BOOK REVIEW

Beneath Boston's Catholic subculture

By Michael Kenney, Globe Staff, 06/18/1994

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In November, Massachusetts voters may once again face -- for the third time in a dozen years -- the ballot question of whether they want to strike the "anti-aid" amendment from the state constitution and allow the use of public funds to support private and parochial schools.

The amendment was drafted by a constitutional convention in 1917 and ratified by the state's voters later that year, and a substantially revised version was ratified in 1974. Senate President William M. Bulger, who has led the fight for repeal for the past dozen years, argues that the language reflects an anti-Catholic sentiment that prevailed in the early years of the century.

Paula M. Kane, a graduate of Holy Cross and an assistant professor of religious history at the University of Pittsburgh, has studied Catholic society in Boston during the years leading up to, and immediately after, the adoption of the amendment. While she addresses that issue only in passing, she presents little evidence of a rampant anti-Catholicism. What she does find is a deliberate strategy of "separatist integration" that created "a strong Catholic subculture . . . sacred but equal, separated but integrated."

The dominant figure during those years -- and well beyond them -- was Cardinal William Henry O'Connell, a churchman in the grand, even grandiose, manner. Kane revisits the marriage of O'Connell's nephew, the ordained chancellor of the archdiocese, and other scandals, drawing on the story uncovered by James O'Toole in his 1992 biography.

But O'Connell's major interest for Kane is in his espousal of a "separatist integration" strategy. Before 1900, she writes, American Catholics responded to anti-Catholicism "with defensive hostility and from a position of withdrawn entrenchment." But O'Connell, after he became archbishop in 1907, "directed Boston Catholics to the formation of a triumphalist, separatist Catholic subculture, with cooperation from the successful laity" and built around separate cultural institutions. Of particular interest in this regard is Kane's discussion of the Gothic-inspired architecture of Charles Maginnis (Boston College) and Ralph Adams Cram (the All Saints churches in Ashmont and Brookline). Kane notes that "Catholic consciousness about architectural styles emerged only with its middle class and with the firmer financial footing of the second and third generation removed from immigrant status." But neither architects' "aesthetic sensitivity reflected the voice of the average Catholic churchgoer."

Kane effectively contrasts the celebration of the archdiocesan centennial in 1908 -- the occasion for O'Connell's boast that "The Puritan has passed; the Catholic remains" -- with the tentative participation of Catholics in "Boston 1915," the good government-urban uplift reform program sponsored by Edward A. Filene, James J. Storrow and other Yankee progressives.

Kane suggests two reasons for the arm's-length approach to "Boston 1915": "an inkling of the anti-Catholic potential" in the immigration restrictions that were a factor in the reform program's economic development policies, and a reflection of the views expressed in The Pilot (which O'Connell had taken over in 1908) that "the Church, not social engineering, possessed the solutions to all social problems." And even when O'Connell did allow some minimal Catholic participation, it was with the triumphalist explanation that "the Catholic Church be adequately represented as it is doing much more work in the city and for its people than any other institution within its limits."

The event that did split Boston's Catholics and Yankees -- and the Catholic community itself -- was the campaign to remove from office the Suffolk County district attorney, Joseph Pelletier.

Described as "a typical Catholic family man," Pelletier had become district attorney in 1906 and soon after also became national counsel to the Knights of Columbus. But the Yankee-dominated Watch & Ward Society brought formal complaints against him in 1917, charging him with failure to close down hotels "rumored to be brothels" and subsequently successfully petitioned the Supreme Judicial Court to remove Pelletier from office.

While the Pelletier affair was "hyperbolically" compared to the Dreyfus Affair in France, "suggesting the presence of a persecution complex among Catholics," Pelletier "did not evoke sympathy from Church leaders in Boston" -- notably not from O'Connell, whom Pelletier was investigating in connection with the marriage of his nephew, the archdiocesan chancellor. Kane concludes that while the affair indicated that "anti-Catholic prejudices persisted in Boston," Pelletier's guilt prevented Catholics from portraying him "as an innocent victim of anti-Catholicism." If there is one complaint about "Separatism and Subculture," it is that Kane has focused too much on institutions and institutional responses. But despite that, Kane's comment that in her book her college friends of Irish Catholic ancestry "will surely recognize elements of their own experience" is one that applies as well to any reader who comes from that background -- and the more Boston the background, the stronger the recognition.

This story ran on page 29 of the Boston Globe on 06/18/1994.
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