Dr. Columbia, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Church

[Lujack]

Sorry for the awful joke in the thread title, but I just thought I’d share with you a reassuring passage from The Columbia Guide to Irish American History that I just read, and that sorts of puts my mind at ease about the future of the Church. I hope it does the same for you.
Columbia Guide to Irish American History:

That is not to say that the Church had as yet achieved this pervasiveness and power in Irish America during the famine years. It was, in fact, a ramshackle organization in the 1840’s in most cities, plagued by massive numbers of impoverished lay men and women who left Ireland with little knowledge of their faith and consisting of a motley band of often undisciplined clergy. As Jay Dolan has pointed out, it seems likely that no more than 40% of the Irish Catholic immigrants attended church regularly in New York City during the 1840’s and 1850’s. In some cities like Boston and Worcester, new Irish immigrants brawled openly with priest in the 1840’s. Getting proper priests was also a constant problem, as America attracted renegade or malcontented clerics. As late as 1865…parishes of 20,000 or even 30,000 were not unknown. Nevertheless, the Church slowly managed to get control…

The Devotional Revolution or Catholic Revival sweeping Europe and Ireland in the middle of the century also caught fire in America, transforming immigrant faith from a chaotic blend of scattered doctrine, magic, and encrusted traditions born in peasant life to a disciplined institutionalized religious life of regular Mass attendance, frequent devotions, and respect for clergy. Only slowly would the Church establish its primacy, but it would survive the difficult period of crisis and had laid a foundation for future development by the end of the famine era.

In other words, the Church has always had trouble in one area or another, and rebounded stronger than ever. Think about how strongly Catholic the Irish became by the 1870’s, from the low point of the 1840’s, with mostly castoff priests, in a country that had little to no Catholic identity to that point.

It put my mind at ease, at least.