<i>The Rise of Newport's Catholics: From Colonial Outcasts to Gilded Age Leaders</i> . By John F. Quinn

After a mob set fire in the summer of 1834 to a convent of Ursuline nuns in Charlestown, Massachusetts, as John F. Quinn explains at the outset of The Rise of Newport's Catholics, a group of Protestants in that Rhode Island seaport town “invited the bishop of Boston, Benedict Fenwick, to relocate the sisters to Newport and reestablish the school” (1). The bishop's newspaper confirmed the attractiveness of such an offer from a locale—less than 75 miles south of Charlestown—“where the well-known liberality and generous feelings of the inhabitants, would always be a guarantee or safeguard from an infatuated or infuriated mob.” The sisters instead “dispersed” to Canada and Louisiana after the Massachusetts legislature rejected their bid for compensation (1). With this vivid anecdote, Quinn sets the tone for his excellent study of why one New England community “was so welcoming to Catholics” (2).In 1719 the Rhode Island General Assembly banned Catholics from voting or holding public office, a law at such variance with the colony's reputation for tolerance that at least two prominent historians, writes Quinn, “wondered if it were mistakenly recorded” (10). Since “it is not clear that any Catholics resided in Rhode Island in the seventeenth century” (8) and precious few were found there in the 18th century, anti-Catholicism in colonial Newport was largely a rhetorical exercise. That situation persisted until 1779, when British occupying forces abandoned the town, to be replaced the following year by the French who “brought along twelve chaplains, at least two of whom were Irish” (28). Newport residents “who had been suspicious of popery,” writes Quinn, “were unperturbed. They now openly welcomed the French and their priests” (29). It may have helped, as Quinn notes in quoting a late 19th-century church historian, that “religion sat lightly” on the French forces, which included numerous Freemasons and “skeptics influenced by the Enlightenment (32).Newport's decline as a port after the War of 1812 shifted the community's focus by the 1820s to the nearby Fort Adams construction project, which employed hundreds of Irish Catholics: “They formed the nucleus of Rhode Island's first Catholic congregation,” with masses celebrated in a former schoolhouse turned chapel (50). Amid struggles to maintain federal funding for the fort, “the local press downplayed problems there,” notes Quinn. One newspaper asserted—around the time of the Charlestown convent fire—that the Irish workers at the fort had “proved themselves, with few exceptions, respectable in their vocations, and peaceable and respectful in their demeanor” (3). Yet the “List of Letters” published in Newport's newspapers relegated Irish mail recipients to a separate category, “at the very bottom . . . through the end of the 1830s” (71).Newport's first parish church opened in 1838, just as the local tourist industry launched an economic revival that provided ample employment opportunities for the city's diminutive Catholic population (as late as the mid-1840s, Newport's Catholic population was an estimated 375 people), which remained overwhelmingly Irish through the post-Famine decades until the end of the 19th century. The prevalence of southern seasonal hotel residents—some of whom were Catholic—gave way to wealthy New Yorkers who liked their domestic servants Irish and numerous, and who often hired Irish contractors to build their seaside mansions. A new church, The Holy Name of Mary, was dedicated in 1852 to replace St. Joseph's, the city's first parish. St. Mary's had 4,500 parishioners by 1867. Longtime pastor Philip Grace was a sophisticated if occasionally contentious Notre Dame graduate. There is an almost genteel tone to Quinn's portrayal of Catholic and especially Irish life, in a community that did not experience the traumas of mass immigration and the adjustment of rural peasants to the brutal realities of urban industrialization.A Catholic middle class emerged in Newport among proprietors of service industries: bakers, contractors, grocers, nursery owners and floral suppliers. Even when social and political strife broke out in town, the effects were mild compared to the experience of larger cities. One hundred and five souls perished in three days of anti-conscription rioting in New York City in July 1863. On July 16, when an officer tried to distribute draft notices in Newport's Fifth Ward, “two dozen women gave him a ‘severe pelting of mud and stones and forced him to withdraw.’” That was the extent of the unrest in Civil War Newport. Local newspapers stressed that “the Irish community should not be blamed for the day's events” (125).In many ways, the Newport Catholic experience in the late 19th century mirrored that found in larger American cities. Women's religious communities arrived to teach and provide spaces for spiritual retreats. A wide array of fraternal organizations was established, from the Father Mathew Total Abstinence Society to the Newport Irish Land League to the Catholic Literary Society. By the summer of 1882, Quinn adds: “the sporting life had taken over the city.” A poignant photograph of young “shackers,” Irish ball boys at a Newport tennis club (decked out in “red sweaters and cocky yachting caps, furnished by their employers, and disreputable trousers and sneakers out of their own wardrobes”) reminds us that Irish Catholics supplied much of the heart and soul in the life of American cities in the late 19th century (157–58).The once-rigid boundaries separating Newport's Protestants and Catholics began to blur late in its heyday as an elite summer colony. Patrick Boyle, a Democratic politician from the city's heavily Irish Fifth Ward, won the first of his 16 one-year terms as mayor in 1895. Boyle and other Irish-American leaders witnessed the emergence of Italian and Portuguese-American communities by the turn of the 20th century. Quinn outlines the experience of those newcomers, but not with the same depth that he affords the Irish, who did not always heartily welcome them. A volume on Newport Catholics in the 20th century would nicely complement John F. Quinn's outstanding study of the city's Catholic history from colonial times through the Gilded Age.

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