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If that's the truth, then why aren't ALL people in Central/South America Catholic? Why aren't they ALL Catholic now?
Were some forced and others not? And if not, WHY not? If so WHY so?
Because 1. There's always going to be resistance. Though realise resistance often comes with bloodshed.
2. Its not the 1600s anymore, so people have more freedom of religion.
3. Central n South America have received tons of immigrants over the centuries, many of them are other denominations of Christian, some are Muslim, some Jewish etc. We are talking about the era of the Conquistadors not contemporary times.
Because 1. There's always going to be resistance. Though realise resistance often comes with bloodshed.
2. Its not the 1600s anymore, so people have more freedom of religion.
3. Central n South America have received tons of immigrants over the centuries, many of them are other denominations of Christian, some are Muslim, some Jewish etc. We are talking about the era of the Conquistadors not contemporary times.
Pinch0, my friend, what about the tens of thousands from all the surrounding tribes that fought along with the (800 some-odd) Spanish who wanted to put an END to the murderous human-sacrificing ways of the Aztecs?
Do you seriously think 800 men alone 'forced' MILLIONS to make changes that they themselves didn't already desire??
Why aren't all people in Central, South America Catholic ?
Thank you for reminding me I cannot stereotype. My maternal grandfather was born, raised in Spain, came to California, 1908. Believe he was an Episcopalian, the church my Mom was Christianed.
When I moved from Northern California 1993, it seemed .numerous Catholics were becoming Charismatic Catholics. Reading the Bible themselves not just hearing it from the priest. Admit that they were a sinner, Believe in Jesus as your Lord and Savior, Choose to follow Jesus and confess Him as Lord of your life.
Some Catholics believe they were saved because they were baptized? as an infant
When my non practicing Catholic husband was explained the Gospel by a preacher, did the above, Admit, Believe,Confess. The church we were attending, had a baptismal ready at all times. After he accepted Christ that afternoon, he was immersion baptized.
Why aren't all people in Central, South America Catholic ?
Thank you for reminding me I cannot stereotype. My maternal grandfather was born, raised in Spain, came to California, 1908. Believe he was an Episcopalian, the church my Mom was Christianed.
When I moved from Northern California 1993, it seemed .numerous Catholics were becoming Charismatic Catholics. Reading the Bible themselves not just hearing it from the priest. Admit that they were a sinner, Believe in Jesus as your Lord and Savior, Choose to follow Jesus and confess Him as Lord of your life.
Some Catholics believe they were saved because they were baptized? as an infant
When my non practicing Catholic husband was explained the Gospel by a preacher, did the above, Admit, Believe,Confess. The church we were attending, had a baptismal ready at all times. After he accepted Christ that afternoon, he was immersion baptized.
Great news about your husband! He obeyed the gospel of Jesus Christ.
There's no need to sugarcoat anything. The Spanish brought civilization to the Americas and saved the natives from their eventual self-destruction by routing the demons they worshipped.
Do you have a specific example of a "convert or die" incident, or a specific individual who faced this situation?
Sorry to bump an old thread, but I thought this fella should really hear this song.
Maryland established for English Catholics, mostly comes to nothing.
Acadians are resettled in Louisiana and have frequent tensions with "American" settlers. There's a reason boulevard medians are called the "neutral ground" in New Orleans.
American Catholics play a minor role in the revolution. In fact the revolution, being anti-monarchical, would have seen Catholics as suspect. The French monarchy, in the spirit of Richelieu, supports the revolution at a pivotal time to strip England of her colonies as France had been stripped thirty years prior. Supporting the American revolution proves a Faustian bargain for the Bourbons.
In the 1830s Irish immigration begins to pick up, especially in places like Boston, New York, and upstate New York along the Erie Canal which was dug to a large degree by Irish labor. Irish immigration is accelerated greatly by the potato famine.
Some German Catholic immigration occurs shortly after the Irish wave, with a little boost after the failure of the 1848 revolutions.
The Democratic party in the north begins to become the immigrant party, distinct from both the southern Democrats and the northern Whigs. The urban Democratic party is tribal and focused on the survival of immigrant communities in the face of discrimination. During the Civil War, Irish Catholic Democrats in New York riot against the Union cause, not because they are pro-Confederacy, but because they see the war as other people's business and don't want to get drafted.
After the Civil War, Catholic immigration intensifies as the US industrializes. These are economic migrants seeking the prototype of the American dream. As well as the usual Irish and German Catholics, other groups such as Italians, Poles, Lithuanians, Czechs, Slovaks, Slovenes, Croatians, and French Canadians migrate to industrial cities in the northeast and midwest. This swells the ranks of the northern Democratic party. Trade unionism grows, and is somewhat allied with the Catholic Church but also kept at a distance because of fears of communism. Not unique to Catholics but dominated by various Catholic groups, organized crime also grows alongside Democratic machines and trade unions.
This second wave of immigration peaks in the early 20th century when the immigrant percent of the US reaches its historic high of 15%.
Immigration from Catholic countries is effectively stopped by immigration reforms in the 1920s. This is the start of the time when Catholics are Americanized. Urban ethnic and class relations are very complicated. What ends up happening is that Irish Americans come to dominate urban Democratic political machines across the country. This is for three reasons: 1) the Irish spoke English, 2) the Irish were the first of the post-revolution waves of Catholic immigration and so had a head start, and 3) the Irish did not have long standing rivalries with any other Catholic groups due to their geographical isolation (they only had beef with the English and Scottish) and so could act as trusted power brokers. For example, Poles distrusted Slovakians, and Italians distrusted Slovenians, but the Irish could work with everyone.
One notorious example of Irish-English beef was the Boston mayoralty of William Curley, which coincided with English American loss of political control of Boston, moving to the suburbs and taking a lot of the money with them. This mayoralty was the start of Boston's image as a gritty, working class Irish American enclave.
At the same time you start to see the fruits of assimilation contra the Curley approach. You have figures like Fiorello LaGuardia reforming the Irish Tammany Hall machine in New York and governing as a progressive. Bridging the two approaches (assimilation vs confrontation) was the presidential candidacy of Al Smith, the first Catholic to run for president, who is absolutely crushed.
The stock market crash of 1929 is a watershed and ushers in the long-term decline of old stock, British American control of the country, a process that takes about a half century to play out. The Democratic party, dominated by the northern wing since the Smith candidacy, is the main beneficiary of the Great Depression, as the loss of confidence in the northeastern establishment as well as decades of immigration flip the balance of power in the country. To be sure, the Democrats relied on the southern wing of the party to form a majority, but Catholics now, at least politically, have a seat at the table.
At the same time assimilation first begins breaking down barriers between the various Catholic ethnicities and later between Catholics and the Protestant majority. There is something of a cultural exchange, mostly flowing from the majority to the minority but also the other way. All the immigrant communities learn English and begin working their way up in the economy. At the same time Catholics influence the national culture as with the Hollywood Code banning topics from movies and radio.
This all comes to a head during the second world war, when Catholics, mostly second and greater generation citizens, fully assimilate during the time of national service and mobilization. You have the canonical "band of brothers" of mostly Protestant old stock Americans but also Irish, Italian, and Polish characters. Audie Murphy is a war hero.
Catholic America reaches its zenith with the presidency of JFK. There is a Catholic president. Concurrently the second Vatican council is reforming the church in the face of modernity. This begins the process of Catholic cultural disintegration and the breaking down of remaining internal barriers to assimilation.
Catholics move to the suburbs, begin to stop going to church, and by the 1990s in some places are fully secularized, assimilated, and indistinguishable from their Protestant heritage counterparts. The old immigrant communities from Europe live on in some places, particularly after the fall of the Berlin Wall and a brief uptick in European immigration, but the writing is on the wall.
Meanwhile as European Catholics are finishing their process of assimilation, the immigration laws are reformed in the 1960s to open up again. This kicks off the third wave of Catholic immigration from Latin America. This peaks in the early 2000s. Much as before, assimilation is a slow, generational process but with each wave the rate of assimilation accelerates. This is due, again, to the cultural exchange between the Catholic heritage minority and the Protestant heritage majority. Mass media and consumer culture make the mainstream more accessible and desirable, while political institutions such as anti-discrimination laws make assimilation easier. While it took about 150 years from the arrival of the first Irish immigrants to JFK, and it took Italian immigrants about 100 years to assimilate, now Mexican immigrants assimilate within about fifty years.
Indeed as secularization and cosmopolitan attitudes grow across the world, the notion of Catholic vs Protestant in the US loses much of its punch. Protestants cease to be a majority in the 2010s, mostly due to the growth of religious "nones" from all traditions roughly proportional to their share of the population. Immigration has and will put its stamp on the country. Due to higher birthrates of Latin American Catholics, plus the existing Americans of European Catholic heritage (the so-called "white Catholics") it's conceivable that a plurality of Americans in the future will be of Catholic heritage. (Asian immigration will preclude an outright majority IMO.) That won't mean much however since by this time a majority of the population will be religious nones and ethnic and racial distinctions will be downplayed and diluted by intermarriage from all directions.
So all in all, it's the hero's journey. Catholic immigrants set out for America for all the typical reasons people immigrate to the US, had to fight some battles along the way, slay some monsters, but in the process were changed. After the journey is complete, the transformation has been internal not external, and you can't go back home again.
Maryland established for English Catholics, mostly comes to nothing.
Acadians are resettled in Louisiana and have frequent tensions with "American" settlers. There's a reason boulevard medians are called the "neutral ground" in New Orleans.
American Catholics play a minor role in the revolution. In fact the revolution, being anti-monarchical, would have seen Catholics as suspect. The French monarchy, in the spirit of Richelieu, supports the revolution at a pivotal time to strip England of her colonies as France had been stripped thirty years prior. Supporting the American revolution proves a Faustian bargain for the Bourbons.
In the 1830s Irish immigration begins to pick up, especially in places like Boston, New York, and upstate New York along the Erie Canal which was dug to a large degree by Irish labor. Irish immigration is accelerated greatly by the potato famine.
Some German Catholic immigration occurs shortly after the Irish wave, with a little boost after the failure of the 1848 revolutions.
The Democratic party in the north begins to become the immigrant party, distinct from both the southern Democrats and the northern Whigs. The urban Democratic party is tribal and focused on the survival of immigrant communities in the face of discrimination. During the Civil War, Irish Catholic Democrats in New York riot against the Union cause, not because they are pro-Confederacy, but because they see the war as other people's business and don't want to get drafted.
After the Civil War, Catholic immigration intensifies as the US industrializes. These are economic migrants seeking the prototype of the American dream. As well as the usual Irish and German Catholics, other groups such as Italians, Poles, Lithuanians, Czechs, Slovaks, Slovenes, Croatians, and French Canadians migrate to industrial cities in the northeast and midwest. This swells the ranks of the northern Democratic party. Trade unionism grows, and is somewhat allied with the Catholic Church but also kept at a distance because of fears of communism. Not unique to Catholics but dominated by various Catholic groups, organized crime also grows alongside Democratic machines and trade unions.
This second wave of immigration peaks in the early 20th century when the immigrant percent of the US reaches its historic high of 15%.
Immigration from Catholic countries is effectively stopped by immigration reforms in the 1920s. This is the start of the time when Catholics are Americanized. Urban ethnic and class relations are very complicated. What ends up happening is that Irish Americans come to dominate urban Democratic political machines across the country. This is for three reasons: 1) the Irish spoke English, 2) the Irish were the first of the post-revolution waves of Catholic immigration and so had a head start, and 3) the Irish did not have long standing rivalries with any other Catholic groups due to their geographical isolation (they only had beef with the English and Scottish) and so could act as trusted power brokers. For example, Poles distrusted Slovakians, and Italians distrusted Slovenians, but the Irish could work with everyone.
One notorious example of Irish-English beef was the Boston mayoralty of William Curley, which coincided with English American loss of political control of Boston, moving to the suburbs and taking a lot of the money with them. This mayoralty was the start of Boston's image as a gritty, working class Irish American enclave.
At the same time you start to see the fruits of assimilation contra the Curley approach. You have figures like Fiorello LaGuardia reforming the Irish Tammany Hall machine in New York and governing as a progressive. Bridging the two approaches (assimilation vs confrontation) was the presidential candidacy of Al Smith, the first Catholic to run for president, who is absolutely crushed.
The stock market crash of 1929 is a watershed and ushers in the long-term decline of old stock, British American control of the country, a process that takes about a half century to play out. The Democratic party, dominated by the northern wing since the Smith candidacy, is the main beneficiary of the Great Depression, as the loss of confidence in the northeastern establishment as well as decades of immigration flip the balance of power in the country. To be sure, the Democrats relied on the southern wing of the party to form a majority, but Catholics now, at least politically, have a seat at the table.
At the same time assimilation first begins breaking down barriers between the various Catholic ethnicities and later between Catholics and the Protestant majority. There is something of a cultural exchange, mostly flowing from the majority to the minority but also the other way. All the immigrant communities learn English and begin working their way up in the economy. At the same time Catholics influence the national culture as with the Hollywood Code banning topics from movies and radio.
This all comes to a head during the second world war, when Catholics, mostly second and greater generation citizens, fully assimilate during the time of national service and mobilization. You have the canonical "band of brothers" of mostly Protestant old stock Americans but also Irish, Italian, and Polish characters. Audie Murphy is a war hero.
Catholic America reaches its zenith with the presidency of JFK. There is a Catholic president. Concurrently the second Vatican council is reforming the church in the face of modernity. This begins the process of Catholic cultural disintegration and the breaking down of remaining internal barriers to assimilation.
Catholics move to the suburbs, begin to stop going to church, and by the 1990s in some places are fully secularized, assimilated, and indistinguishable from their Protestant heritage counterparts. The old immigrant communities from Europe live on in some places, particularly after the fall of the Berlin Wall and a brief uptick in European immigration, but the writing is on the wall.
Meanwhile as European Catholics are finishing their process of assimilation, the immigration laws are reformed in the 1960s to open up again. This kicks off the third wave of Catholic immigration from Latin America. This peaks in the early 2000s. Much as before, assimilation is a slow, generational process but with each wave the rate of assimilation accelerates. This is due, again, to the cultural exchange between the Catholic heritage minority and the Protestant heritage majority. Mass media and consumer culture make the mainstream more accessible and desirable, while political institutions such as anti-discrimination laws make assimilation easier. While it took about 150 years from the arrival of the first Irish immigrants to JFK, and it took Italian immigrants about 100 years to assimilate, now Mexican immigrants assimilate within about fifty years.
Indeed as secularization and cosmopolitan attitudes grow across the world, the notion of Catholic vs Protestant in the US loses much of its punch. Protestants cease to be a majority in the 2010s, mostly due to the growth of religious "nones" from all traditions roughly proportional to their share of the population. Immigration has and will put its stamp on the country. Due to higher birthrates of Latin American Catholics, plus the existing Americans of European Catholic heritage (the so-called "white Catholics") it's conceivable that a plurality of Americans in the future will be of Catholic heritage. (Asian immigration will preclude an outright majority IMO.) That won't mean much however since by this time a majority of the population will be religious nones and ethnic and racial distinctions will be downplayed and diluted by intermarriage from all directions.
So all in all, it's the hero's journey. Catholic immigrants set out for America for all the typical reasons people immigrate to the US, had to fight some battles along the way, slay some monsters, but in the process were changed. After the journey is complete, the transformation has been internal not external, and you can't go back home again.
The Christmas Riot of 1806: Anti-Catholic violence mars the holiday
In 1806, St. Peter’s Church — at Barclay and Church Street — was the only parish in town if you were a practicing Catholic. (The current St. Peter’s, sometimes called Old St. Peter’s, a simple, neo-classical gem near the WTC site, was built over the location of the old structure in 1840.) Its most famous congregants would be Elizabeth Ann Seton, the first American to be declared a saint, and the venerable Pierre Toussaint, who’s currently interred at St. Patrick’s Cathedral.
uilt in 1785, St. Peter’s was a perpetual target of anti-Catholic sentiment, and indeed, horrific violence would erupt here on Christmas morning 1806. As worshippers gathered for midnight mass, a group of nativist rowdies gathered outside, prepared to disrupt services.
One source, perhaps drawing from a contemporary New York Evening Post article, calls the group of about fifty a ‘gang’ called the Highbinders. However I’m not exactly sure it was any kind of an organized gang. The word ‘highbinder’ would eventually come to mean any kind of gangster and would even be slang for a corrupt politician. The first ‘gang’ of New York is commonly thought to be the Forty Thieves, who wouldn’t surface for at least another twenty years.
Simply consider them a massive of drunken, anti-Catholic thugs — sailors, according to one source, “a nativist gang of apprentices and propertyless journeyman butchers” according to Edwin Burrows and Mike Wallace — all looking to cause trouble. Still another newspaper referred to them as “a desperate association of lawless and unprincipled vagabonds.” [source]
Parishioners ran to get their alderman who successfully convinced the group to disperse for the evening.
However the mob which returned the next night — Christmas night — far more incensed, only this time the churchgoers were ready, armed with weapons. The defenders at St. Peter’s were not merely parishioners but other Irish immigrants who had heard about the prior evening’s altercation and came looking for a fight.
Many other Irish New Yorkers stood watch over their homes on Augustus Street, waiting for the anti-Irish mob to arrive there. That night, the two groups clashed in the streets, a few dozen men on each side, attacking each other on the streets around City Hall.
In this melee, the watch were called to quell the violence and arrest the rioters. Jacob Hays may have been there; several of his captains certainly were. Watchman Luswanger was called to join them. Somewhere along the way, a rioter stabbed Luswanger, and the watchman “expired without a struggle.”
In 1836, the Gothic Revival cathedral was targeted by American-born Protestant agitators who feared the building was a central command post from which the pope might move to take control of the Protestant-dominated city. Alerted that the nativists planned to sack the cathedral, the church’s Irish Catholic defenders posted armed sentries and cut holes for musket barrels in the recently built wall, which surrounded burial grounds both north and south of the building.
As the “anti-Catholic army” surged up the Bowery, “its advance scouts reported back on the fearsomeness of the Gaels’ military preparations and the fortresslike impregnability of their walled cathedral,” wrote the historians Mike Wallace and Edwin G. Burrows in their book “Gotham.” The nativists retreated.
The stakes of the conflict rose as a hard-nosed new archbishop, John Hughes, who was known as Dagger John because of the knifelike crucifix with which he adorned his signature, organized his community’s immigrant-filled ranks, endorsing political candidates and pressing for public funding of parochial schools.
In 1844, the cathedral again came under threat after a pair of Catholic churches were torched in Philadelphia. As New York nativists planned a massive rally, the bishop warned that attacks on Catholic churches would be met in kind. Alluding to the Russians’ scorched-earth strategy in their war against the invading Napoleonic army, Hughes cautioned New York’s nativist municipal officials that “if a single Catholic church were burned in New York, the city would become a Moscow.”
With the bishop’s permission, “men with guns patrolled the streets outside the cathedral,” according to a biography of Hughes by John Loughery. The nativists again stood down.
This scene of well-armed Irish-Catholic defiance was dramatized, with artistic license of time and place, in the 2002 film “Gangs of New York,” directed by Martin Scorsese, who was once an altar boy at St. Patrick’s Old Cathedral.
“This place is just breathing stories and lives long forgotten,” Mr. Scorsese said of the church in “The Oratorio,” a 2019 documentary. “And it was built by people who flocked here from all over the world to start a new life in this city, the city that for me has always been synonymous with America itself.”
This first St. Patrick’s Cathedral was built from 1809 to 1815 after plans by the French-born architect Joseph François Mangin, who codesigned New York’s City Hall. The site, which had previously been used by St. Peter’s Church as a graveyard, lay in what was still a rural area north of town.
Constructed barely a generation after the 1784 repeal of the anti-Catholic law in New York State, and primarily serving abjectly poor Irish immigrants, the cathedral was a bold assertion of Catholicism in the burgeoning, multiethnic metropolis. At 120 feet long and 80 feet wide, it was the largest church in the city and one of the earliest Gothic Revival buildings in the country.
The Orange Riots took place in Manhattan, New York City, in 1870 and 1871, and they involved violent conflict between Irish Protestants who were members of the Orange Order and hence called "Orangemen", and Irish Catholics, along with the New York City Police Department and the New York State National Guard. The riot caused the deaths of over 60 civilians – mostly Irish laborers – and three guardsmen.
Background
On July 12, 1870, a parade was held in Manhattan by Irish Protestants celebrating the victory at the Battle of the Boyne (1689) of King William III (also Prince of Orange), over the former King James II of England (a Catholic, who had been deposed by William III).
The parade route was up Eighth Avenue to Elm Park at 92nd Street. The Orangemen marching through the Irish-Catholic neighborhood of Hell's Kitchen was viewed by the Irish-Catholic residents as a recurring reminder of past and current class oppression and, subsequently had no love for the Orange Order. Many of the Irish-Catholic protesters followed the parade and according to statements later made by police, the violence that would follow was premeditated. At the park, the crowd of 200 Irish-Catholic protesters was joined by a group of 300 Irish-Catholic laborers working in the neighborhood, and the parade erupted into violence. Although the police intervened to quell the fighting, 8 people died as a result of the riot.
The following year, the Loyal Order of Orange requested police permission to march again. Fearing another violent incident, the parade was banned by City Police Commissioner James J. Kelso, with the support of William M. Tweed, the head of Tammany Hall, the Democratic Party political machine which controlled the city and the state. Catholic Archbishop John McCloskey applauded the decision.
Protestants objected, as did newspaper editorials in the Herald and Times, a petition signed by Wall Street businessmen, and a cartoon by Thomas Nast in Harper's. Not only was the ban felt to be giving in to the bad behavior of a Catholic mob, but fears were voiced about the growing political power of Irish Catholics, the increasing visibility of Irish nationalism in the city, and the possibility of a radical political action such as occurred in Paris with the Commune.
The pressure generated by these concerns among the city's elite, on top of pressure from good-government reformers against Tweed's regime in general, caused Tammany to reverse course and allow the march; Tammany needed to show that it could control the immigrant Irish population which formed a major part of its electoral power. Governor John T. Hoffman, a Tammany man, rescinded the police commissioner's ban and ordered that the paraders be protected by the city police and the state militia, including cavalry.
1871 riot
On July 12, 1871, the parade proceeded with protection from 1,500 policemen and 5 regiments of the National Guard, about 5,000 men. It was to begin at the Orangemen's headquarters at Lamartine Hall, located at Eighth Avenue and 29th Street. By 1:30 pm, the streets from 21st to 33rd were full of people, mostly Catholic, and mostly laborers, and both sides of the avenue were jammed. The police and militia arrived, to the disapproval of the crowd. The small contingent of Orangemen began their parade down the avenue at 2:00 pm, surrounded by regimental units.
The riot caused the deaths of over 60 civilians – mostly Ulster Scots Protestant and Irish Catholic laborers – and three Guardsmen. Over 150 people were wounded, including 22 militiamen, around 20 policemen injured by thrown missiles, and 4 who were shot, but not fatally. Eighth Avenue was devastated, with one reporter with the New York Herald describing the street as "smeared and slippery with human blood and brains while the land beneath was covered two inches deep with clotted gore, pieces of brain, and the half digested contents of a human stomach and intestines."[5] About 100 people were arrested.[1]
The following day, on July 13, 20,000 mourners paid their respects to the dead outside the morgue at Bellevue Hospital, and funeral processions made their way to Calvary Cemetery in Queens by way of ferries. Governor Hoffman was hanged in effigy by Irish Catholics in Brooklyn, and the events began to be referred to as the "Slaughter on Eighth Avenue."[1]
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