A Spiritual Home

JOANNE: Everyone knows Spotify is the place to go to stream the latest and greatest in music, but you can now also stream podcasts.

NATHAN: It’s easy. Open the app on your mobile device or desktop, click the browse channel, then click on the podcast section. You can also stream on your smart speaker.

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JOANNE: Major funding for BackStory is provided by an anonymous donor, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the University of Virginia, the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, and the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations.

BRIAN: From Virginia Humanities, this is BackStory.

NATHAN: Welcome to BackStory, the show that explains the history behind today’s headlines. I’m Nathan Connolly.

JOANNE: I’m Joanne Freeman.

BRIAN: And I’m Brian Balogh.

NATHAN: If you’re new to the podcast, we’re all historians, and each week we explore the history of one topic that’s been in the news.

BRIAN: Every year, New York’s St. Patrick’s Day parade marches up Fifth Avenue and brushes past the steps of a world famous monument to Catholic piety, vision, and ambition.

JOANNE: So we’re going to start at a special ceremony on 51st Street in New York City. But it’s not the bustling midtown Manhattan that we know today, with its hotels, and banks, and glitzy shops. This is August 15th, 1858, and this part of the city is still woodsy and unpopulated. Here, the Archbishop of New York, John Hughes, is about to lay the cornerstone for his dream project– the construction of the greatest church in the United States.

JOHN LOUGHERY: So on this hot Sunday in the summer of 1858, he has a platform erected on the empty lot that is now St. Patrick’s Cathedral.

JOANNE: This is writer John Loughery. He says that an enormous number of people packed into the open space. 40,000, 60,000, or maybe even 100,000 people.

JOHN LOUGHERY: The omnibuses and trains that are heading uptown had been packed for three, four hours before to get everybody from the populated part of the city. Some newspaper said entire neighborhoods downtown are emptied that Sunday.

JOANNE: Hughes put together a ceremony worthy of the monumental crowd. Around 200 priests attended, and 100 choir boys sang throughout the procession. Plus, the archbishop adorned the area with flags representing the congregation. Banners from France, Spain, Russia, and the Netherlands. But one flag held a place of honor above the rest.

JOHN LOUGHERY: By the spot where the altar of the cathedral would be, he placed an Irish flag, a flag with a harp on it. And then he placed a cross above it. That was a kind of statement saying, we, the Irish, are building this cathedral.

JOANNE: John Hughes became archbishop of the New York diocese in 1850, an era of intense anti-Irish and anti-Catholic feeling in the United States. In the decades prior, nativist backlash had erupted as waves of Irish immigrants came to the United States. Many Americans saw the Irish as dirty and ignorant. In some cities, rioters had destroyed Catholic churches and convents. Hughes, an Irishman himself, wouldn’t take it.

JOHN LOUGHERY: Rather than turn the other cheek– he was not a turn the other cheek sort of person, really– he takes on all of these people in a polemical way in his own speeches and writings. He insists that if anything happens to the churches of New York, the Protestants had better look to their own churches. Of course, the Irish Catholics loved that. He was constantly trying to explain to the Vatican, this is what Americans respect. They respect confidence, and clarity, and strength.

JOANNE: His position and his rhetoric made Hughes the most famous Catholic in the country, and his militancy earned him a rather un-priestly nickname– Dagger John.

JOHN LOUGHERY: He would put a cross by his name, as bishops and archbishops do, more nowadays, especially. Enemies at the time said that wasn’t a cross, it was a dagger. And I think there were times when he almost took a strange pride in it. Let them be wary of me, yes. Let them not think because I am a man of the cloth, a man of God, that I’m not also someone to be reckoned with. I think he liked that aspect of his persona.

JOANNE: Other Catholic officials didn’t really appreciate his style.

JOHN LOUGHERY: But there was no doubt that without him, there would have been a void. There wouldn’t have been a person saying, we will feel a bond if we understand we are under attack, and you, the Irish, are not what the Protestant nativists of this country say you are. They say you’re uneducated, they say you’re hopeless, they say you don’t understand American values, they say you’re all vassals of the pope. You’ll never be true American citizens who will bring anything to this country.

And he constantly was saying to the Irish, don’t believe that. You are a great people in many ways. Maybe greater even than you know. And I’m here to tell you that, and I’m here to lead you to a proper place in this society.

JOANNE: He encouraged his flock to adopt a threefold identity– be loyal Catholics, good Americans, and also be proud of their Irish heritage.

JOHN LOUGHERY: In some ways, he could be seen as one of the originators of the idea of the hyphenated identity. So in that sense, he really is a kind of galvanizing force for an ethnic, as well as a religious, community.

JOANNE: And Hughes had a vision for the construction of a building which would symbolize faith, community, and religious devotion. He was inspired by a trip to Europe.

JOHN LOUGHERY: He went to Paris, and Rome, Florence, Vienna, soliciting funds and meeting figures at the Vatican. But he also worshipped in those great cathedrals in Paris, and Florence, Venice, and Rome, and came back feeling if we are to come together as a Catholic community, we need our own cathedral here.

JOANNE: Loughery says that the construction of St. Patrick’s Cathedral was the culmination of this goal.

JOHN LOUGHERY: It was going to be more Irish Catholics who contributed the funds. There were going to be Irish Catholic workers who built it. The majority of his parishioners were Irish Catholic. That this was going to make them feel very good about themselves as Catholics and as Irish people, as Irish-Americans. He thought the cathedral would be a wonderful symbol reinforcing those different parts of an identity that he was trying to cultivate.

JOANNE: Dagger John Hughes didn’t live to see the completion of the cathedral. He died in 1864 and St. Patrick’s wasn’t finished until 1878. But the great church survives as a testament to Hughes’s vision.

JOHN LOUGHERY: It is an awesome building still. I mean, when one goes today, it’s full of both worshippers and tourists who are in awe of the beauty and complexity of this building. And that would have been deeply satisfying to him, definitely.