the U.S.¹

            Ireland also stood out from other Catholic leaders in that he was a strong advocate for temperance and other Progressive Era reforms associated with Republican politics. Unlike many Irish Catholics, Ireland supported the Republican Party. He drew on his political connections and his relationship with railroad scion James J. Hill to create a colonization project that resettled four thousand Irish families from urban poverty in the Northeast to farming communities in Southern and Western Minnesota.

St. Paul Cathedral

Archbishop Ireland’s most visible legacy is the magnificent Cathedral of St. Paul. It was Ireland’s brainchild, and he remained in command of its creation, from selecting its location,

Ireland was as interested in rethinking the internal workings of the Catholic Church in America as in its civic reputation, and these contributions are felt today in Minnesota as well. Unlike Gothic buildings, with their side chapels competing for devotions and attention, the St. Paul Cathedral centers attention on the altar in an apse that is just off-center of the dome. Ireland’s architect placed the various saints relevant to immigrant Catholic devotion in a rounded walkway out of view around the back of the altar area. One can find, if she looks hard enough, the Irish saints Patrick and Bridget, the Polish St. Stanislaus, the German St. Boniface, and so on, but they are all organized around a shared American Catholicism. This was not to be an enclave-based melding of religion and cultures from the old countries, but a respectable American Catholicism relevant to the modern world. While the liturgical language of the mass remained Latin at the time, Archbishop Ireland insisted all speaking from pulpits within the archdiocese be conducted in English. Choosing its architect, Emmanuel Masqueray, to holding its first mass on Palm Sunday,1915. Sitting atop a hill over downtown, the edifice raises a prominent neo-classical dome that makes reference to that of the State Capitol, which was completed the same year construction on the cathedral began. The cathedral expresses in architecture a vision of a Church that remains relevant to modern American life and ready to partner with, not contest, the democratic institutions of the state in civic life, and to bring justice to the economic and social life of American cities. Its edifice towers over the bustle of commercial and civic life in the state’s capital city.

Parochial Schools

Crucial to Ireland’s project was his reforming vision of Catholic schooling. Catholic schools had of course emerged in enclave communities as key facets of parish life: a parish consisted of a church and a school, and immigrant identity aligned with both. Catholic schools became especially important in the United States because of the implicit Protestantism of public schools, especially in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Public schools hardly hesitated to include biblical references and theological themes as part of instruction – the classic alphabet book began with the letter A: In Adam’s Fall, we Sinned All. The issue was not so much that teachers used Protestant rather than Catholic bibles, though there were some important differences between English translations based on Protestant versions and those from the Latin Vulgate. The issue was that direct use of bibles was a Protestant practice, rather than one of Catholic tradition, where biblical learning was refracted through Church tradition and priestly learning.

Faribault Plan

Ireland believed in specifically Catholic education as an alternative to implicitly Protestant or secular schools, but he also insisted on the professionalism and modernity of education standards within Catholic schools, and in their complementary role in educating American citizens. In 1890, Ireland released his “Faribault Plan” in an effort to incorporate parochial and public-school models. In Faribault, Immaculate Conception Parish school was briefly cooperatively run by Faribault Schools and (a similar experiment was conducted at St. Michael’s in Stillwater). Students would receive religious instruction at the parish church but then engage a secularized curriculum in their parish school overseen by the public school board. No overt religious instruction was allowed, but neither could curricula are chosen by the school board contradict Catholic teaching.² The plan was discontinued after several years, bowing to internal pressure from the Catholic hierarchy above Ireland’s rank and from external anticatholic opinion.