Faith Groups
The Roman Catholic presence in North America commenced in 1565 with Spain's first permanent settlement in Saint Augustine, Florida, and its later colonization of territories to the west and southwest. Colonization efforts by France, which began in the same era, focused on New Orleans and on northern and northwestern territories. During the extended colonization period, these European governments and the Catholic Church jointly financed the work of missionaries whom they commissioned to "civilize and christianize" the numerous Native American tribes.
Catholicism was banned in most of the English colonies until 1776, although missionaries had served in a few small Catholic settlements in Maryland and Pennsylvania since the mid-seventeenth century. As a result, when John Carroll of Maryland was appointed the nation's first bishop in 1790, and the church was formally organized, his congregation numbered only about 30,000.
Since 1790, the Catholic Church in America has consistently called its members not only to support their local parishes and dioceses but also to unite as a church community to assist the needy. An emphasis on the spiritual merits of gifts of personal service as well as of money encouraged parishioners of every social class to participate actively in the church's charitable sector.
The first benevolent work undertaken by American Catholics was the education of girls. In 1805 Visitation nuns near Washington, D.C. established a small day school for poor girls and cared for a number of boarding orphans. Several years later, Mother Elizabeth Seton, who had just founded the Sisters of Charity, established a similar school in Baltimore. From these small beginnings evolved the vast and varied network of charitable and educational institutions that has come to exemplify Catholic philanthropy in America.
The arrival of millions of impoverished immigrants, many of them Catholic, in the 1840s and 1850s posed an immense challenge for a scattered, working-class church. Benevolent laity, clergy, and members of religious orders joined forces to house and care for the destitute, especially parentless children. Typically, local parishioners, with the approval of their pastor, would construct a small orphanage, engage an order of nuns to care for the children, and pledge ongoing financial support for the institution. Every parish orphanage had its own male board of trustees, female auxiliary, and benevolent society.
Catholic hospitals appeared in response to devastating typhoid, cholera and smallpox epidemics that recurred regularly in the early nineteenth-century. Founded by religious sisterhoods to serve the indigent, these small establishments were financed by free will offerings and the sisters' contributed labor. In time, they became larger, broadened their services, and increased in number, from eighteen in 1860 to about 140 by 1885.
Mainstream citizens distrusted the Catholic Church, not only because of its unpopular religious teachings, but also because its membership was progressively poor and foreign-born. As a result, except in civic emergency, nineteenth-century Catholics rarely cooperated with other benevolent agencies in charity work. A separatist spirit also marked the church's own charities since various ethnic groups preferred to concentrate their efforts on projects that aided their own nationalities.
Church leaders strongly encouraged generous young Catholics to join one of the many religious orders that were subsidizing church charities and schools through the contributed labor of their members. The response from women was especially enthusiastic, and by 1900, the nation's more than 40,000 sisters outnumbered clergy by a margin of nearly four to one. Religious sisterhoods continued to flourish until the mid-1960s, when their total membership peaked at approximately 180,000. Nuns were an ubiquitous and very important feature of the nineteenth-century Catholic charity system. In an era of narrow views about women's proper sphere of influence, they assumed leadership roles in hospitals, social agencies, schools, and child-caring institutions, a phenomenon remarked upon by Americans of every religious persuasion.
One aftermath of the Civil War was a sharp rise in the number of orphaned and abandoned children. In response to this critical problem, the Catholic community founded a number of urban orphanages with attached industrial schools. These huge enterprises appeared in most major cities, with seven opening in New York City alone between 1875 and 1885. The New York Catholic Protectory, accommodating nearly 3,300 children, was the largest child-caring institution in America in 1897.
Funding for the burgeoning charitable institutions, large and small, came from diverse sources. Contributions in occasional collections, while generous, were never sufficient. Most institutions relied for funding almost entirely on their own boards of trustees and benevolent societies. Society members raised money by sponsoring events that attracted the entire community, such as charity fairs, balls, and bazaars, as well as by selling subscriptions and lottery tickets. These various projects continued throughout the year and provided myriad ways for local parishioners to collaborate in charity as volunteers, financial donors, and event patrons.
By the early twentieth century, the church hierarchy generally agreed that, in comparison to mainstream charity organization, the Catholic philanthropic approach was disorganized and inefficient. Major reform was essential if the church was to collaborate meaningfully with other private charities and government service agencies. The bishops decided that the many charitable institutions in each diocese could no longer continue to operate autonomously in fundraising and in setting institutional policies. With the help of charity professionals, they devised the diocesan charitable bureau, a new structure that would allow them to bring all the charities under their direct control. By the 1930s, almost every diocese had a charitable bureau with the bishop at its head. He appointed its priest-director as well as the clergy and wealthy laymen who sat on its board. The bureau set common policies and all charitable institutions were required to observe them.
This comprehensive restructuring was accompanied by equally far-reaching reforms in the area of charity fundraising. Bishops banned all fundraising events for individual charitable institutions. Instead of a host of local charity fairs, lotteries, and bazaars, there would now be a single annual diocesan-wide charity collection. On "Charity Sunday" congregants in every parish in the diocese were asked to contribute in accord with their means for the support of all charities in the diocese. The funds collected were remitted to the central diocesan office where the bishop and his advisors proceeded to distribute them among the various charitable institutions.
These radical changes in the church's charity sector disturbed grassroots parishioners. Of particular concern was the expanding involvement of bishops and clergy in the only area of church life where the laity had traditionally enjoyed considerable decision-making power. The ban on charity events to benefit specific institutions weakened the warm rapport between benevolent laity and the religious sisters, and it also reduced occasions for informal contact between donors and beneficiaries. Working- and middle-class parishioners who responded to the call to contribute generously in the annual diocesan charity collection no longer had the means to give much to their favorite charities. Realistically, only the wealthy could afford to designate their giving.
Since the 1960s, the proportion of household income that American Catholics, on average, contribute annually to the church and its charities has declined appreciably, and membership in religious sisterhoods has experienced a dramatic downturn. These disquieting developments are linked, in part at least, to the far-reaching bureaucratization of the church's philanthropic sector in the first half of the twentieth century. While the highly decentralized approach of nineteenth-century Catholic charity had its flaws, it fostered far more lay initiative and personal involvement than did the hierarchical model that succeeded it.
Several auspicious developments suggest that a revival of time-honored Catholic philanthropic values may be underway. Stewardship, sacrificial giving, and tithing programs are spreading in the nation's 19,000 parishes; parish communities are uniting to address the needs of the local poor; and laity, women as well as men, are again assuming leadership positions in church philanthropy at every level.
Bibliography
Brown, Dorothy M., and Elizabeth McKeown. 1998. "The Poor Belong to Us": Catholic Charities and American Welfare, 1870-1940. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Greeley, Andrew, and William McManus. 1987. Catholic Contributions: Sociology and Policy. Chicago: Thomas More Press.
Oates, Mary J. 1995. The Catholic Philanthropic Tradition in America . Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
O'Brien, David and Thomas Shannon, eds. 1995. Catholic Social Thought: The Documentary Heritage . Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books.
Zech, Charles E., Francis J. Butler, and Mary Grant. 2000. Why Catholics Don't Give … And What Can Be Done About It. Huntington, IN: Our Sunday Visitor Press.
Learning to Give wishes to express appreciation to Dr. Dwight Burlingame, editor/author of Philanthropy in America, a Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia of Philanthropy Information, and the publisher ABC-CLIO for graciously sharing this resource information with Learning to Give. The complete encyclopedia may be purchased through ABC-CLIO.
