(Ed's Note: this is an excerpt from the book The German Americans by La Vern J. Rippley. It details thumbnail sketches of the German churches and religious sects as they participated in the evolution of German-American culture and society following immigration to America. Though lengthy, the insights are important because of the predominance of Germans in our ancestry. The last third of this essay covers German Catholicism in the American immigrant.)
The Germans did not easily shed the customs of their Fatherland even after several generations had lived and died in America. Several factors account for this retention. Among them are the German-language press, an outlook on life that contrasted with American Puritanism, the German theatrical, musical, and singing societies, the German-language schools, and, in particular, the churches. Undoubtedly the most important factor in perpetuating German culture in the United States after 1880 was the church. To be sure, German-language churches would not have endured without German schools, but the majority of these schools were parochial or church schools. We see, therefore, that religion and ethnic identity were closely intertwined. Late in the nineteenth century when temperance and Sunday closing laws drew the Germans into political battles with Yankee Americans, it was as much a difference of religious opinion as of national traditions that nourished what, at first glance, seemed to be opposite cultural viewpoints.
Toward the end of the nineteenth century, there was an unbelievable proliferation of German clubs — Vereine as they were called. Sometimes the Germans criticized each other for paying too much attention to local Vereine instead of uniting into national organizations to promote German interests. All too often the local societies bred factionalism in the German-American community, which led to schisms and duplication of effort. As often as not, however, these schisms had religious roots. Particularly the mutual aid and benevolent societies were German, but also German Catholic, German Lutheran, or perhaps German atheist. Usually the gymnastic societies or Turnvereine had religious characteristics. A key tenet of the North American Turnerbund was the propagation of a freethinker’s philosophy of life. The Turners espoused socialism and proselytized for the common ownership of property. As time wore on, the federated Turners toned down their missionary zeal, but they never relented in their belligerence toward the Christian churches. Temperance, prohibition, nativism, and extreme wealth were targets for their scorn, but nothing was ever more despised than das Pfaffentum, the organized clergy.
The following pages shall provide thumbnail sketches of the German churches as they participated in the evolution of German-American culture. From the settlement of Germantown, Pennsylvania in 1683 to the Bismarck May Laws of 1873 - 1887 (which initiated a persecution of Catholics under the banner of a Kulturkampf) (Bodinet (1881) and Utz (1890)), Germans had looked to America as a refuge from religious persecution. Broadly speaking, we can present the German churches by three main headings: the pietistic sects, the Lutherans, and the Catholics. The pietistic German sects came to occupy the lands, which William Penn had pledged would retain freedom of religion for all time. The Lutherans, the Moravians, and the German Reformed were also numerically significant in colonial times, but with the exception of a few settlements in Pennsylvania and Maryland, Catholic Germans did not migrate to America before the revolutionary war (they did migrate for other reasons, Resch (1833) and Kestel (1857)).
There are historical reasons why the pietistic sects predominated in the colonial German element. One provision of the treaty which ended the Thirty Years’ War (1618 - 1648) stipulated that only three religious confessions were to be tolerated in Germany: Catholic, Lutheran, and Reformed. Sects other than these basic three were outlawed. Catholic, Lutheran, or Reformed members often had to move to a new duchy, but religious nonconformists had to emigrate. Thus the largest percentages of colonial Germans were members of dissenting sects. They rejected fixed doctrine, they were more or less dedicated to a communal way of life, and virtually all of them opposed military service. By contrast, Catholics and legal Protestants found that their faith would be endangered more by emigrating abroad than by staying close to organized spiritual life at home.
After the colonial period, the smaller sects were never again numerically dominant among the incoming Germans. At the peak of German immigration in the early 1880s, roughly half of all German-Americans were Roman Catholics. Since the smaller sects contributed so much to the mosaic of American life, let us turn first to a few representative groups that came from Germany.
Among the earliest were the German Baptist Brethren, also known as the Dunkards, Dunkers, or Tunkers (from the German word tunken, "to immerse"). The first German Baptists to arrive in America came from Krefeld in the Rhineland and settled in Germantown, Pennsylvania, in 1719, to be followed by the entire congregation in 1729. As the German Baptist Brethren expanded into other parts of the United States and Canada, some were converted to a belief in celibacy. Led by Johann Conrad Beissel, this offshoot founded the celibate German community at Ephrata, Pennsylvania, in 1732. A well-known tourist attraction today, the original cloisters of Ephrata disbanded in 1830. Another branch, the Seven Day German Baptists, maintains churches and a publishing house at New Enterprise, Pennsylvania. In 1881 a further split sent the Old Order Dunkers to establish their church in Covington, Ohio, while the more progressive Brethren Church moved on to Winona Lake, Indiana, founding Ashland College en route. The main body, the Conservative Dunkards, today has central offices in Elgin, Illinois.
Like the German Baptists at Ephrata, the Rappists believed in communal ownership of property, communal work, and, after 1807, celibacy. The society of Rappists was founded by Johann Georg Rapp, born in Wuerttemberg in 1757, who brought his group to the United States in 1803, purchased land near Pittsburgh, and named it Harmony. By 1815 the colony had moved from Pennsylvania to southern Indiana, where a new settlement called Harmonie was established. The 9,000-acre town site in Pennsylvania was sold for $100,000 to a Mr. Ziegler in 1815. To New Harmony, located on the Wabash River near the Indiana-Illinois line, came an influx of new German immigrants. Germans not belonging to the society also settled nearby to take advantage of the many luxuries and conveniences, which the society’s managers made available. After a few years, the members not only carried considerable weight in politics but on occasion made loans to the state government of Indiana.
But in 1824 it was determined that New Harmony on the Wabash was to be sold. The total land amounted to 20,000 acres, and an earlier court suit had placed an appraised value of $368,690 on the property. After a few months, the communist philanthropist from Scotland, Robert Owen purchased the entire package for the asking price of $150,000. The Harmony Society moved back to Pennsylvania, where a third settlement was established at Economy, a town site downstream from Pittsburgh. Applications for membership poured in from would-be members who were motivated by the alleged existence of great wealth. Others sought to learn a valuable trade or to gain social prestige from association with the society’s factories and schools.
When Father Rapp died in 1847, the church fund was estimated to contain a half million dollars in gold and silver, all of it hidden in Rapp’s house. Thereafter the society declined from one of communal work and ownership to one of corporate investments. For the balance of the century, the Harmonists pioneered in oil, built pipelines, and constructed railroads. Provisions restricting use of the wealth to religious purposes were ignored. In spite of stipulations that prohibited the funds from being inherited, "except by the state of Pennsylvania as an aid in the payment of her heavy debt," the entire common holdings were converted to the property of individuals by a court decision of 1916. Today, the very name of the society has been expunged: Economy is now known as Ambridge, an abbreviation for the American Bridge Company which bought the lands and built the world’s largest structural steel plant on the site.
There was other nonconformist Germans who came to the United States to establish communistic societies called by some "small oases of cooperation in a wide desert of competition." In 1817, some 300 separatists emigrated from Wurttemberg, Baden, and Bavaria to Tuscarawas County, Ohio, where they founded the communal town named Zoar, in honor of the biblical city to which Lot fled when the cities of the plain were destroyed. Like the Zoar in Genesis, the little Ohio town was intended as a refuge from the evils of the world. Under their leader, Joseph M. Bäumeler (mispronounced Blinder by the local citizens, hence the name Bimelers for the society), the community was financially successful and acquired new members, although the total never exceeded 500. The U. S. Supreme Court rejected a charge brought by the state that Bäumeler could not retain the property in his own name in 1852. It declared that "Wiumeler’s holding of property was not only not fraudulent, but above reproach." Less than one year later, however, Bäumeler died, and, while his will assigned all property to the society, disintegration set in immediately. The mills and furnaces were first mismanaged, and then abandoned. In response to a petition by the members in 1884, the village of Zoar was dissolved and the land incorporated by the local county.
Still another example of a German-American communistic society rooted in religious mysticism was the Amana Society of Iowa. Situated on the Iowa River twenty miles south of Cedar Rapids, the community originated when 800 members of a pietistic sect left Germany under the leadership of Christian Metz in 1842 and settled in Ebenezer, New York. In 1855, the Community of True inspiration, as the colony was officially known, moved west to Amana, Iowa. By 1858 the society owned about 26,000 acres of land. Legally incorporated in 1859, the membership reached 2,000 by 1900 when a nonmember brought suit charging that the society exceeded its franchise in holding property. In 1906 the state supreme court held in favor of the community. The county auditor in 1908 assessed the property at $1,843,000, demonstrating the extent of the financial success of these religious communities. Communally held property remained in force until 1932 when the society’s assets of over $2,000,000 were divided into common stocks arid distributed to the members. While the German flavor and German language of their forbears remain alive today, private property is the rule, and even the famous Amana Refrigeration Company no longer belongs to the community.
Amana is not to be confused with Amish. The Amish originated as a sect of the Mennonite Church, and in North America they are formally known as Old Order Amish Mennonites, numbering at least 50,000. The Amish trace their heritage to Jakob Ammann, a Mennonite bishop of Bern, Switzerland, who separated from his parent church in a controversy over Meidung, a form of severe excommunication meted out to individuals who offend against the society’s codes. Persecuted in Europe, the Amish began migrating to the New World in 1728. At first they lived on fertile farmlands in Pennsylvania, then expanded to Ohio, Illinois, Iowa, and of late to Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Canada. Today the Amish Church exists only in North America and, despite being marooned on an English-language "sea," the members continue to use High German in their religious services and a dialect of German in family speech. Virtually all of them also know English.
Known as the Plain People, the Amish divorce themselves from the mainstream of modern American life. They dress in the tradition of their forefathers, and occupy homes without mirrors, radios, telephones, or electric lights. Forbidden to own automobiles, they travel by horse drawn vehicles and resist the social changes, which modern conveniences have brought to American society. Education, too, centers on the practical, and as a rule, is limited to their own schools In 1871, the U. S. Supreme Court decided, in a suit brought against the Amish by the state of Wisconsin, that the members were exempt from compulsory public school attendance laws, because their way of life is, in all practical respects, their religion. Compelling them to attend public schools would be tantamount to denying them freedom of religion.
Although the Amish are known as Old Order Mennonites, the name Mennonite comes from Menno Simons, a Roman Catholic priest born in Holland about 1496. Converted to the Anabaptist movement, he preached personal sanctity without the dogmatism and violence of the original Anabaptists. Although the sect developed mainly in north Germany, especially near Liibeck and Hamburg, the strong leadership of Menno Simons eventually caused all Anabaptists to be known as Mennonites.
Mennonites emigrated to the United States in five major periods: (1) to Pennsylvania before the revolutionary war; (2) to Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Iowa after the Napoleonic wars; (3) to the prairie states of North and South Dakota, Nebraska, Minnesota, Kansas, and Manitoba, Canada, during the last three decades of the nineteenth century, when at least 20,000 migrated from South Russia to avoid military conscription; (4) to the western Canadian provinces after World War I, when another 20,000 arrived from South Russia; and (5) to Canada, the United States, and South America after World War II, when about 15,000 left Russia, Prussia, and Pomerania While there are at least 800,000 members of the Mennonite Churches in the United States, they are widely fragmented, some as a result of controversy over use of the German language in their religious services. To many, English means the language of the world. For these Mennonites, the German language was not only the vehicle of worship but also the means of keeping Mennonite life intimately associated with religion.
In the case of the Hutterian Brethren or Hutterites, a different set of circumstances prevails. Anabaptist in origin, the Hutterites do not employ the term Mennonite, but take their name from Jakob Hutter of Austerlitz, who led their congregation during the Reformation and died in 1586. For more than a century, the Hutterites lived in a German-language enclave in the midst of Slavic Moravia. During the late eighteenth century the Hutterites accepted the invitation of Czarina Catherine the Great (1762 - 1796) to settle in Russia, where they sojourned for approximately a century until 1874. At that time the Russian government made the Russian language mandatory for all schools and made military service compulsory. As a result, all of the Hutterite colonies left to settle, first in Dakota territory, and later also in Canada. Today there are at least 17,000 members in North America.
To this day the Hutterites maintain their German language, employing a Tirolean dialect for everyday purposes and High German in school and in services. They also practice Gemeinsinn ("devotion to the common good"). During and immediately after World War I, the Hutterites suffered persecution from American neighbors who resented their use of the German language. Concomitantly, the federal government indiscriminately drafted conscientious objectors. As a result, a majority of the communities left southeastern South Dakota and settled in Manitoba, Canada. Many have since moved back. At present, fully two thirds of the Hutterite colonies in the United States lie east and north of the Missouri River. South Dakota remains the North American home of the Hutterites. Here, in 1874, with an original population of 448, they established their first settlement, Old Bon Homme. In 1985 the South Dakota Legislature passed the Communal Corporation Act that encouraged the colonies to incorporate their farmlands as a religious community. Seven of South Dakota’s newer colonies represent reentrants from Canada, whereas others are the offspring of older colonies in South Dakota.
The Hutterites maintain their own German-language instruction (for children of public-school age. Pupils attend classes in the community schoolhouse during the morning before nine and after three-thirty in the afternoon. They learn Hutterite history, religion, and German before and after hours. During the main part of the school day, a certified teacher employed by the district comes into the school for regular instruction in compliance with compulsory school attendance laws. After age fifteen, pupils serve as apprentices to learn a trade within the community. In South Dakota, no Hutterite children attend schools with children from outside the community. In all cases, public-school boards provide for the education of colony children on colony property. In 1968, only five out of the twenty-seven schools in Hutterite colonies of South Dakota were parochial schools supported exclusively by a colony. The remaining received tax money to pay expenses, often in the form of a district returning to the colony all of the revenue collected from it for education. In spite of the interesting character of the German-language sects, the vast majority of German immigrants have been members of the more traditional Protestant and the Catholic churches. There was a German Baptist Church, a German Presbyterian Church, and, especially worthy of note, the Moravian Church, which had German origins. Today there are two Moravian bodies, one located in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, and the other at Winston-Salem, North Carolina. The German Reformed Church remained strictly German during the nineteenth century in America. Originating with the Swiss reformers, Huldreich Zwingli, John Calvin, and others, the Reformed Church had deep roots in the Palatinate, and because these were the Germans who came to colonial America, the German Reformed Church was a strong force in the United States ever since the first synod was formed in 1793. A national synod of the German Reformed Church came into being in 1868. It was this church that established the missionary organization known as Deutscher Evangehscher Kirchenverein des Westens (German Evangelical Church Syndicate of the West) in 1840. After 1877 the church began using the name German Evangelical Synod of North America, by which it was known until 1925, when the word "German" was dropped.
The German Methodists owe their existence in America to the great patriarch William Nast, a descendant from a long line of Swabian pastors of the Lutheran Church in Wurttemberg. Initially, the Methodist Episcopal Church extended Methodism to German immigrants in the United States. When Nast arrived in the United States after seminary training in Germany, he taught German at West Point and at Kenyon College in Ohio before being appointed a Methodist German missionary in Cincinnati in 1885. By leaps and bounds, the German Methodist Church grew after the Civil War into a church with 138 churches, 200 Sunday schools, 165 circuit riders, and over 20,000 members. Not until 1924 did the Methodist church take steps to phase out its German wing of the church.
The German Lutherans in the United States date from colonial times when the Salzburgers settled in Georgia and when Pastor Heinrich Muhlenberg established the first Lutheran Synod of America in Pennsylvania. Suborganizations of these early German Lutherans were at work in Ohio and Tennessee since 1812. By 1900 the largest of the Lutheran general bodies was the Synodical Conference, popularly called the Missourians, which dates from 1838. In that year, some 800 Saxon Lutherans, AIt-Lutheraner as they were called, chose to leave their native land rather than combine with other Protestant sects (Lutherans and Reformed churchmen) into one state church. They departed from Bremerhaven in five chartered ships, one of which was lost at sea. Traveling via New Orleans and the Mississippi to Missouri, they purchased land in Perry County. Thus, once again in 1838, America became the land of refuge for Germans in search of religious liberty.
At a Chicago meeting in April 1847, the Lutherans of the Midwest united into the German Evangelical Lutheran Synod of Missouri, Ohio and Other States. In this achievement the Reverend Frederick Wyneken of Indiana and the Reverend Wilhelm Sihler of Ohio aided the great leader, Carl Walther. Subsequently the Missouri Synod expanded, spreading into Wisconsin, Michigan, and later Minnesota and Iowa. As time passed, it also spread to California, New Orleans, Texas, and eventually throughout the United States. Everywhere the church went, it developed a progressive program, which usually included German-language parochial schools.
By the outbreak of World War I, German Lutherans of the mid-nineteenth century were federated in the Synodical Conference. Other German Lutheran churches at the time were the Joint Synod of Ohio, the Buffalo Synod, and the Iowa Synod. For the most part, World War I Americanized German Lutherans in the eastern United States. Not so in the Middle West. Predictably, the Midwest German Lutherans were sympathetic to the German cause between 1914 and 1917. The Missouri Synod vigorously denounced America’s arms trade and voiced the conviction that "anything that touches moral issues is within the sphere of the church. In turn, superpatriotic Americans vilified the Lutherans of German extraction. There were charges that the German-Lutheran churches were hotbeds of treason, were harboring enemy agents, and were loyal to the Kaiser. German-language church services were disrupted and pastors threatened. Major newspapers like the New York Times and the St. Louis Globe urged them to drop German from their worship and from the curriculum in their parochial schools.
As a result, not just the Germans, but also all of the foreign-heritage Lutherans became convinced that German and other languages should be replaced by English in both worship and work. Not that German had always been preferred to English. In fact, the Missouri Synod witnessed considerable controversy over this matter almost from its inception in the late 1830s. German was always the language for conventions and official proceedings, but provisions were made for those who knew only English.31 Lutheran leaders in the nineteenth century were ambivalent about the desirability of maintaining German, because a century earlier, the Pennsylvania German Lutherans had lost the second generation by not abandoning German in worship when the young adopted English in their daily speech. The Missouri Synod’s Statistical Yearbook reports that services conducted in German had dropped from 62 percent in 1919 to 46 percent in 1926. Ten years after the close of World War I, the language question ceased to be an issue in synodical discussions.
The story of German Catholicism in the United States parallels that of German Lutheranism. The difference is that German Catholic immigration in the nineteenth century coincided with the influx of Irish Catholics.
The Irish furnished the clergy for the Catholic Church in the United States. The Irish were urban and skilled in the art of politics, whereas the Germans were more rural and ill suited by virtue of speaking a foreign language to seize the political initiative. Thus the Irish held a decided edge in maintaining an Irish hierarchy in America.
German Catholicism gained its first hierarchical toehold in the figure of John Martin Henni, who was appointed bishop of Milwaukee in 1844. In the decades that followed, Henni became the patriarch of German Catholicism by building a solid foundation for a German-American clergy in his Midwest archdiocese. During his time it became something of a policy to appoint German-born bishops and to import German-speaking priests until seminaries could be built in the United States to train German-speaking priests. The policy was developed in Milwaukee where, it was calculated German-speaking pastors were needed to hold the German immigrant church together. Almost half of all the German-Americans in the 1880s were Roman Catholics. But as Sir Shane Leslie wrote in the 1918 Dublin Review, "The Germans are a pillar of the Church in America, but the Irish have always held the rooftop." Of the sixty-nine American bishops in 1886, thirty-five were Irish and only fifteen were German-speaking, including those of Swiss and Austrian descent. Up to 1900, 210 bishops had been appointed in the United States. Of these, 174 were of foreign birth or parentage. Ninety-three were Irish, thirty-five French, seven Austrian, and four Swiss. Only nine were German.
Understandably, then, the Midwest Germans made efforts to secure their own clergy in their own churches. In many a small town, even today, it is common to find two or more Catholic churches, often only a block or two apart (Zanesville: St. Nicholas and St. Thomas; Mount Sterling: St. Joseph and St Mary; Joliet: St. John the Baptist and Irish counterpart; Chicago: St George and St. Augustine and many Irish and other ethnic counterparts). Each bears the name of a national patron saint, hut among the townspeople the churches are known simply as "the German church," "the Polish church," or "the Irish church". In rural areas where only one church was a feasibility, a compromise was occasionally reached whereby the parish was called "St. Boniface," but the statues of St. Patrick and St. Boniface shared opposite but equal positions on the High Altar. The Irish resented that the Germans as well as the Polish and Italians clung to their mother tongues in America. Non-Irish clergy promoted retention of the foreign languages, as a rule, in order to create islands of Catholicism that would be isolated from contact with non-Catholics. Irish clergy had the same objectives, but, because they spoke English in an English-speaking country, they never understood the importance of a mother-tongue ministry for the non-English speaker. It may have been an exaggeration, but a priest from Albany, New York, reported in 1881 in a paper read at Liege, Belgium, that out of 25,000,000 Catholic immigrants to the United States, fully 20,000,000 had lost their Catholic faith.
Around the middle of the nineteenth century, Irish and German Catholics found a more or less common rallying point in self-defense against the nativists ‘who hated all foreigners in general, and Catholic foreigners in particular. Allegedly Catholics were foreign by birth and by virtue of their allegiance to the Vatican. When nativism died down in the last third of the nineteenth century, Catholic immigrants were less dependent on each other. German Catholics were also appalled when certain Irish clergymen, for example, Archbishop Ireland of St. Paul, became militant prohibitionists — failing to perceive that liquor may have been a curse to the Irishman, but to the German it was a balm and a "living bread." Amen.
Tensions between these two ethnic wings of the Catholic Church in America emerged mi the 1880s and eventually erupted in open conflict in the 1890s. The battleground was the so-called "German triangle of the West," the area embraced by the archiepiscopal sees of Milwaukee, Cincinnati, and St. Louis. Strife began when Archbishop Henni reiterated that all priests in his diocese must be German. He also petitioned Rome to appoint a German coadjutor bishop who would automatically succeed him on his death. Irish members of his clergy wrote to Cardinal Gibbons of Baltimore objecting to the Germanizing of the Catholic dioceses in Wisconsin.
While the Milwaukee commotion continued, at the other end of the triangle in St. Louis, Archbishop Peter Richard Kenrick created German, Bohemian, and Polish parishes that did not enjoy all the rights and privileges of the English-speaking parishes. Pastors were not juridical pastors. In 1884, therefore, eighty-two priests in the St. Louis diocese petitioned Rome to upgrade the succursal foreign-language parishes. The Catholic German-language newspapers, especially by Father Henry Muhlsiepen, prepared the Cologne-born editor of the Pastoral Blatt the case for this petition.
When the petition was received at the Vatican, lobbyists for the Irish-American clergy reported back to their bishops comments such as these: "There is evidently a powerful German influence active in Rome.... The breach between the nationalities is widening every day, and if the German influence at Rome is allowed to hold sway, it will, I fear, be the entering wedge of a grave breach." Bishop Gilmour of Cleveland charged, "The Germans demand absolutely that the priest and the school should be German. To keep the peace with the Germans, injustice is often done to other nationalities." In the thick of this, a Milwaukee priest named Peter M. Abbelen set out for Rome with petitions from German priests in Milwaukee, St. Louis, and Cincinnati. Bishop McCloskey of Louisville rushed a note to his Roman lobbyist, "If these German prelates are allowed special legislation as Germans, great injury is likely to follow to the interests of religion. We will be looked upon as a German church in an English-speaking country."
With tempers ruffled, the Catholic bishops of America poised for battle. Ominously, Bishop Gilmour prophesied that if nothing dramatic was done, then in twenty-five years it would be too late and "the Church in the Mississippi Valley would be bound hand and foot to the wheel of Germanism." Through the years 1886 and 1887 the controversy continued.
Eventually arguments for relenting on the German question came from Father John Gmeiner, editor of the German weekly Der Seebote. In part, he wrote:
The Catholic Church is no literary club to foster peculiar linguistic tastes, nor an ethnological society to advance any particular national cause, but a divinely instituted organization to bring men of "all nations, and tribes, and peoples, and tongues, to eternal salvation. She, indeed, encourages the study of languages, as she uses other temporal means, in their relation to her God-given mission — not for the sake of the languages themselves.
Gmeiner claimed that the Germans were better represented in the American hierarchy than they were in national or state legislatures. The Irish, he said, lost their original language when English was imposed upon them, yet they remained faithful to their religion. Besides, he pointed out, modern English is substantially Germanic and akin to the language spoken by the Angles and Saxons living along the Elbe River in Germany. "Let our German infidels who ignore the One True God worship their idol Deutschtum. To us as Catholics our German language is not an object of religious veneration."
Taking up where Gmeiner left off was the Reverend Anton H. Walburg of Cincinnati, who in 1889 wrote on the question of nationality to the German American Priests’ Society. Walburg argued that people can change languages just as they can change political parties. But changing does not make them better or worse Americans. One who speaks English cannot be considered a better American than one who speaks German just because English predominates in the United States. In fact, a rich mixture of languages, Walburg was convinced, would result in a richer American culture.
But Walburg startled everyone when he concluded that denationalization is demoralization.
A foreigner who loses his nationality is in
danger of losing his faith and character. When the German immigrant ... seeks
to throw aside his nationality . . . the first word he learns is generally a
curse, and the rowdy element in his preference to the sterling qualities of
the Puritans ... like as the Indians ... adopted the vices rather than the
virtues
Slowly the voices of reason were heard, however, as when Archbishop Ireland maintained that people had the right to practice their religion in the language of their choice: "Yes, speak the German language and teach it to your children. But permit me to add in very earnest words, whatever be your conclusion as to your own selves, see that your children learn well, and speak well, English.’
Out of the language controversy there arose a further complication. The philanthropist member of the Prussian Parliament and later of the Reichstag, Peter Paul Cahensly, who sponsored the St. Raphael Societies in Germany and in the United States to aid German immigrants, expanded his organization throughout Europe to provide for all Catholic emigrants to the United States. Representatives of the St. Raphael Societies assembled in 1890 in Lucerne, Switzerland, to suggest policy. No delegates from the American branch of the society attended. Nevertheless, the meeting generated a set of resolutions called the Lucerne Memorial, which was signed by fifty-one Catholic delegates from seven nations and presented to Pope Leo XIII. Disregarding all other signers, the American press and the Irish hierarchy charged Peter Paul Cahensly with authorship of the document.
Essentially the memorial called for the establishment of separate churches in the United States for each nationality, with priests of the same nationality as the faithful. Likewise, parochial schools were to be set up and maintained separately for each nationality with the language of each native country included in the respective curriculums. Also, Catholics were to be organized into social societies and mutual aid unions according to country of origin. Most offensive was the seventh provision, which stipulated that "Catholics of each nationality ... have in the episcopate of the country where they immigrate, several bishops who are of the same origin."" Finally, the Holy See should sponsor seminaries in the mother country where priests could be trained for service in the United States.
The provisions of the memorial were published in the United States for the first time when the Associated Press released the story from, of all places, the imperial city of Berlin on May 27, 1891. The chief irritant to the Irish-American Catholic hierarchy was the proposal regarding Episcopal appointments, since proportion to nationality would have divided control of the Church in America almost evenly between the Germans and the Irish. As expected, the German Catholic press in America agreed with the Cahensly proposals, whereas the public press saw it more or less as an attempt by a foreign power to mingle in internal American affairs, and the Irish hierarchy saw it as a threat to their existence.
While the matter was considerably threshed over, Cardinal Gibbons of Baltimore exhibited a levelheaded approach to the problem. Through his suggestion, the Vatican wrote to Gibbons explaining that the Holy Father was willing to assist organizations such as the St. Raphael Society, but he did not find the plan opportune. On August 20 of the same year Gibbons came to Milwaukee and spoke out boldly,
Woe to him who would breed dissention among the leaders of Israel by introducing the spirit 0f nationalism into the camps of the Lord! Brothers we are, whatever may be our nationality, and brothers we shall remain.... Let us glory in the title of American citizen. We owe all our allegiance to one country, and that country is America.
Americanization thereafter proceeded at a rapid pace, although not without incidents in St. Louis, Buffalo, and elsewhere. Attempts were made to erect nationality parishes for the Germans in several cities but with only partial success. Meanwhile in Wisconsin, compromises on the appointment of bishops were reached when German-speaking candidates received appointments: James Schwebach of Luxembourg was appointed bishop of La Crosse, and Sebastian G. Messmer of Switzerland became bishop of Green Bay.
On the floor of the Prussian House of Representatives, Cahensly reviewed his twenty years of work with the St. Raphaelsverein. He stressed that the society had spent over four million marks for emigrants of all faiths at no obligation to the emigrants and with no compensation from commercial sources, states, or shipping companies. He urged the German government itself to take the initiative in drawing up emigration laws. He spoke out against having the state give money to private emigrant societies. As for his own St. Raphaelsverein, he rejected government help, stating that although the society cares for 30,000 emigrants yearly, and helps all emigrants without differentiating religion, it is at the same time primarily directed toward Catholics. It is, for religious considerations, not in a position to accept these 30,000 RM for fear that they would not he equally distributed. We cannot fulfill the task nor accept the grant that the Reich offers.
By 1910, the storm between the Irish and German Catholics in America had all but blown over. A tone of ethnic nostalgia emanated from the lips of the Irish bishop of Peoria, Edmund M. Dunne, when he addressed the German Central-Verein of his district.
Most of my student companions were Germans, and I always am happy to visit German parishes because I find all there in beautiful order. I especially rejoice at the good parochial schools in German parishes. I cannot encourage you Germans enough to teach your children as much German as possible; for a German who values his language lightly, as a rule abandons his religion without thinking. Hold to your language, and I will make it a point to see that there will he instruction in German conversation in the parish schools.
German Catholics in the early twentieth century were first Catholic, then American, and thereafter German. Overcoming feelings of mistrust toward the German element, the Irish-American hierarchy developed plans to induce German Catholics to come to America. In St. Louis, St. Paul, Green Bay, and other cities, Irish prelates joined the St. Raphael Society and the Central-Verein to foster such projects. In 1910 Archbishop John J. Glennon of St. Louis founded the Catholic Colonization Society to promote similar endeavors. Behind the dream lay the belief that "man made the city but God made the country," and therefore the Church would thrive if it would build its strength on the land.
In Germany, Cahensly worked with the Catholic Colonization Society in directing "his" immigrants to its lands. In 1910, Cahensly journeyed to the United States, where the hierarchy and clergy received him warmly. In his report, given orally at Augsburg in 1911, Cahensly stressed that the Slavic and Italian immigrants were in the unfavorable position in America once occupied by the Germans. He recommended the same medicine, that they are given spiritual succor in their native languages — proof, perhaps, that he never advocated the German language out of a desire to advance the interests of Germany in the United States.
One of the most important structures through which the Catholic leadership in America aided the German-American Catholic was the Central-Verein. It was a loosely structured vehicle through which German-American Catholics could participate in church and civic functions in the United States. Although several bishops called upon the Central-Verein to take a stand on the Cahensly issue, it persistently refused. The Central-Verein’s period of greatest influence came between the time it was reorganized in 1909 and America s entry into World War I in 1917. The battles over Cahenslyism were over, and yet, according to the data compiled for the Catholic Encyclopedia in 1909, there were over 2,000 Catholic Congregations in which the German language was used either exclusively or in combination with English. A few years earlier, there were 2,600 German-speaking priests in the United States. Fourteen of the twenty dioceses having fifty or more German-speaking priests fell within the triangle, Ohio on the east, Minnesota on the north, and Missouri on the south. After 1910 the society exercised a strong force through its organ, the Central Blatt and Social Justice, published in St. Louis. The most important personality behind the society and its journal was its director and editor, Frederick P. "Fritz" Kenkel. Born in Chicago in 1863 of Forty-Eighter immigrants, he studied in Germany, became a convert to Catholicism, and eventually edited the Central Blatt. Until his death in 1952, Kenkel worked tirelessly, if in later years, somewhat hopelessly, for fundamental changes in the American Catholic social order.
In Cahenslyism, unlike the Central Verein, native Americans pretended to see the shadow of Pan-Germanism cast diagonally across the United States. They objected to the prospect but with no great vigor until World War I brought anti-Germanism to a frenzy in America. By the time this emotionalism had spent itself in the 1920s, there was little "German" left in the German Catholic Church in America.
The Table of Contents can be reached with this link.