Parish Boundaries Quotes

“This cultural separation of residence from work helps explain the phenomenon noted as early as the 1919 Chicago riot and emphasized later by a wide array of observers—that the same individuals accepting of an African-American presence in the workplace violently resisted neighborhood integration.108 Catholic interracialists constantly encountered this problem.”
― John T. McGreevy, Parish Boundaries: The Catholic Encounter with Race in the Twentieth-Century Urban North

“After commending the district’s ability to produce “leaders in civic, social and political life,” McGarry attributed the disturbances to “professional agitators and saboteurs bent upon creating and furthering racial and religious incidents.”
― John T. McGreevy, Parish Boundaries: The Catholic Encounter with Race in the Twentieth-Century Urban North

“More important, Pius XII released a major encyclical in 1943 endorsing the organic definition of community implicit in Mystical Body theology. Catholic interracialists immediately applied the pope’s words to American race relations. “The stupendous Encyclical Letter of His Holiness on the ‘Mystical Body of Christ’ left me weak and ever so happy,” noted one activist, “For now none who will read it, will be able to justify any kind of prejudice against the Negroes, or Interracial Justice.” Another editorialist observed that “If any one tenet of the Church may be called all-inclusive, it is this doctrine of the Mystical Body. And in its perfected application it has no common ground with racial discrimination of any sort.”
― John T. McGreevy, Parish Boundaries: The Catholic Encounter with Race in the Twentieth-Century Urban North

“All but invisible to the outside world, the debate over the direction of the Federated Colored Catholics remains instructive. Most important, it marks the first significant break in the racialism undergirding so much of American Catholicism in the first part of the twentieth century. Both Thomas Turner and John LaFarge opposed discrimination. The debate was how to end it.”
― John T. McGreevy, Parish Boundaries: The Catholic Encounter with Race in the Twentieth-Century Urban North

“Catholic intellectuals in both Europe and the United States used a strategy similar to that of international socialists, promoting a universalist ideology as a mechanism for disentangling race, nation, and state.”
― John T. McGreevy, Parish Boundaries: The Catholic Encounter with Race in the Twentieth-Century Urban North

“Brooklyn African-American Catholics asked for “the establishment of a church among us, and the defense and propagation of our holy faith within our race.”17 Some Euro-American clerics made parallel arguments. An Omaha pastor argued that “I do not say they are inferior—from man to man all are equal before God—but they feel oppressed, and so they prefer to have a church of their own . . . where they feel themselves on an equality with their fellow worshippers. . . . Have they not the same right to this privilege as Poles, Italians and others?”
― John T. McGreevy, Parish Boundaries: The Catholic Encounter with Race in the Twentieth-Century Urban North

“The researcher also discovered that as soon as a parishioner married a non-Pole (even if the spouse was Catholic) the rule was that “he must move out to a non-Polish Catholic parish.”
― John T. McGreevy, Parish Boundaries: The Catholic Encounter with Race in the Twentieth-Century Urban North

“Indeed, recent writing suggests that episcopal attempts to quash national parishes, schools, and societies only strengthened national identities by creating a sense of shared victimization.”
― John T. McGreevy, Parish Boundaries: The Catholic Encounter with Race in the Twentieth-Century Urban North

“The story is alternately hopeful and discouraging. Parish boundaries in the urban North served to foster communities of the sort admired by contemporary intellectuals at one historical moment, but proved unable to separate “community” from racial mythology at another. Parochial institutions strengthened individuals while occasionally becoming rallying points for bigotry. The extant literature on religion and race sidesteps this complexity.”
― John T. McGreevy, Parish Boundaries: The Catholic Encounter with Race in the Twentieth-Century Urban North

“The same issues illuminate the transformation of American Catholicism. This study emphasizes the period between World War I and the early 1970s, when the Catholic system of parishes and schools first expanded into every section of the northern cities, and then, within the last quarter century, began a retreat from what now seemed institutional hubris.”
― John T. McGreevy, Parish Boundaries: The Catholic Encounter with Race in the Twentieth-Century Urban North

“Racial violence in the North centered on housing and not, for the most part, on access to public space, employment issues, or voting rights. Indeed, through most of the twentieth century, neighborhoods in the northern cities were significantly more segregated (in terms of African-American and “white”) than their southern counterparts.10 The more appropriate question is this: what prevented the extension of an occasionally integrated public culture and industrial workplace into the residential communities of the urban North?11 Answering this question entails exploring how city residents understood the neighborhoods they created. And a central claim of this book is that American Catholics frequently defined their surroundings in religious terms.”
― John T. McGreevy, Parish Boundaries: The Catholic Encounter with Race in the Twentieth-Century Urban North