The Archdiocese is 200 — As the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Boston celebrates its 200th anniversary, we’ll look at who is Catholic, what that means for both parishioners and the church and what it signifies about the power of the church in Massachusetts.
Are you a Catholic church parishoner? Tell us what it means to you.
Listen to the full show:
Plus, in our web specials: From Latin to Cape Verdean Creole, listen to Boston Catholicism’s past, present, and future…
WEB SPECIALS
The Past: Tridentine, reborn:
Last year, Pope Benedict XVI issued a motu proprio, a papal edict regarding the traditional Latin, or Tridentine mass. Priests who wished to perform the Latin mass once needed a bishop’s permission to do so. The 2007 modu proprio loosened that restriction.
The history of the Latin mass is long, and it was only recently pushed to the margins by the modernizing moves made by the Second Vatican Council in the mid-1960s. But now the Latin Mass is back. Though it’s only regularly performed in one Boston church, Mary Immaculate of Lourdes in Newton, the mass itself hasn’t changed.
A Chicago mass from 1941:
And one from 2006:
The Present: Boston’s Polyglot Parishoners
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An Easter lily goes home after a Cape Verdean Creole Mass in Brockton |
The American Catholic church has relied on immigration for its growth, and never more so than today. The Boston Archdiocese says each week, mass is given in more than 20 languages among its 144 communities. Radio Boston visited a number of parishes this week. Click here to see more images.
And listen to excerpts of Mass performed in six different languages around Boston:
Spanish:
Vietnamese:
Cape Verdean Creole:
Polish:
Italian:
Latin:
Now that the ground has thawed let’s go on an archaeological dig. What are some of the latest big local discoveries? What do historical artifacts teach us about our past?
In your informative program, you indicate that the Catholic Church has been called “the church for immigrant.” It was not always so.
In their book “La Storia: Five Centuries of the Italian American Experience,” Jerre Mangione & Ben Morreale point out that “Although it was the policy of the Catholic Church to receive all immigrant Catholics with open arms…, the Italians rarely received this welcome” (p. 328). Some churches, for example, told Italian worshippers that they were not wanted; and Italian children were segregated in some parochial schools.
The failure of the Catholic Church to embrace a significant portion of the early immigrant population reflected an essentially anti-Italian attitude maintained by the predominantly Irish leadership of the Church in America in general and Boston in particular.
Similarly, in “La Merica: Images of Italian Greenhorn Experience,” Michael La Sorte reports that “Irish priests denounced the Italians from the pulpit.” He also notes that besides not finding “a ready welcome in the churches,” Italians “would be segregated and hear themselves referred to as intruders. This attitude extended also to the parochial schools, where Italian children were called ‘spaghetti” by the other students and often subjected to humiliating treatment by the nuns” (p. 149).
Mercifully, the Catholic Church has come a long way since those ignominious days and has shown itself truly capable of important change.