Timeline of American Catholic History

An Immigrant Church, 1800–1900

Arguably the century of most dramatic change in American Catholicism, the 1800s saw the Church develop from an infant institution claiming the loyalties of a tiny minority of citizens culturally and ethnically like their Protestant countrymen, to a major factor in American life, a vast network of dioceses, schools, and hospitals serving the largest single religious community in the United States, a majority of whom were first- and second-generation immigrants. The tidal wave of Catholic immigration began with the Irish in the 1840s, but by 1900 the European emigration had shifted decisively south and east as Poles, Slovaks, and Italians crowded through the nation's ports of entry. Successsive councils held at Baltimore exhorted parishes to a monumental program of school-building, and religious orders entered the field of higher education with the founding of colleges from west coast to east: Santa Clara, Notre Dame, and Fordham, to name a few. By the end of the century, Catholic lay people were active in every facet of American society: intellectual, artistic, economic, and perhaps most noticeably, political.