Parish Boundaries: The Catholic Encounter with Race in the Twentieth Century Urban North.

The urban immigrant parish of the early twentieth century educated children, nurtured families, encouraged home ownership, anchored communities, and created and defined neighborhoods. So what could there possibly be to criticize in an institution that did so much good?

Well, how about xenophobia, intolerance, and racism? Organized along lines of ethnicity, the immigrant parishes served well many essential needs of their own peoples. But they served far less well the demands of the gospel to treat all men and women as brothers and sisters. This shortcoming was evident not just in their treatment of African-Americans, but it was most evident there, and had the most far-reaching effects for the American nation and for American Catholicism.

Mining a largely unexplored vein of American social history, John T. McGreevy has produced a work that has the feel of at least a minor classic. "[H]istorians of modern America give matters of faith and belief only fleeting attention," he writes in explanation of his project. "Religion frequently ends up at the bottom of a list of variables presumed to shape individual identity, as an ethical afterthought to presumably more serious matters of class, gender, and ethnicity."

McGreevy, an assistant professor of history at Harvard (and a Commonweal contributor), put religion at the center of his analysis, and the result is a work that is more complex, but ultimately more intellectually compelling, than the usual treatments of urban race relations. As the author puts it: "A guiding principle of this study has been to understand Catholic racism, not simply to catalog it."

That locution--"Catholic racism"--clearly indicates that McGreevy was not trying to explain the phenomenon away. He couldn't have if he wanted to. The evidence of it is voluminous and over-whelming. Indeed, as he notes in several places, it is not too much to say that the black-white confrontation in America's cities in this century was largely a confrontation between African-Americans and Catholics.

But before there was the race problem, there was the "race" problem. "Crucially," says McGreevy, "the primary `race' problem for American Catholics before the 1940s was the physical and cultural integration of the various Euro-American groups into the parishes and neighborhoods of the urban North, not conflicts between `blacks' and `whites.' "

As early as 1920, a Carnegie Foundation report described how "the great mass of [Catholic] immigrants belong to racial churches of their own." "Race" in this context referred to nationality, and in particular, the various European nationalities.

How tough was this early "race" problem? Listen to this description of Chicago's Back of the Yards Neighborhood in the early 1920s: "There residents could choose between eleven Catholic churches in the space of a little more than a square mile--two Polish, one Lithuanian, one Italian, two German, one Slovak, one Croatian, two Irish, and one Bohemian. Together, the church buildings soared over the frame houses and muddy streets of the impoverished neighborhood in a triumphant display of architectural and theological certitude."

With its church, rectory, convent, and school (typically staffed by nuns of the same ethnicity as the parishioners), "Each parish was a small planet whirling through its orbit, oblivious to the rest of the ecclesiastical solar system."

This model prevailed in all the cities of the Northeast and Midwest. To an extent that is difficult to appreciate today, the parish supplied its members' social needs, as well as their religious ones. Priests encouraged parishioners to buy homes in the parish and parishioners responded, creating personal investments as important and binding as the communal investment in the parish's land and physical plant.

In a very real sense, says McGreevy, "Catholic neighborhoods were created, not found." And having created them, the various Euro-American ethnic groups were understandably attached to them and reluctant to abandon them. Indeed, at a time when Protestant and Jewish congregations had long since abandoned their urban worship spaces for new ones in the suburbs, the Catholics hung in. (The closest contemporary analogue to this may be the Hasidic Jewish community in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. Fiercely attached to the neighborhood where they have created their equivalent of an old immigrant parish, the Hasidim refuse to abandon it. And it has brought them, like the Catholics before them, into nasty confrontations with African-Americans.)

The implications of this for African-Americans were not auspicious. "Upon their arrival in the northern cities," writes McGreevy, "African-Americans would confront a set of Catholic peoples accustomed to discrimination and sympathetic to the notion that the segregation of `races' was inevitable and natural." And the clergy and the hierarchy, whether out of conviction or resignation, generally acquiesced in this approach to things.

But the times, they were a `changin'. Forces both within and outside the church--from the Second World War to the rise of communism to the activities of committed interracialists like John LaFarge, S.J.--eventually eroded that attitude and led to its replacement by a policy of integration, a policy that was underpinned by a quite well-developed theology.

But while the policy and the theology were persuasive to the hierarchy and to committed "interracialists," they cut no ice with the average white parishioner in the pew, who saw in the arrival of blacks a threat to his or her home, neighborhood, and community--all the things that "parish" had come to mean.

Thus the hideous spectacles during the 1960s of civil rights demonstrators, often including priests and nuns aflame with fervor for social justice, being violently repelled during open housing marches in white urban neighborhoods. Maybe even more pathetic were the incidents in which African-American Catholic families were hounded out of neighborhoods so Catholic that they were known by the parish name.

What makes McGreevy's analysis of these events unique is his appreciation of the ecclesiastical and theological influences at work beneath the surface of things. The theology of the parish--there really is one--on one side; the theology of integration on the other. The Second Vatican Council, with its democratizing tendencies, was perhaps the most powerful influence on the interracialists.

McGreevy does not say it, but his book implies that, ultimately, African-Americans became incidental in the Catholic encounter with race in the urban north. Race became the issue by which two different white Catholic cultures--the old parish culture and the new democratic culture--defined themselves. To be for integration was to be a new, post-Vatican II Catholic, uncloistered and immersed in the world. To be against integration was to be for the old ways, the faith of their fathers, keepers of the parish, the neighborhood, the community.

And to be African-American is to be still in search of one's place in the one, holy, Catholic, and apostolic church.