Review: Thomas J. Shelley's Upper West Side Catholics: Liberal Catholicism in a Conservative Archdiocese: The Church of the Ascension, New York City, 1895-2020
Reviewed by Susie Pak
Thomas J. Shelley has added to his already substantial oeuvre of New York Catholic history with the publication of Upper West Side Catholics: Liberal Catholicism in a Conservative Archdiocese.[1] His deep and broad understanding of New York’s Catholic institutions provides the context for his study of the Church of the Ascension, which was founded in 1895 on the Upper West Side. While his history of Ascension starts from its founding, Shelley’s book offers an extended view of the neighborhood during the 1960s and 1970s, a period when demographic transition overlapped with economic decline and produced immense political conflicts that destabilized New York’s institutions, including the Catholic Church. His story of Ascension is the story of the challenge of a Catholic institution to adapt to a changing racial and demographic landscape that is New York City.
Upper West Side Catholics: Liberal Catholicism in a Conservative Archdiocese: The Church of the Ascension, New York City, 1895-2020
By Thomas J. Shelley
Fordham University Press, 2019
144 pages
Like his text, Greenwich Village Catholics, which is a parish history of St. Joseph’s Church, Shelley was commissioned by Ascension’s pastor, Father Daniel S. Kearney, to write the church’s biography. As the book was also subsidized by an Ascension benefactor for the 125th anniversary, and the investment of the contemporary Ascension community to tell and commemorate their past frames the text. Shelley’s book sets the history of the Church of Ascension within the historiographical tradition established by Jay Dolan’s The Immigrant Church (1975), which inaugurated a vitalization of the social history of the Catholic parish, whose significance to 19th and early-20th century Catholic social identity is now well-documented.[2]
Histories of the Catholic parish are also important because they illustrate the particular challenges of writing institutional histories, starting with how to define their parameters as a historical object. For instance, given that this is a history of a territorial parish, one might assume that its boundaries were defined geographically. But as Shelley tells us (and illustrates through two wonderful maps), the boundaries of Ascension, like those of other Catholic parishes, changed over time. When Ascension was first formed, “primarily for the benefit of the German-speaking Catholics in the neighborhood,” it was resisted by the pastor of another parish. Thus, the founding of the Church of Ascension took place within the backdrop of ethnic Catholic rivalries between and among Irish and German pastors. Later in its history, Ascension found itself on the other side of that debate when the parish of Notre Dame was formed in 1910 and cut into Ascension’s territory. Shelley writes, “In vain [Ascension’s pastor Father Sweeny] used the same contradictory arguments that other pastors had used fifteen years earlier to prevent the establishment of Ascension parish,” including the idea that there were not enough Catholics to form another parish.
The history of Ascension’s parishioners, whose makeup would be another way to define the parish, is also a fluid one. As Catholics moved in and out of the neighborhood and as the number of faithful waxed and waned, Shelley documents the ways in which the parish’s size and makeup changed over time. Though Ascension began as a German-American church, by the Great Depression, the parish was at its peak a largely Irish one with over 9500 members, the great majority whose first language was English. The year the United States entered the Second World War, Shelley writes, “Ascension [parochial] school graduated 124 boys and girls, almost all of whom appear to have been Irish, except for Jesus Ortiz, the lone graduate with a Hispanic name.” By 1945, however, the parish had “a sizeable Spanish-speaking population (100 adults and 150 children).” In 1948, the parish had 50 families from Puerto Rico among 55 Hispanic families. Within 20 years, “more than two-thirds of the 631 students [of the parish school] were now Hispanic; 110 were Caucasian; 90 were African American; and about two dozen were Asian.”
In charting the makeup of the Church of Ascension, the parameters of the parish and that of Shelley’s story thus become defined by change itself, one with an arc that is familiar to other Catholic parishes that survived into the 21st century — a rise, a decline, and then another rise. Shelley tells this story through wonderful details gleaned from the records of the parish and by tracking the changes in the numbers of baptisms, offerings, confessions, times of Masses, attendance, receipt of Holy communion, parish societies, parochial school students, priests, religious, and lay teachers. With regards the Upper West Side, in particular, Shelley argues, “The main cause of the decline of the parish was a local phenomenon, a violent crime wave, fueled by drugs, that affected every individual and institution in the Upper West Side...” According to Shelley, “The story of Ascension parish from the late 1960s to the early 1990s is largely the story of how Ascension survived this calamity by welcoming into its parish community large numbers of Puerto Ricans and later Dominicans, who transformed Ascension from an aging Irish parish into a vibrantly bilingual Hispanic and Anglo parish.” This central narrative in Ascension’s history after the Second Vatican Council or Vatican II (1962-1965) highlights the ways in which its experience as a Catholic parish reflected those of the Catholic Church at large. It was after Vatican II, the first ecumenical council in almost 100 years, that the Catholic Church called on Catholics to turn towards a changing modern world.
External events facing Catholics and New Yorkers loom large in Shelley’s narrative as one question he addresses is the cause of the changes in the ethnic and socioeconomic makeup of Ascension parish. Were the rise and fall and rise of Ascension’s fortunes and makeup due to external causes or were they the result of internal parish decisions? Shelley gives substantial emphasis to exogenous factors, such as urban development, immigration, and secularization. For the late Gilded Age, for example, expressive photos in the text highlight the nascent urban nature of the neighborhood development of the Upper West Side, the growth of the city and transportation networks. From the World War II era into 1990, Shelley chronicles the importance of the Great Puerto Rican Migration. He also considers the backdrop of Catholic power in New York City and the growth of a Catholic middle class as he follows the ethnic, racial, religious, and class makeup of the neighborhood in the late 19th and later the late 20th centuries.
Much of Shelley’s narrative interweaves the stories of four main sets of actors in the history of the parish — the pastors, the parishioners, the neighborhood, and the Catholic Church. One of the most compelling aspects of Shelley’s text is the way in which he uses a combination of statistics and narrative to tell the story of how the changing ethnic makeup of the Ascension parish contrasted with that of the Ascension clergy. Even as the arrival of Puerto Rican and Dominican parishioners saved the parish in the long term, it was not an easy transition. As Shelley writes, an important story of the Church in the post-Vatican II era is that of the growing pains of what was once “a thriving Irish American parish” led and attended by Irish American Catholics. Even the religious, who worked at the Ascension parish school, like the Sisters of Charity, were mostly of Irish background. (When Ascension’s parochial school opened in 1912, it was staffed by Sisters of Charity and Christian Brothers. These ties continued until 1973-74, when both communities withdrew from the parish school.)
The first Spanish-speaking diocesan priest, Father Delaney, arrived in 1956 but left soon after lacking the support of Bishop Joseph P. Donahue, who had been Ascension’s pastor since 1924. Shelley writes that Donahue “resolutely refused to acknowledge the growing Puerto Rican population in the parish and stifled every effort of the more sympathetic and pastorally minded assistant priests to reach out to the Puerto Ricans and welcome them to the parish.” According to Shelley, “Ascension was not the only Upper West Side parish to experience the shockwaves of the transition from an Irish to a Hispanic parish.” In 1972, though a large number of pastors served a growing Latino community through Spanish-language services, he states, “there were only 39 Spanish-speaking pastors and not a single Spanish-speaking cleric in the upper echelons of the administration of the archdiocese.”
After Vatican II, when a study group, “Christianity Ascension,” emerged in 1967 to create an “assessment of the parish and its needs,” it also revealed the differences between the clergy and the parishioners in mid-century. Shelley writes, “Aside from Monsignor Quinn… the search committee offered a scathing indictment of the state of the Catholic Church on the Upper West Side in 1968. They said, ‘It has long enough been immobilized and pastors have been chiefly to blame. Consider any pastor from Holy Trinity to Ascension. Through old age, sickness or lack of knowledge, not a single one offers leadership or the inspiration to tackle the problems we presently face on the [Upper] West Side.’” Four years later, in 1971, Hispanic parishioners created a committee, El Comité de Cristianos pro Justicia that criticized the pastor, Monsignor Wilson, for his “reluctance to employ more priests from Spain and the failure to provide a bilingual parish bulletin.”
Shelley writes, “One of the complaints voiced by El Comité was that the Ascension Church Bulletin was an exclusively English-language publication except for the Mass schedule and parish regulations.” He states, “It was a justified complaint. The Ascension Church Bulletin reflected the nostalgia of many of the older Irish parishioners for the rapidly vanishing world of the Hibernian Upper West Side.” He notes how the bulletin gave histories of Irish counties, had a column “called Beatha in Eirinn, ‘News from Ireland,’” and gave reports of Irish Night, which took place on St. Patrick’s Day, which remained an important social event for the parish. By comparing the content of the Ascension Church Bulletin with the ethnic makeup of the parish, which is presented in dramatic statistical changes, Shelley demonstrates the lag by the parish leadership, whose represented “old-fashioned Irish-American Catholicism in New York City,” in representing the members of its parish.
The time that Ascension’s pastors and the leadership of the Catholic Church took to adjust to the changes in the makeup of the Catholic community coincides with the shape of the changing history of the Ascension parish as an arc — a rise, then a decline, and then another rise. Shelley has much to say about the period of decline, which he attributes largely to neighborhood or exogenous factors. He writes, “Ascension’s problems were not limited to the diminishing numbers who frequented the doors of the church. The problems were aggravated by the fact that the church itself was located in a neighborhood that had become a center of the virulent crack-cocaine drug epidemic that plagued New York City in the 1980s.” Shelley spends a considerable amount of time writing about issue of crime, which he dates back to at least the late 1960s when the Upper West Side was seen as transforming “from a peaceful and attractive community into one of the most dangerous neighborhoods in Manhattan for the better part of three decades.”
Similar arguments on crime have been made, for example, for parishes in Chicago and Brooklyn, but as historian Craig Wilder once pointed out to me, the idea that Brooklyn was not violent in the past and somehow more violent in the late 20th century depends upon how one decides to view a historical event like “a rise” and from whose perspective it is observed. Irish Americans were subjected to intense violence in the New York Archdiocese at different times in the 19th and early 20th centuries and yet they did not move then because the ability and resources were not available to them. In exploring the phenomenon of crime, which is historically defined, the issue of timing is a critical one, and in this area, the book could engage more with a wider historiography on urban politics and finance, such as the work of Kim Phillips-Fein (Fear City, 2017) and Kevin Kruse and Julian Zelizer (Fault Lines, 2020), Wilder (A Covenant with Power, 2000), and Richard Rothstein (The Color of Law, 2019), which emphasize the role of the federal government and economic and political choices in the era of America’s decline as a global power during the Cold War.[3]
Shelley’s argument on crime is important because later he argues that “the decline in crime and changing demographics in the neighborhood also transformed Ascension into a more diverse parish community” beyond Spanish-speaking parishioners to LGBT Catholics and including members of more affluent class backgrounds. He writes that in contrast to its past, “Ascension was to transform itself even further into an exceptionally inclusive Catholic parish that recovered the original meaning of the word “Catholic.’” By this he means that the parish welcomes “people of every ethnic background, language, color, sexual orientation, marital status, and social class.” This transformation completes the arc of the story that marks the commemoration of Ascension’s revival and survival in the early 21st century.
Fundamentally, parish histories are histories of Catholic institutions at the local level and as such, do much to illuminate the relationship between the laity, the clergy, and the Catholic Church. Shelley’s biography of Ascension is no exception and the story of its present-day parish community life speaks to the central role of the laity, particularly women. Here again, the issue of timing — why things happen when they happen — is a critical one. The significant role of the laity and of women is not a new story and can be found in the history of the Catholic Church writ large, but that it happens in the post-Vatican II era and in the context of the changes in the Catholic Church and American Catholicism on the Upper West Side matters deeply.
Susie J. Pak is an Associate Professor of History at St. John’s University, New York. She is the author of Gentlemen Bankers: The World of J.P. Morgan (Harvard University Press, 2013).
[1] Shelley’s prior publications in just the 21st century include: Thomas J. Shelley, Fordham: A History of the Jesuit University of New York: 1841-2003 (New York: Fordham University Press, 2017); Thomas J. Shelley, Greenwich Village Catholics: St. Joseph’s Church and the Evolution of an Urban Faith Community, 1829-2002 (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2016); Thomas J. Shelley, The Bicentennial History of the Archdiocese of New York, 1808-2008 (Strasbourg: Editions du Signe, 2007); Thomas J. Shelley, Kevin Keenan and Fran Gangloff, Empire State Catholics: A History of the Catholic Community in New York State (Cedex 2, France: Editions du Signe, 2006); Thomas J. Shelley, Slovaks on the Hudson: Most Holy Trinity Church, Yonkers, and the Slovak Catholics of the Archdiocese of New York, 1894-2000 (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2002); Thomas J. Shelley, “Ubiquitously Useful: The Jesuit College of St. Francis Xavier, New York City, 1847-1912,” The Catholic Historical Review, vol. 101, no. 3 (Summer 2015): 463-487.
[2] Jay Dolan, Immigrant Church: New York’s Irish and German Catholics, 1815-1865 (1975: Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977).
[3] Kim Phillips-Fein, Fear City: New York’s Fiscal Crisis and the Rise of Austerity Politics (New York: Picador, 2017); Kevin M. Kruse and Julian E. Zelizer, Fault Lines: A History of the United States since 1974 (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2019); Craig Steven Wilder, A Covenant with Color: Race and Social Power in Brooklyn (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000); and Richard Rothstein, The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America (New York: Liveright, 2018).