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Uploaded on: 6/24/2004
Only in America:
Immigrants enrich our communities
By Bob Zyskowski
The Catholic Spirit
Irish-American Rosella Kennelly makes her first Communion in 1921. |
John Ireland, the larger-than-life first archbishop of St. Paul, had a good month back in November 1889.
As one of the leaders among the American bishops in the later part of the 19th century, Archbishop Ireland had the honor of preaching the Sunday homily Nov. 11 at one of the major liturgies in Baltimore during the celebration of the 100th anniversary of the establishment of the church in the United States.
And, since he was back East for that occasion, he took the opportunity a few days later to lobby President Benjamin Harrison for just employment practices in the federal Indian Bureau. In the company of Secretary of State James Blaine and Secretary of the Treasury William Windom, Archbishop Ireland visited for more than an hour with President Harrison.
Ireland’s biographer, Father Marvin R. O’Connell would later write poignantly about that event:
In America even an immigrant boy from County Kilkenny, with not a farthing in his pocket, could grow into a man who walked into the White House by the front door and sat down to confer with the president of the United States himself.
Throughout this special issue, you will find similar stories and anecdotes about people of many nationalities who, having come to Minnesota from distant shores, have planted roots, done great things and thrived here.
Unlike typical rags-to-riches immigrant tales, however, you’ll find that the stories in The Catholic Spirit’s “Heritage” issue have a unique flavor. We hope to have captured on these pages the love of the Catholic faith and the passion with which it has been expressed and put into practice by those from around the globe who have made the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis home over the past 153 years.
The benefit of hindsight allows us to appreciate ever so much more what we in the here-and-now have a tendency to forget: that people who were very different from one another, people from very different cultures and backgrounds, were able to look beyond those differences and work together, grow together, build together and pray together. They built not only a thriving metropolitan area on the northern plains but a strong and vital church that is a leader and an innovator in the church in the United States.
That hindsight — and these stories — are of little value, however, if they only record history.
Our purpose in publishing this “Heritage” issue is to influence the future.
You see, immigrants still come to the Land of 10,000 Lakes.
These newest arrivals may or may not look, talk or pray like you and I, but they seek the same opportunities, the same second chances, that our ancestors sought when they left their homelands. These new immigrants bring with them their faith and their faith traditions, just as our ancestors carried the faith and faith traditions with them 20, 50, 100 or 150 years ago.
One lesson of this “Heritage” issue is that our church and the communities that lie within the boundaries of our archdiocese have been enriched by those who have brought their faith and their culture with them from far-away lands; lesson two is that our church and our communities continue to be enriched by those who speak foreign tongues and worship in ways we are not yet used to.
Archbishop Ireland promoted a unique philosophy about the church he was leading in this new land. He struggled to convince the Vatican that the American church was more than a collection of immigrant churches. Ireland believed that the United States offered a new and tremendously favorable opportunity for Catholics and their church.
Rather than copying the German way of expressing the faith or the Italian way or the French way, this new church in this new land would take the best features of the other churches, and, combined with the American sense of liberty, fairness and the common good, develop something better.
It was the future that inspired John Ireland.
Shunning the opportunity to reminisce about those first 100 years and the key players in early American Catholic history, Minnesota’s archbishop on that November day in 1889 preached one of the magnificent homilies in American Catholic history.
Read just a few of his words that Father O’Connell culled for the biography “John Ireland and the American Catholic Church”:
- “I bid you turn to the future. The past our fathers wrought; the future will be wrought by us.”
- “The duty of the moment is to. . . do the full work that heaven has allotted us.”
- “I love my age. I love its aspirations and its resolves. I revel in its feats of valor, its industries, and its discoveries. . . . I seek no backward voyage across the sea of time; I will ever press forward. I believe that God intends the present to be better than the past, and the future to be better than the present.”
- “Seek out men. Speak to them not in stilted phrase or seventeenth-century sermon style, but in burning words that go to their hearts, as well as to their minds, and in accents that are familiar to their ears.”
- “Seek out social evils, and lead in movements that tend to rectify them. Speak of vested rights, for this is necessary; but speak, too, of vested wrongs, and strive, by word and example, by the enactment and enforcement of good laws, to correct them.”
- “Let there be individual action. Layman need not wait for priest, nor priest for bishop, nor bishop for pope. The timid move in crowds, the brave in single file.”
- “The Catholic Church will preserve as no human power, no human church can preserve, the liberties of the Republic.”
- “We cannot but believe that a singular mission is assigned to America, glorious for itself and beneficent to the whole race, the mission of bringing about a new social and political order, based more than any other upon the common brotherhood of man, and more than any other securing to the multitude of the people social happiness and equality of rights.”
The heritage of Archbishop Ireland, the heritage of our forebearers in faith, call us to fulfill that mission. May the stories that follow inspire each and every one of us.
Bob Zyskowski is associate publisher of The Catholic Spirit.