I
I may not have understood at the time, but I must have been vaguely
conscious that if so often I felt myself a stranger in my native town,
it was not only because of the long years I had been shut up in
boarding-school, but because that boarding-school happened to be a
Convent.
There were schools in Philadelphia and schools out of it as useful as
Rittenhouse Square in laying the foundation for profitable friendships.
Miss Irwin's furnished almost as good social credentials as a Colonial
Governor in the family. But a Philadelphia Convent did the other thing
as successfully. It was not the Convent as a Convent that was objected
to. In Paris, it could lend distinction: the fact that, at the mature
age of six, I spent a year at Conflans, might have served me as a social
asset. In Louisiana, or Maryland, a Philadelphia girl could see its door
close upon her, and not despair of social salvation. Everything depended
upon where the Convent was. In some places, it had a social standing, in
others it had none, and Philadelphia was one of the others. In France,
in Louisiana, in Maryland, to be a Catholic was to be at the top of the
social scale, approved by society; in Pennsylvania, it was to be at the
bottom, despised by society.
This was another Philadelphia fact I accepted on faith. It was not until
I began to think about Philadelphia that I saw how consistent
Philadelphians were in their inconsistency. Their position in the matter
was what their past had made it, and the inconsistency is in their
greater liberality to-day. For Pennsylvania has never been Catholic, has
never had an aristocratic Catholic tradition like England: to the
Friends there, all the aristocracy of the traditional kind belongs. The
people--the World's People--who rushed to Pennsylvania to secure for
themselves the religious liberty William Penn offered indiscriminately
to everybody, found they could not enjoy it if Catholics were to profit
by it with them. They had not been there any time when, as one of the
early Friends had the wit to see and to say, they "were surfeited with
liberty," and the Friends, who refused to all sects alike the privilege
of expressing their religious fervour in wood piles for witches and
prison cells for heretics, could not succeed in depriving them of their
healthy religious prejudice which, they might not have been able to
explain why, concentrated itself upon the Catholic. Episcopalians
approved of a doctrine of freedom that meant they could build their own
churches where they would. Presbyterians and Baptists objected so little
to each other that, for a while, they could share the same pulpit.
Moravians put up their monasteries where it suited them best. Mennonites
took possession of Germantown. German mystics were allowed to search in
peace for the Woman in White and wait hopefully for the Millennium on
the banks of the Wissahickon. Later on Whitefield set the whole town of
Philadelphia to singing psalms, and Philadelphia refrained from
interfering with what must have been an intolerable nuisance. Even Jews
were welcome--their names are among early legislators and on early
Assembly lists. Catholics, alone, they all agreed, had no right to any
portion of Penn's gift, and popular opinion is often stronger than the
law. Whatever ill will they had to spare from the Catholics, they
reserved for the Friends to whom they owed everything--if Pennsylvania
was "a dear Pennsylvania" to Penn, a good part of the blame lay with the
"drunken crew of priests" and the "turbulent churchmen" whom he
denounced in one of those letters to Logan, which are among the saddest
ever written and published to the world.
After religious passions had run their course, the religious prejudice
against the Catholic was handed down as social prejudice, which was all
it was in my day when Philadelphians, who would question the social
standing of a Catholic in Philadelphia simply because he was a Catholic,
could accept him without question in the Catholic town of Baltimore or
New Orleans simply because he was one. The Catholic continued to pay a
heavy price socially for his religion in Philadelphia where it was not
the thing to be a Catholic, where it never had been the thing, where it
got to be less the thing as successive Irish emigrations crowded the
Catholic churches. I fancy at the period of which I am writing
Philadelphians, if asked, would have said that Catholicism was for
Irish servants--for the illiterate. I remember a book called _Kate
Vincent_ I used to read at a Protestant Uncle's, where it may purposely
have been placed in my way. Does anybody else remember it?--a story of
school life with a heroine of a school girl who, in the serene
confidence of her sixteen or seventeen summers, refuted all the learned
Doctors of the Church by convicting a poor little Irish slavey of
ignorance for praying to the Blessed Virgin and the Saints. I think I
must have forgotten it with many foolish books for children read in my
childhood had not Kate Vincent been so like Philadelphians in her calm
superiority, though, fortunately, Philadelphians did not share her
proselytising fervour. They went to the other extreme of lofty
indifference and for them the Catholic churches in their town did not
exist any more than the streets of little two-story houses south of
Pine, a region into which they would not have thought of penetrating
except to look up somebody who worked for them.
II
I might have learned as much during my holidays at my Grandfather's had
I been given to reflection during my early years. My Father was a
convert with the convert's proverbial ardour. He had been baptised in
the Convent chapel with my Sister and myself--I was eight years old at
the time--and many who were present declared it the most touching
ceremony they had ever seen. However, to the family, who had not seen
it, it was anything but touching. They were all good members of the
Episcopal Church and had been since they landed in Virginia; moreover,
one of my Father's brothers was an Episcopal clergyman and Head Master
of the Episcopal Academy, Philadelphia's bed-rock of religious
respectability. The baptism was only conditional, for the Catholic
Church baptizes conditionally those who have been baptized in any church
before, but even so it must have been trying to them as a precaution
insolently superfluous. I do not remember that anything was ever said,
or suggested, or hinted. But there was an undercurrent of disapproval
that, child as I was, I felt, though I could not have put it into words.
One thing plain was that when we children went off to our church with my
Father, we were going where nobody else in my Grandfather's house went,
except the servants, and that, for some incomprehensible reason, it was
rather an odd sort of thing for us to do, making us different from most
people we knew in Philadelphia.
[Illustration: THE PULPIT, ST. PETER'S]
Nor had I the chance to lose sight of this difference at the Convent.
The education I was getting there, when not devoted to launching my soul
into Paradise, was preparing me for the struggle against the temptations
of the world which, from all I heard about it, I pictured as a horrible
gulf of evil yawning at the Convent gate, ready to swallow me up the
minute that gate shut behind me. To face it was an ordeal so alarming in
anticipation that there was an interval when I convinced myself it would
be infinitely safer, by becoming a nun, not to face it at all. If I
stopped to give the world a name, it was bound to be Philadelphia, the
place in which I was destined to live upon leaving the Convent. I knew
that it was Protestant, as we often prayed for the conversion of its
people, I the harder because they included my relations who if not
converted could, my catechism taught me, be saved only so as by the
invincible ignorance with which I hardly felt it polite to credit them.
To what other conclusion could I come, arguing logically, than that
Philadelphia was the horrible gulf of evil yawning for me, and that in
this gulf Protestants swarmed, scattering temptation along the path of
the Catholic who walked alone among them?--an idea of Philadelphia that
probably would have surprised nobody more than the nuns who were
training me for my life of struggle in it.
The gulf of the world did not seem so evil once it swallowed me up, but
that socially the Catholic walked in it alone, there could be no
mistake. When eventually I left school and began going out on my modest
scale, I could not fail to see that the people I met in church were not,
as a rule, the people I met at the Dancing Class, or at parties, or at
receptions, or on that abominable round of morning calls, and this was
the more surprising because Philadelphians of the "Chestnut, Walnut,
Spruce and Pine" set were accustomed to meeting each other wherever they
went. Except for the small group of those Philadelphia families of
French descent with French names who were not descendants of the
Huguenots, and here and there a convert like my Father, and an
occasional native Philadelphian who, unaccountably, had always been a
Catholic, the congregation, whether I went to the Cathedral or St.
John's, to St. Joseph's or St. Patrick's, was chiefly Irish, as also
were the priests when they were not Italians.
Fashion sent the Philadelphian to the Episcopal Church. It could not
have been otherwise in a town as true to tradition as Philadelphia had
not ceased to be in my young days. No sooner had Episcopalians settled
in Philadelphia than, by their greater grandeur of dress and manner,
they showed the greater social aspirations they had brought with them
from the other side--the Englishman's confidence in the social
superiority of the Church of England to all religion outside of it.
Presbyterians are said to have had a pretty fancy in matters of wigs and
powdered and frizzled hair, which may also have been symbolic, for they
followed a close fashionable second. Baptists and Methodists, on the
contrary, affected to despise dress and, while I cannot say if the one
fact has anything to do with the other, I knew fewer Baptists and
Methodists than Catholics. By my time the belief that no one could be "a
gentleman" outside the Church of England, or its American offshoot, was
stronger than ever, and fashion required a pew at St. Mark's or Holy
Trinity or St. James's, if ancient lineage did not claim one at St.
Peter's or Christ Church; though old-fashioned people like my
Grandfather and Grandmother might cling blamelessly to St. Andrew's
which was highly respectable, if not fashionable, and new-fashioned
people might brave criticism with the Ritualists at St. Clement's. As
for Catholics, a pew down at St. Joseph's in Willing's Alley or, worse
still, up town at the Cathedral in Logan Square, put them out of the
reckoning, at a hopeless disadvantage socially, however better off they
might be for it spiritually. That the Cathedral was in Logan Square was
in itself a social offence of a kind that society could not tolerate. At
the correct churches every function, every meeting, every Sunday-school,
every pious re-union, as well as every service, became a fashionable
duty; and at the church door after service on Sunday, a man with whom
one had danced the night before might be picked up to walk on Walnut
Street with, which was a social observance only less indispensable than
attendance at the Assembly and the Dancing Class.
[Illustration: THE CATHEDRAL, LOGAN SQUARE]
I recall the excitement of girls of my age, their feeling that they had
got to the top of everything, the first time they took this sacramental
walk, if not with a man which was the crowning glory, at least with a
woman who was prominent, or successful, in society. But I believe I
could count the times I joined in the Walnut Street procession on Sunday
morning. As long as I lived in Third Street, my usual choice of a church
lay between St. Joseph's, the Jesuit church in Willing's Alley with its
air of retirement, and St. Mary's on Fourth Street, where the orphans
used to come from Seventh and Spruce and sometimes sing an anthem that,
for any save musical reasons, I delighted in, and where we had a pew.
After we moved from Third Street, our pew was at the Cathedral, more
distinguished from the clerical standpoint, for there we sat under the
Bishop. No matter which our church, High Mass was long: I could not have
got to the appointed part of Walnut Street in time, had I found at the
door the companion to go there with me. There was nothing to do but to
walk home alone or sedately at my Father's side, and one's Father,
however correct he might be under other circumstances, was not the right
person for these occasions. On Sundays I could not conceal from myself
that I was socially at a discount. The reflection that this was where I,
as a Catholic, scored, should have consoled me, for if the Episcopalian
was performing a social duty when he went to church, I, as a Catholic,
was making a social sacrifice, and sacrifice of some sort is of the
essence of religion.
III
If I could but have taken the trouble to be interested, it must also
have occurred to me to wonder why St. Joseph's, where I went so often,
was hidden in an obscure alley. In Philadelphia, the town of straight
streets crossing each other at right angles, it is not easy for a
building of the kind to keep out of sight. But not one man in a hundred,
not one in a thousand, who, passing along Third Street, looked up
Willing's Alley, dreamt for a minute that somewhere in that alley,
embedded in a network of brokers' and railroad offices, carefully
concealing every trace of itself, was a church with a large
congregation. Most churches in Philadelphia, as everywhere, like to
display themselves prominently with an elaborate facade, or a lofty
steeple, or a green enclosure, or a graveyard full of monuments. St.
Peter's, close by, fills a whole block. Christ Church stands flush with
the pavement. The simplest Meeting-House, by the beautiful trees that
overshadow it or the high walls that enclose it or the bit of green at
its door, will not let the passer-by forget it. But St. Joseph's,
evidently, did not want to be seen, did not want to be remembered;
evidently hesitated to show that its doors were wide and hospitably open
to all the world in the beautiful fashion of the Catholic Church. There
was something furtive about it, an air of mystery, it was almost as if
one were keeping a clandestine appointment with religion when one turned
from the street into the humble alley, and from the alley into the
silence of the sanctuary.
[Illustration: CHRIST CHURCH, FROM SECOND STREET]
Perhaps I thought less about this mysterious aloofness because, once in
the church, I felt so much at home. I do not mind owning now, though I
would not have owned it then for a good deal, that after my return from
the Convent, I had the uncomfortable feeling of being a stranger not
only in my town, but in my family. I had been in the Convent eleven
years and until this day when I look back to my childhood, it is the
Convent I remember as home. St. Joseph's seemed a part of the Convent,
therefore of home, that had strayed into the town by mistake. In some
ways it was not like the Convent, greatly to my discomfort. The chapel
there was dainty in detail, exquisitely kept, the altars fresh with
flowers from the Convent garden, and for congregation the nuns and the
girls modestly and demurely veiled. But nothing was dainty about St.
Joseph's,--men are as untidy in running a church as in keeping a
house--it was not well kept, the flowers were artificial and tawdry, and
the congregation was largely made up of shabby old Irishwomen. The
priests--Jesuits--were mostly Italian, with those unpleasant habits of
Italian priests that are a shock to the convent-bred American when she
first goes to Italy. They had, however, the virtue of old friends, their
faces were familiar, I had known them for years at the Convent which
they had frequently visited and where, by special grace, they had
refrained from some of the unpleasant habits that offended me at St.
Joseph's.
There was Father de Maria, tall, thin, with a wonderful shock of white
hair, a fine ascetic face and a kindly smile, not adapted to shine in
children's society--too much of a scholar I fancied though I may have
been wrong--and with an effect of severity which I do not think he
meant, but which had kept me at a safe distance when he came to see us
at Torresdale. But he had come, I could not remember the time when I had
not known him, and that was in his favour.
There was Father Ardea, a small, shrinking, dark man, from whom also it
was more comfortable to keep at a safe distance, so little had he to
say and such a trick of looking at you with an "Eh? Eh?" of expectation,
as if he relied upon you to supply the talk he had not at his own
command. But I could have forgiven him worse, so pleasant a duty did he
make of confession. His penances were light and his only comment was
"Eh? Eh? my child? But you didn't mean it! You didn't mean it!" until I
longed to accuse myself of the Seven Deadly Sins with the Unpardonable
Sin thrown in, just to see if he would still assure me that I didn't
mean it.
There was Father Bobbelin--our corruption I fancy of Barbelin--a
Frenchman, short and fat, sandy-haired, with a round smiling face: the
most welcome of all. He was always very snuffy, and always ready to hand
round his snuff-box if talk languished when he went out to walk with us,
which I liked better than Father Ardea's embarrassing "Eh? Eh?" It was
to Father Bobbelin an inexhaustible joke, and the only other I knew him
to venture upon resulted in so unheard-of a breach of discipline that
ever after we saw less of him and his snuff-box. He was walking with us
down Mulberry Avenue one afternoon, the little girls clustered about him
as they were always sure to be, and the nun in charge a little behind
with the bigger, more sedate girls. When we got to the end of the
Avenue, the carriage gate leading straight out into the World was open
as it had never been before, as it never was again. Father Bobbelin's
fat shoulders shook with laughter. He opened the gate wider. "Now,
children," he said, "here's your chance. Run for it!" And we did, we ran
as if for our lives, though no children could have loved their school
better or wanted less to get away from it. One or two ran as far as the
railroad, the most adventurous crossed it, and were making full tilt for
the river before all were caught and brought back and sent to bed in
disgrace. After that Father Bobbelin visited us only in our class-room.
And there were other priests whose names escape me, but not their
home-like faces. Now and then Jesuits who gave Missions and who had
conducted the retreats at the Convent, appeared at St. Joseph's,--Father
Smarius, the huge Dutchman, so enormous they used to tell us at the
Convent that he had never seen his feet for twenty years, who had
baptized my Father and his family in the Convent chapel; and Father
Boudreau, the silent, shy little Louisianian, whom I remember so well
coming with Father Smarius one June day to bless, and sprinkle Holy
Water over that big yellow and white house close to the Convent which my
Father had taken for the summer; and Father Glackmeyer, and Father
Coghlan, and with them others whose presence helped the more to fill St.
Joseph's with the intimate convent atmosphere.
IV
These old friends and old associations took away from the uneasiness it
might otherwise have given me to find the church, for which I had
exchanged the Convent chapel, hidden up an alley as if its existence
were a sin. But overlook it as I might, this was the one important fact
about St. Joseph's which, otherwise, had no particular interest. It did
not count as architecture, it boasted of no beauty of decoration: an
inconspicuous, commonplace building from every point of view, of which I
consequently retain but the vaguest memory. As I write, I can see, as if
it were before me, the Convent chapel, its every nook and corner, almost
its every stone, this altar here, that picture there, the confessional
in the screened-off space where visitors sat, the dark step close to the
altar railing where I carried my wrongs and my sorrows. But try as I
may, I cannot see St. Joseph's as it was, cannot see any detail, nothing
save the general shabbiness and untidiness that shocked my convent-bred
eyes. Could it have appealed by its beauty, like the old Cathedrals of
Europe, or, for that matter, like the old churches of Philadelphia, no
doubt I should be able to recall it as vividly as the Convent chapel.
Because I cannot, because it impressed me so superficially, I regret the
more that I had not the sense to appreciate the interest it borrowed
from the romance of history and the beauty of suffering--the history of
the Catholic religion in Philadelphia which I might have read in this
careful hiding of its temple; the suffering of the scapegoat among
churches, obliged to keep out of sight, atoning for their intolerance in
a desert of secrecy, letting no man know where its prayers were said or
its services held. Catholics had to practise their religion like
criminals skulking from the law. Members of a Protestant church might
dispute among themselves to the point of blows, but they never thought
of interfering with the members of any other church, except the
Catholic, against which they could all cheerfully join. There were times
when the Friends, most tolerant of men, were influenced by this general
hostility, and I rather think the worst moment in Penn's life was when
he was forced to protest against the scandal of the Mass in his town of
Brotherly Love.
[Illustration: FIRST PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH, SEVENTH STREET AND WASHINGTON
SQUARE]
The marvel is that Catholics ventured out of their hiding-places as soon
as they did. They had emerged so successfully by Revolutionary times
that the stranger in Philadelphia could find his way to "the Romish
chapel" and enjoy the luxury of knowing that he was not as these poor
wretches who fingered their beads and chanted Latin not a word of which
they understood. The Jesuits have the wisdom of their reputation. When
they built their church the Colonies had for some years been the United
States, and hatred was less outspoken, and persecution was more
intermittent, but they believed discretion to be the better part of
valour and the truest security in not challenging attack. That is why
they built St. Joseph's in Willing's Alley where the visitor with a
dramatic sense must be as thrilled by it as by the secret chapels and
underground passages in old Elizabethan mansions and Scott's novels.
Philadelphia gave the Jesuits a proof of their wisdom when, within a
quarter of a century, Young America, in a playful moment, burnt down as
much as it could of St. Michael's and St. Augustine's; churches which
had been built bravely and hopefully in open places. Young America
believed in a healthy reminder to Catholics, that, if they had not been
disturbed for some time, it was not because they did not deserve to be.
Philadelphia had got beyond the exciting stage of intolerance before I
was born. There were no delicious tremors to be had when I heard Mass at
St. Joseph's or went to Vespers at St. Mary's. There was no ear alert
for a warning of the approach of the enemy, no eye strained for the
first wisp of smoke or burst of flame. With churches and convents
everywhere--convents intruding even upon Walnut Street and Rittenhouse
Square--with a big Cathedral in town and a big Seminary at Villanova,
Catholics were in a fair way to forget it had ever been as dangerous for
them as for the early Christians to venture from their catacombs. Their
religion had become a tame affair, holding out no prospect of the
martyr's crown. Only the social prejudice survived, but it was the more
bitter to fight because, whether the end was victory or defeat, it
appeared so inglorious a struggle to be engaged in.
One good result there was of this social ostracism. I leave myself out
of the argument. Religion, I have often heard it said, is a matter of
temperament. As this story of my relations to Philadelphia seems to be
resolving itself into a general confession, I must at least confess my
certainty that I have not and never had the necessary temperament,
that, moreover, the necessary temperament is not to be had by any effort
of will power, depending rather upon "the influence of the unknown
powers." But I am not totally blind, nor was I in the old days when,
many as were the things I did not see, my eyes were still open to the
effect of social opposition on Catholics with the temperament. It made
them more devout, at times more defiant. I know churches that are in
themselves alone a reward for faith and fidelity--who would not be a
Catholic in the dim religious light of Chartres Cathedral, or in the
sombre splendours of Seville and Barcelona? But St. Joseph's and St.
Mary's, St. Patrick's and St. John's gave no such reward, nor did the
Cathedral in its far-away imitation of the Jesuit churches of Italy and
France. In these arid, unemotional interiors, emotion could not kindle
piety which, if not fed by more spiritual stuff, was bound to flicker
and go out. This is why the Philadelphian who, in those unattractive
churches and in spite of the social price paid, remained faithful, was
the most devout Catholic I have ever met at home or in my wanderings.
V
For his spiritual welfare, it might have been better had the conditions
remained as I knew them. But even at that period, the signs of weakening
in the social barrier must have jumped to my eyes had I had eyes for the
fine shades. Catholics among themselves had begun to put up social
barriers, so much further had Philadelphia travelled on the road to
liberty.
Religiously, one of their churches was as good as another, but not
socially. St. Mark's, from its superior Episcopal heights, might look
down equally upon St. Patrick's and St. John's, but the Catholic with a
pew at St. John's did not at all look upon the Catholic with a seat at
St. Patrick's as on the same social level as himself. St. Patrick's name
alone was sufficient to attract an Irish congregation, and the Irish who
then flocked to Philadelphia were not the flower of Ireland's
aristocracy. St. John's, by some unnamed right, claimed the Catholics of
social pretensions--the excellence of its music may have strengthened
its claim. I know that my Father, who was a religious man, did not
object to having the comfort of religion strengthened by the charms of
Gounod's Mass well sung, and, at the last, he drifted from the Cathedral
to St. John's.
[Illustration: OLD SWEDES' CHURCH]
The Cathedral necessarily was above such distinctions, as a Cathedral
should be, and it harboured an overflow from St. Patrick's and St.
John's both. But it was the Cathedral, rather than St. John's, that did
most to weaken the foundations of the social prejudice against the
Catholic. The Bishop there was Bishop Wood, and Bishop Wood, like my
Father a convert, was no Irish emigrant, no Italian missionary, but came
from the same old family of Philadelphia Friends as J. Some people
think that Quakerism and Catholicism are more in sympathy with each
other than with other creeds because neither recognizes any half way,
each going to a logical extreme. Whether Bishop Wood thought so, I am
far from sure, but he had himself gone from one extreme to the other
when he became a Catholic, and the religious step had its social
bearing. With his splendid presence and splendid voice, he must have
added dignity to every service at the Cathedral, but he did more than
that: in Philadelphia eyes he gave it the sanction of Philadelphia
respectability. The Catholic was no longer quite without Philadelphia's
social pale.
I had no opportunity, because of my long absence, to watch the gradual
breakdown, but I saw that the barrier had fallen when I got back to
Philadelphia. Never again will Philadelphia children think they are
doing an odd thing when they go to Mass, never again need the
Philadelphia girl fresh from the Convent fancy herself alone in the
yawning gulf of evil that opens at the Convent gate. I should not be
surprised if an eligible man from the Dancing Class or Assembly list can
to-day be picked up at the door of more than one Catholic church for the
Sunday Walk on Walnut Street. St. John's has risen, new and resplendent,
if ugly, from its ashes; St. Patrick's has blossomed forth from its
architectural insignificance into an imposing Romanesque structure. The
Cathedral has been new swept and garnished--not so large perhaps as I
once saw it, for I have been to St. Paul's and St. Peter's and many a
Jesuit church in the meanwhile, but more ornate, with altars and
decorations that I knew not, and with Mr. Henry Thouron's design on one
wall as a promise of further beauty to come. The difference confronted
me at every step--and saddened me, though I could not deny that it meant
improvement. But the change, as change, displeased me in a Philadelphia
that ceases to be my Philadelphia when it ceases to preserve its old
standards and prejudices as jealously as its old monuments. For the sake
of the character I loved, I could wish Philadelphia as far as ever from
hope of salvation by anything save its own invincible ignorance.