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The Church of St. Benedict the Moor: Propagating and Contesting Black Catholicism in New York City, 1883-1920 Jeffrey Wheatley

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The Church of St. Benedict the Moor: Propagating and Contesting Black Catholicism in New York City, 1883-1920 Jeffrey Wheatley Florida State University Libraries Electronic Theses, Treatises and Dissertations The Graduate School 2014 The Church of St. Benedict the Moor: Propagating and Contesting Black Catholicism in New York City, 1883-1920 Jeffrey Wheatley Follow this and additional works at the FSU Digital Library. For more information, please contact [email protected] FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES THE CHURCH OF ST. BENEDICT THE MOOR: PROPAGATING AND CONTESTING BLACK CATHOLICISM IN NEW YORK CITY, 1883-1920 By JEFFREY WHEATLEY A Thesis submitted to the Department of Religion in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts Degree Awarded: Spring Semester, 2014 Jeffrey Wheatley defended this thesis on March 28, 2014. The members of the supervisory committee were: John Corrigan Professor Directing Thesis Amanda Porterfield Committee Member Aline Kalbian Committee Member The Graduate School has verified and approved the above-named committee members, and certifies that the thesis has been approved in accordance with university requirements. ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The faculty at Florida State University provided me with the tools necessary to complete this project. Dr. John Corrigan provided support and pushed me to articulate a bolder and clearer argument. Dr. Amanda Porterfield’s enthusiasm for the metaphor of the corral helped me shape this project early on. Dr. Aline Kalbian provided thoughtful feedback on the vocabulary and implications of this work. Staff members at the Archives of the Archdiocese of New York and the New York Historical Society provided excellent aid in finding materials on the Church of St. Benedict the Moor. Kate Feighery and Rev. Michael Morris from the AANY deserve special thanks for their diligence, their kindness, and the ride to the Metro-North station in Yonkers. I eagerly await their new facility. Graduate school is a testament to the fact that research is and should be a social activity. A number of friends and colleagues have contributed to my scholarly development. I give special thanks to Michael Graziano, Charles McCrary, and Emily Clark for their thoughtful conversations and good humor. One cannot help but to become more critical and self-aware in the midst of such wonderful company. My partner Allison Walsh provided love and encouragement from afar. She did so despite her skeptical reflections on the dubious rituals of academia. When I was born my parents predicted that I would become a minister. Instead, I entered religious studies. Nonetheless, they have been nothing but loving and supportive of my research and teaching. Their constant encouragement for and interest in my education has provided me cheer and comfort. This thesis is dedicated to them and all of their efforts. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT v INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER ONE: A HISTORIOGRAPHICAL OVERVIEW 6 In Search of a Black Catholicism 7 The Catholic Church in America 12 New Questions in African American Religious History 14 Conclusion 16 CHAPTER TWO: ST. BENEDICT'S APPEAL 18 The Past: Crafting an Afro-Catholic History 21 The Present: Naturalizing Black Catholicism 28 The Future: The Urban Environment, Social Uplift, and Institution-Building 31 Conclusion 40 CHAPTER THREE: "THE SCHEME WAS EXPERIMENTAL!" 42 Demographics 43 Finances 46 Services 49 CONCLUSION: RACE, RELIGION, AND AUTHORITY 57 BIBLIOGRAPHY 63 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH 68 iv ABSTRACT This thesis examines the Church of St. Benedict the Moor from 1883 to 1920. St. Benedict’s was the first black Catholic church in the North. I argue that supporters of the Catholic mission to African Americans sought to incorporate the assumptions of black religiosity in order to render Catholicism as a legitimately black religion. The institutional history of St. Benedict’s demonstrates the difficulties that the Catholic Church faced in attempting to overcome African American suspicion. A key contribution of this thesis is its approach to black Catholicism as a contested and propagated identity. Prompted by St. Benedict’s creation in New York, black Catholics, Irish priests, freethinking radicals, and Protestants all participated in a dialogue over the nature and function of black religion vis-à-vis Catholicism. v INTRODUCTION Nestled in the back of the 1908 dime novel The Bradys and the Chinese Fire Fiends was an odd vignette: Two young Irish girls, one of whom had apparently only “lately landed,” were walking through West Forty-third street the other day and the following scrap of their conversation was overheard by a woman who was close behind them. In front of the Catholic Church of St. Benedict the Moor the girls paused to read the name, and then glanced upward at the large figure of the saint which adorns the front of the structure. “Why, Mary,” exclaimed the “greenhorn,” clutching excitedly at her companion’s sleeve, “It looks like a black man!”, “Sure,” responded Mary composedly; “that’s a church for colored people.” “A black saint!” repeated the other, half under breath. “Well, and how manny more quare things will I hear of in this counthry, I’d like to know!” [sic].1 For many onlookers, anxious Protestant ministers, and curious journalists, the Church of St. Benedict the Moor in New York City was indeed a “quare thing” that demanded explanation. This was in large part due to the fact that many white and black Americans in the urban north normalized black religion as Protestant. Of course, there had always been Catholics who were black in New York. However, St. Benedict’s signaled a shift towards a black Catholic identity that suggested a past and future relationship in which “black” and “Catholic” modified each other. The mission pushed the possibility of a black Catholicity into the New York public. But what exactly did this black Catholicism entail? And what were its implications? This thesis explores the variety of New Yorkers’ responses to these questions from St. Benedict’s opening in 1883 to 1920, when public interest in the church had waned significantly. St. Benedict’s serves as the prism through which we can glimpse these responses. The Catholic Church’s interest in missionizing African Americans peaked in these four decades. I argue that a cadre of liberal Catholic priests and lay black Catholics sought to missionize African Americans by reading (or, more appropriately, misreading) the needs of the black community in order to incorporate these needs into St. Benedict’s missionary appeal. Although I believe that the hierarchy must be central to the story of a mission to African Americans, the hierarchy was one voice among many. Lay black Catholics, freethinking radicals, hostile Protestant ministers, and the liberal Irish priests all played a role in the propagation and contestation of a black Catholicism. Because of the co-constituted nature of racial and religious identities, the Catholic 1 The Bradys and the Chinese Fire Fiends; Or, Breaking Up a Secret Band (New York: Frank Tousey, 1908), 27. 1 mission to African Americans necessarily participated in the ongoing dialogue over the nature and function of black religion in an attempt to overcome the effects of the normalization of black religion as Protestant. The argument has two steps. First, I seek to demonstrate that supporters of Catholic missions to African Americans read black culture as desirous of what the Catholic Church could offer: a home that could provide order within a hostile and racist society. Protestantism, Catholics argued, had failed to do this. As a result the black community was left without an institutional center around which African Americans could organize and uplift themselves. Whatever inconsistencies with the history of the American Catholic Church’s relationship with African Americans beforehand, this conviction drove and shaped the mission. This conviction also fueled Catholic optimism in the potential of St. Benedict’s. Second, I seek to demonstrate that the hierarchy and its supporters had misread African American desire and their own church. According to the standards set by the rhetoric of the priests in the 1880s, the mission had failed by the early 1900s. Far from hoping to be rescued from their oppressive situation by an ostensibly universal church, African Americans desired to create and participate in a variety of black religious institutions that reflected and served the black community. The disjuncture between Catholic uniformity and black polyculturalism crippled the Catholic mission to African Americans in New York City. Despite the efforts of the Catholic hierarchy, the Catholic Church and African Americans by and large continued on divergent paths in the twentieth century. Although operating within multiple historiographies, this thesis primarily contributes to the historiography of black Catholics in the United States. I provide a narrative of a mission church that has not received substantial treatment in the existing literature. St. Benedict’s deserves study for three reasons. First, the church provoked widespread curiosity in a city that has been paramount in both Catholic and black history. Public interest in the mission is all the more remarkable considering the church’s small size. Second, New York’s robust print culture provides us with a substantial record of the dialogue prompted by the church. Third, the variety of religious groups in New York City and their interest in and objections to St. Benedict’s allow us to see clearly the co-constitution of race and religion around the turn of the twentieth century. Although black Catholics had existed in the Americas since the fifteenth century, St. Benedict’s presented itself and was received as a new black religion. 2 Rather than approaching black Catholicism as a static set of beliefs and practices, I approach black Catholicism as a flexible identity that a variety of groups propagated and contested. The history of black Catholicism in the United States is usually one of both celebration and lamentation. Scholars such as Cyprian Davis, M.
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