Chapter 10: The Role of Cleveland Bishops in Shaping the Ethnicity of Cleveland’s Irish

As we have already observed, both Bishop Amadeus Rappe, who presided over the Diocese from 1847 to 1870, and Bishop Richard Gilmour, who was bishop here from 1872 until 1891, were relatively strong Americanizers. They dealt with the Irish ethnicity in Cleveland with severity. They allowed exceptions, already mentioned, to their policy, but for the most part they wanted their Irish people to become part of the American mainstream as soon as possible.

Bishop Ignatius Horstmann

This was not quite the policy of Bishop Ignatius Horstmann who was Bishop of Cleveland from 1892 until 1908. He saw his diocese rife with nationalism, mostly rooted in a genuine hostility between the children of the Irish immigrants and the children of the German immigrants. Horstmann too professed to be an Americanizer. Although he himself had been born in Germany, he came to this country as a very young boy with his parents who settled in Philadelphia. Horstmann did his studies for the priesthood at the Urban College of the Propaganda in Rome, and returned to work in the Philadelphia archdiocese as a curate, pastor, seminary professor and chancellor from 1863 until his appointment to Cleveland in 1892. He was profoundly influenced by the transcultural experience that was his at the Urban College where students from all over the world were educated in an environment that bore no resemblance at all to the provincialism of the seminaries in Ireland, Germany or in the United States which trained most of the American priests of his day. At the Urban College, a young seminarian was taught the following:

1) He was told to regard himself as a missionary in his own country. He was to respect the culture of his country which he was urged to study thoroughly.

2) He was to seek to adopt the teaching of the Catholic Church to the culture of his country, assimilate its good insights and incorporate this culture into the discipline of the Church as it was to be lived in the missionary environment.

3) At the same time, the Urban College exposed the seminarian to the diversity of the cultures of other churches within the world-wide influence of Roman Catholicism. He learned that differences of culture led to differences of style, especially in the liturgy, without doing any violence to the doctrine of Catholicism. Thus, for example, the alumnus of the Urban College knew that a Mass celebrated by Coptics in Aramaic was just as valid as a Mass celebrated in Latin by the Pope in Rome or by an isolated priest in rural or urban America.

4) An alumnus of the Urban College in Rome was also taught that when he returned to America he was to treat the cultures of all the different nationalities with an equal respect. He had no desire to destroy either the language or culture of any national group in order to make that group something it had not yet become, in this case, American.

5) This approach, extremely sophisticated for its own time, was bound to be misunderstood by any immigrant group who might seek to impose its culture or language on any other diverse though Catholic immigrant group. Hence, the alumnus of the Urban College was rarely understood by priests who had a monolithic or narrowly ultra-national seminary training of their own. And if the Urban College alumnus brought these views to the Episcopacy, especially in a diocese like Cleveland, one could predict that he might well alienate many of his people. The irony of this situation became compounded if the Urban College alumnus bishop found himself unable to convince either the pastors or people of his parishes that, in fact, he favored that all should become American in time. He did not want to rush into an Americanism that had not yet become culturally mature.

This was basically the thrust of the episcopate of Bishop Horstmann. He allowed that the Irish were moving more quickly toward some sort of American Catholic culture in their parishes but he would not force the Germans to join them. He made extraordinary efforts to care for the countless other immigrant groups from middle and eastern Europe, often making genuine efforts to obtain for these recently arrived immigrants priests from Europe to come here to take charge of their needs. For the most part, he succeeded in doing so. But once these parishes were begun, they antagonized the Irish or territorial pastors. For their part, the Irish claimed that the new immigrants were frequently lawless, that they formed all but schismatic churches in that they did not follow diocesan rules, especially with regard to the observation of parish boundaries. One need hardly note that these same criticisms might have been leveled against the Irish themselves when they arrived in Cleveland forty years earlier. But at the same time, as we have observed earlier, the rush toward upward mobility by the Irish in the second half of the last century appears to have cost them a real loss of their historical roots. Maybe they wanted it that way. But if some Irish narrowly condemned the immigrants who came after them, they must stand before the tribunal of history as being intolerant of the very same hardships of immigration they themselves had endured. The fact that the Irish had overcome these hardships by sheer determination did not make them more understanding. Their fear of falling back into the poverty of the Famine times seems to have often cost the Irish their great natural gift of compassion.

There were exceptions. In 1886 when a parish was begun for the Italians at East 13th and Central, called St. Anthony, it was the pastor and the people of the Cathedral Parish that supported the venture financially and taught Sunday School there. They made the terrible mistake, however, of trying to turn Italian immigrants into Americans in one generation. They failed, of course, and the Italian culture preserved in Murray Hill today is a monument to that failure.

Bishop John Farrelly

Bishop John P. Farrelly succeeded Bishop Horstmann in 1909. He was also a Propaganda alumnus and had the same View of transculturalism as did his predecessor. But he did not pursue it in the same way as Horstmann did. Farrelly wanted the new parishes he had begun in the developing suburbs around the core city to be truly American — that is to say, territorial parishes. In spite of the fact that immigration statistics indicate that more than half of the Catholic immigrants to this country came here after 1900, these newly arriving people in the Cleveland area received scant attention from Bishop Farrelly. But like his predecessor Bishop Horstmann, Bishop Farrelly did continue to encourage the national parishes which had already been begun. He focused his attention primarily on the upwardly mobile children of the immigrants of the nineteenth century and carried on the work of acculturation which had already begun especially in the Irish and German communities.

It was during his episcopate that the First World War occurred, however, and much of his sensitivity with regard to the incoming European Catholics was dulled by the superpatriotic fervor which swept the country during the war. This was especially true after the United States declared war on the Central Powers, Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. For peoples from these countries to seek to preserve their ethnicity was especially difficult during the war. Perhaps the Germans suffered the most. In their churches the German language sermons and devotions were done away with, so much so that today there is precious little preserved of the German culture in the older German parishes. It was crucial to Bishop Farrelly that the Catholics of Cleveland be seen as loyal Americans. He therefore urged, although he did not order, German pastors to preach in English. He urged the use of English in the German schools with no consideration for the values in culture that the preservation of German might have represented. Strangely enough, the German pastors went along with this violence done to their culture, although they continued to lead private devotions and hear confessions in German to accommodate the needs of their people.

For his part, Bishop Farrelly really never perceived this to be a problem. He himself came from Nashville, Tennessee, where there were only Catholics and Protestants. Nationality in Tennessee made little difference. Only religious affiliation made a difference. Farrelly lacked therefore any real sense of sympathy for the cultural needs of his newly arrived people and this lack of sympathy was accented by the partisan feelings generated in this country by the war.

When the war ended and the Central Powers were subjected to a stern and divisive peace which, in some cases, totally wiped out old and proud cultures (as was the case in Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia), Bishop Farrelly reflected no difference of opinion from the decisions of the men who formulated the Treaty of Versailles. So he gave little recognition to the Croatians, Slovenians, Slovaks and countless other peoples who had come to the United States and who found themselves without a homeland with which to identify in Europe. The result of all of this seems to have caused these peoples to see in Bishop Farrelly’s failure to protest the policies of President Wilson as a calculated indifference which forced non-English speaking peoples into the territorial parishes, composed mostly of second and third generation Irish and Germans. These new Americans could do little about this situation other than to protest and to try to keep their parishes together, hoping for a more understanding bishop.

Bishop Joseph Schrembs

Bishop Farrelly died suddenly in Knoxville, Tennessee, in February of 1921. The non-English speaking Catholics of Cleveland begged Rome to send as new bishop to the Diocese of Cleveland one who would give greater care to the preservation of their cultures and who would have a familiarity with the history of their various countries of origin. Rome, it would seem, responded at least in part to this plea and appointed to the vacant diocese Bishop Joseph Schrembs. His arrival in Cleveland on September 8, 1921, gave him occasion to verbalize what would be his policy in dealing with the continuing immigration to Cleveland from the war-torn countries of Europe. Schrembs, who was himself born in Germany but educated in the United States, urged upon all newcomers to the country and their descendants to adapt to their new environment, become citizens, and get involved in American life.

The immigrant who came to Cleveland after World War I posed a different problem than that which had faced Bishop Schrembs’ predecessors who tried to deal with the nineteenth centuny immigrant. The post World War I immigrant often came to this country and to Cleveland with a profound sense of the social upheaval which followed the war in Europe. This was compounded by the fact we have noted earlier that many of the countries from which these immigrants came no longer existed because of the harsh peace of Versailles, and also because of the Communistic influence coming from the Russian Revolution of October, 1917, which touched directly or indirectly so many people from the countries of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. These new Clevelanders were frequently political exiles. They come to the United States harboring a hope rarely found in the immigrant of the last century. These new arrivals intended to return to their homelands as soon as the political climate was favorable for them to do so. The fact is that very few of them ever did return since the situations they fled have not really changed but have often worsened in the intervening years. Schrembs, who knew Europe well and who was a realist, saw this. But he also wisely saw that the cultures and the languages of these post World War I immigrants could and should be preserved here. And he also saw that the Church was perhaps the most vital force in this effort.

Schrembs had a special fondness for the Germans in America, urging them to recapture their language and culture so abruptly taken from them during the war. In this, one would have to say he failed. The Germans in Cleveland, with few exceptions, had become assimilated into American life and Schrembs founded no new German parishes in Cleveland. None were needed. But he was more successful in helping the Germans in Germany. A great deal of diocesan charity was sent, mostly in the form of money, to that war-ravaged country in the 1920’s.

Irish nationalism was rekindled in the diocese after the war as a result of the creation of the Irish Free State in 1921. In the 1920’s Schrembs gave his support to movements to fund the Irish Free State, although he never sent diocesan money to aid this cause. In failing to do so he alienated many of Cleveland’s Irish. In retrospect, one can easily see the loaic of his reasoning as he held back diocesan funds to support a violent political revolution in Ireland, but at the same time sending diocesan funds to help the needy in Germany. Still, he allowed money to be collected here for Ireland, an event to which history gives scant notice.

The bishop embarked on a different course with other non English speaking peoples in his diocese. He urged the older groups, particularly the Slovaks, to establish strong fraternal societies; he gave special care to the Italians, the Hungarians, the Slovenians, the Serbians, the Ukrainians, and the Lithuanians. He had reason to do so since these were the most recently immigrated peoples in Cleveland. For them the bishop began anew the processes inaugurated by Bishops Gilmour and Horstmann. Bishop Schrembs sincerely urged the establishment of the national parish once again to preserve the faith, language and culture of the new immigrants. At the same time, he continued to provide for these parishes pastors of the language and nationality of the congregation. But the bishop went one step further than his predecessors. He was very much aware of the necessity of welcoming the new immigrants to the diocese and of helping them find jobs and housing. To this purpose he established as an adjunct of the Catholic Charities the Catholic Immigrants’ Relief Service, an agency of high professionalism which continues to function today and which has offered the resources of the Cleveland Church to thousands of immigrants who have come to this country since 1924.

It was Bishop Schrembs who applied the basic concept of the national parish to the black Catholics who were beginning to arrive in large numbers on Cleveland’s East Side. For them, at their request, he established in 1922 the parish of Our Lady of the Blessed Sacrament on East 79th Street near Quincy Avenue. This parish implied the concept of segregation and its very existence caused great controversy. Bishop Schrembs’ reasoning was consistent with his policy regarding the national parishes but it was not, it would seem, clearly thought through. He felt that black Catholics, like any other newly arrived cultural minority in Cleveland, needed time, perhaps one generation, before they might integrate with the territorial parishes within whose boundaries they were living. These territorial parishes, as we have already noted, were predominantly composed of upwardly mobile second generation Irish and German.

There was one difference between the black parish and the national parish and it was a crucial one. In the national parish the clergy and people were committed to the preservation of a European language and culture. This was done well within the context of faith. But in the black parish there were no black clergy; none could be found. As a consequence, white clergy, more often than not of Irish or German background, volunteered to work in the black parishes. But in doing so they learned nothing of black culture and incorporated none of the black culture into the liturgy. To them this culture must have seemed either too Protestant or too childlike. In any case, black culture was neither taken seriously nor was it absorbed. As a result the black parish, begun as a national parish, assumed the worship form of the Irish territorial parish. The blacks heard sermons in English and Mass in Latin. Nobody seemed to take black culture seriously. Not until 1961 was black music integrated into Catholic liturgy, but by that time there was nobody in the parishes to profit from it except black people. The whites had all fled to the suburbs. They missed some exciting liturgy and a real opportunity for exposure to another culture.

Such then was Bishop Schrembs’ legacy to ethnicity of all forms in Cleveland; it was full of ambiguities which reflected the chaotic times of his episcopate.

Bishop Edward Hoban

Schrembs’ successor as Bishop of Cleveland was Edward F. Hoban. One would have to classify him as a modern Americanizer formed and directed by his mentor in Chicago, Cardinal George Mundelein. Bishop Hoban came to Cleveland from Rockford Illinois, in 1943. He had been bishop in Rockford since 1928, but his roots were in Chicago where he was ordained in 1903. He quickly captured the attention of Mundelein who made him his auxiliary bishop in 1921. Mundelein’s policy in Chicago was much like that of Horstmann in Cleveland. Mundelein was a Propaganda student in Rome, recognized the value of all cultures and yet he wished ardently to make his priests thoroughly Americanist regardless of their ethnic background. But at the same time he attached great worth to the uniqueness of every nationality and appointed men from every ethnic group in Chicago to positions of responsibility in his administration. Bishop Hoban learned to respect these men with whom he worked closely and seemed blind to any nationalism in the Church. He brought this fresh vision to Cleveland at a time when he was already sixty-five years old.

When Edward Hoban was installed at St. John Cathedral as Bishop Of Cleveland on January 21, 1944, he preached a sermon which utlined clearly the course he would follow with regard to ethnicity. He took for granted that all who knew him also knew he was the son of parents who had immigrated from Ireland. But at the same time, he also made it clear that in his administration he would favor no nationality, including his own. The best men would be appointed to his staff. The old Irish-German feuds were to be forgotten. It was the work of the building up of the Post World War II Church in the Cleveland Diocese that would enlist his concern.

Quickly he named a Pole, Fr. John Krol, who later became Archbishop of Philadelphia, as his chancellor. There then followed a whole series of clerical appointments that recognized that all Americans were equal in law and in the eyes of the new bishop. Nationality had nothing to do with these appointments; the bishop, true to his promise, chose the best men. Bishop Hoban visited Ireland and the birthplace of his parents there when he traveled to Europe and to Rome after the war, but he made it clear that these visits were personal to him. His sense of Irish ethnicity reached no further than his personal life.

As Bishop of Cleveland, Hoban took special interest in those who were displaced by the ravages of the war; he welcomed them to Cleveland and sent priests from his diocese to seek after the people languishing in government-built Displaced Persons camps, urging them to come to Cleveland to resettle. The people came. For them he built a new cluster of national parishes. Still he followed the pattern of his predecessors in urging these new Americans to seek to become American Catholics. To achieve this policy, Bishop Hoban added more staff to the Catholic Resettlement Bureau. This work continues to bear fruit in parishes like St. Vitus for Slovenians and St. Paul’s at East 40th and St. Clair Street for Croatians.

There was one difference in the non-English speaking parishes Bishop Hoban encouraged or founded. They were to build schools, but, although ethnic culture might be urged, there was no question that the language of these schools was to be, in all classes, English. Older people, newly immigrated, could continue their language in prayers, devotions and singing, but their children were to learn English.

Perhaps like no other Cleveland bishop, Edward Hoban grasped the meaning of ethnic culture. He approved and encouraged it. There was, however, no doubt in his mind that the children of these immigrants needed to assimilate with the American culture they were to merge with in the territorial parishes.

To all of this, Cleveland’s Irish people seem to have given monumental support. Ireland had no post-war crisis of poverty for which aid was needed from abroad, hence the Irish gave generously and in the name of Christian charity to the needy of Europe. This was primarily done through the Catholic Charities Bureau.

Bishop Hoban healed what was left of the national strife in the Cleveland Diocese by urging all patriotic Cleveland Catholics to come to the aid of their needy co-religionists in Europe. By the time he died in 1966, one heard very little of nationalities competing with one another. Whatever sense of domination of church affairs the Irish Catholics in Cleveland might have sought earlier in the history of the diocese, it had all but disappeared by the time of Bishop Hoban’s death.

This is not to say, however, as we have noted earlier, that Irish ethnicity had died among the Irish by 1966. It simply had begun to manifest itself in areas other than those closely associated with the Roman Catholic Church with which it had once been so strongly identified and which had so profoundly shaped it. We have already pointed out that in the decade of the 1960’s, the rise of black consciousness gave impetus to a corresponding rise in ethnic consciousness among the other racial and ethnic groups in Cleveland. Loyalty to the Church had produced a special kind of ethnicity among Cleveland’s Irish on the East and West Sides in the immigrant and post-immigrant period. With the end of the immigrant and post-immigrant period, the Church no longer plays the central role it once did in Irish ethnicity. This does not seem to indicate that in the continuing Irish ethnic consciousness in this city the Church no longer plays any part at all. In fact, the contrary seems to be true. The Irish who recall their heritage, and indeed those who do not, retain, it would seem, a loyalty to their church and to their parishes . But new patterns of Irish ethnicity are emerging. Where they will lead we cannot speculate with much hope of accuracy.

What does seem certain is that there are no longer any Irish parishes nor Irish neighborhoods. Thus it must follow that Irish ethnicity will manifest itself In social, familial, cultural and organizational events. Ethnicity, including Irish ethnicity, has often been narrow, arrogant and, even self-serving in Cleveland over the last one hundred years. One would hope that these faults would disappear as ethnicity seeks to lead to some sort of American identity. This American identity has not yet emerged fully. When it does, it hopefully will be built on a respect for the diversity of our cultures and traditions and the preservation of what is of worth in each of them.

Surely such a search for the worth of the Irish heritage is of specific value for the Cleveland Irish. It should be clear that enormous research is necessary to complete this search. And it would seem that this research must be done by the young scholars of today who have barely tapped the reserve of meaning which lies yet to be revealed in the Irish experience of the past in this city. One cannot doubt that this research will be done and that it will, without either arrogance or apology, be made available to all who might inquire in the future about the meaning of the heritage of Cleveland’s Irish.