That is his letter to his mother. A federal surgeon named noris with a new york regiment binds on the battlefield, operates on him, remove the lid and saves his life. In the end, he doesnt die on the battlefield here. What we have covered today are just some of the high points at the park will stop there are many more stories to see if you come out and visit for yourself will stop appomattox is often forgotten by the American Public or overlooked, but it is one of the most significant events in American History. This is a place where the killings of americans by americans to the tune of over 700,000 and. Its also a place where we decided we would the one nation instead of two. The events at the Maclean House on april 9, general grants generosity to generally and the events on the rich the richmond stage road set a positive course for the nation and allowed for a stronger country to emerge. Please pay us a visit or make a special pilgrimage to visit our site. You can watch this or other american Artifacts Program by visiting our website cspan. Org history. Up next on American History tv, a discussion on the challenges catholic immigrants have faced in america as well as their efforts to adapt to their sometimes unwelcoming adopted homeland. This session from a daylong conference at Catholic University of america is about 90 minutes. I am juliette young, one of the coorganizers of this conference. Im a professor of history and study and am very interested in migration to the United States and the involvement of the Catholic Church. I am very excited to be moderating our second panel on culture and religious life where we will talk to let the similarities and differences between the migration thats happening today in regards on the last day, i will focus on legislation and policy, but i will focus more on parish life and catholics and the Catholic Church as different waves of immigrants came into the united hates. How did Catholic Church is an catholic parishes deal with successive waves of immigrants and how did that present challenges and opportunities . Our first is dr. William genghis, and ordinary professor of religious studies here at catholic and is a fellow at ip are. He received his phd and has been on the faculty for 32 years even though he doesnt look at. His interests include a variety of religious and cultural topics, early catholicism religion and ecology. He has published many articles on these topics. He has a longstanding interest and was a contributor on the American Academy of arts and scientists and once taught me when i was an undergrad here at catholic a class i still remember very well. Happy to have you here. Next is a dominican priest who serves as executive of africa faith and Justice Network and is an instructor at loyola marymount. He has taught here, at the university of california davis the university of eastern nigeria, he has done extensive work on immigrant communities and intercultural competence. He served as coordinator as and was cochair at the breakout sessions. Hes the coauthor of african and caribbean catholics in the United States. Hes a frequent guest at Straight Talk africa and is currently studying practical ways of using catholic social teaching to empower catholic Civil Societies in africa to promote just governance. Finally, we have hymie hernandez who in his day job works at the department of the interior. But the reason he is here is hes a Lake Community members of saint Millis Church of the road in silver spring, where he has been a member of the Parish Council, the president of the hispanic committee, and is working on the developing test practices and working on a plan for saint camillus. He is deeply involved in this parish which is a renowned and multicultural parish. They offer Spanish Church services and administer to multiple immigrant communities as well as nativeborn and englishspeaking communities. They have a service that attracts 1400 people they have a French Service that attracts 800 people every week. The Spanish Speaking community is predominately from el salvador and guatemala. The french speaking community is from francophone africa and other french speaking countries. He is an excellent person to talk to about parish life and will bring his own experience. So i will stop talking and let the panelists take it away. Everyone will talk individually and we will have our audience. Im delighted to be here and i want to thank julia, tim and maria for the invitation to participate. Im basically the old immigrant guy here and im going to talk about the old immigration. But we should never the old immigrants were once themselves new immigrants. This is an incredibly complex issue. I cant possibly do this justice in 15 minutes, so i am going to give you something akin to an academic version of speed dating. I want to start with three overriding foundational issues. They are as for was. First of all, it is important to recognize in relationship to euro American Catholic immigration to the United States in the late 19th and early 20th century, there was not a homogeneous or singular catholic immigrant experience. There were multiple experiences of different catholic ethnic groups, 28 different nationalities by the end of the century. There were certain commonalities these groups experienced, but there were also some keen differences. I am going to make a lot of generalizations but i do want this to seem im working with the assumption this was a Homogeneous Group anymore than talking about latinas today. We should not assume it is a Homogeneous Group. There were some cultures or sub ghettos, if you will, even groups like the germans consisted of various groups. Our particular family full gut germans are not bavarian germans. So you have those kinds of differences. The second general point i want to make is in thinking about the Catholic Church in relation to immigrants in the late 19th and early 20th century, in both its institutional structures, if you will and i will use contemporary language, the ministries of individuals within the church, multiple things were done in relationship to these immigrant communities. The overall issue i would like to accentuate is the fact that what the church did institutionally in relationship to individuals was basically to enable catholic immigrants to negotiate the dynamics of assimilation or americanization if you will, which were also involved in the dynamic of separation relationship to their native lands. It enabled them to do this so that they could negotiate this process from a position of strength rather than a position of weakness. The Church Helped these immigrants to adjust to the complexities of American Life and culture and help to anchor and stabilize the life of many immigrants. It played a mediation role in helping these old immigrant populations with the social and cultural transition into american citizenship. An analogy for me is thinking of a family my sense of a Healthy Family in the sense of what mothers and fathers ought to be doing is that you create a wife circumstance so that in your family, your children can negotiate life from a position of strength rather than a position of weakness. Going to argue here the Church Helped immigrants, if you will to negotiate the process of assimilation from a process of strength rather than a process of week this. The third point i would make is the church as an institution proved relatively mellow bowl in terms of embracing different cultural groups ive styles while nevertheless moving in a certain direction of uniformity and maintaining organizational coherence in the face of dealing with all these different Catholic National and ethnic groups. This meant there were certain elements that had to be overcome. The church had to in the face of this diversity foster a lay attachment to the church itself and consolidate catholic identity. Notably over issues of nationalism and ethnicity. This is one of the circumstances that was a fact or in the creation of socalled national parishes as a way of mediating the attentions of this ethnic and cultural conflict stop the national parish was a way to institutionally preserve the religious life of many of these as groups in terms of the old country and it was also an instrument to remedy any decline in the religious practices and fervor of immigrants. It kind of had the twofold purpose. National parishes that continued into the 20th century, as late as 1936, about 55 of catholics in chicago were worshiping at national parishes and 80 of the clergy had assignments in parishes that matched their own national background. The national parish was not just a late 19th century phenomenon. Those are my three starter premises. With regard to specifics what were some of the things the church did with the predominately euro American Population in the late 19th and early 20th century, for things merit attention. One is that obviously, the church worked in different ways institutionally and by virtue of individuals in it to provide material needs through various benevolent societies, charities, hospitals, silos orphanages and so forth. In other words, it provided these kinds of services, if you will. This was a time when there was little national, federal state or governmental social services as we know them today. The church played a very Important Role in providing the services. Secondly, it worked to provide multiple educational opportunities, meeting various Educational Needs through the development of what became a massive infrastructure of Catholic Schools and institutions of this nature. This included fostering vocations and there were many in those days. These locations also came with educational benefits in terms of advanced degrees and so forth. I also want to make the point that in terms of providing these social services, if you will, providing Educational Needs that so much of this was done by women religious sisters where the over warm overwhelming workforce in relationship to these efforts and by that fact had a tremendous impact on laypeople. And we need to acknowledge that will stop a third thing that the church did was counter much of the bigotry, xenophobia, nativism that was arrayed against catholic immigrants and their various religious and cultural patterns. I think sometimes younger catholics today do not appreciate the fact that america was in many ways and for a long time a very hostile place in relationship to roman catholics. In the 19th and well into the 20th century, as the church got larger, anticatholicism got larger growing nativist bigotry, either in relationship to groups like the know nothing hardy in the night century or the ku klux klan in the 1920s, there world kinds of charges made about catholics being a population that could not be absorbed because there are liberal values were antithetical to liberal democratic ideals. Some of the arguments were based on racist ideologies in relationship to national types and some of it was based on pseudoscience. Anticatholicism and i think this is important, not only by religious, but racist animosity with concerns about crime social problems, clinical radicalism and so forth. A lot of america is anticatholicism was an expression of being antiirish. In many ways, the class structure of catholic immigrants worked to reinforce many negative stereotypes, and this in turn fed prejudice against catholics. I just make the point here that in terms of understanding the hostility, this is not derivative of religious present religious prejudice, there were social class and other factors work. My fourth point is with regard to the church, it worked to build a specifically catholic religious culture that was vibrant, comprehensive, and relatively consolidated. This was accomplished not exclusively but in many ways through the instrumentality of catholic parish life. Parishes were in many ways the real powerhouses of euro american immigrant culture. I think of them as in some ways analogous to the fullservice megachurches of our own time that is to say they provided an institutional setting not only for what was taken in terms of their devotional and liturgical life as real encounters with the sacred, that is to say they met spiritual needs, but they also met needs for social solidarity communal life, education and so forth. The parish loomed large in terms of the creation of the vibrancy of catholic culture. It has often been noted there was a time when people, if you lived in a large urban area and people asked where you were from, they would name a parish that was a way of identifying. Still do, im happy to hear that. I want to focus on one particular issue that proves a little problematic, and this is something that relates to my own research interest. This is the role of catholic piety and emotionalism during this immigrant era. By this, i mean these nonliturgical form of prayer, devotions to the sacred heart the stations of the cross pilgrimages, benediction devotion to particular saints and so forth. It is important to remember in this regard that euro American Catholics wrought different types of catholicism to america, not unlike the way we can say latinos bring different types of catholicism to the american experience. There were some rather strauch rather start contrasts italian American Catholicism many of the irish recoiled at what were taken by some of the pagan practices from southern and eastern europe. Italian catholicism generally had a rather seated distrust of formal institutional religion, the church hierarchy, they were quite anticlerical and their experience of the church in southern italy was a landlord that extracted high rent and retarded italian unification and so forth. In this latter regard, it is important to recognize these different ethnic groups brought different forms of devotional piety to the United States or what we refer to as popular religiosity. Although this was rooted in the immigrant experience, it wasnt until the 1930s and 1930s that we see what was considered the heyday of this kind of activity. Two important points to remember about this piety and emotionalism one was popular piety and i would also add the liturgy itself was both a cause and expression of the othering of catholics in American Culture. Catholics were the embittered minority for a long time. One of the most distinct cultural markers and boundary mechanisms between catholics and noncatholics had to do with these forms of piety and emotionalism. Over time, catholics come generally to look more and more like many middleclass americans, but one of the ways they seem weird had to do with how they prayed, how they prayed publicly, and how they prayed privately. This is something that made catholics very, very different. Obviously, protestants were not noted for devotions to the blessed virgin or the cult of the saints. This is one of the ways catholics were distinctly different and the subtext here is this is one of the reasons why they would be more resistant to assimilation. I cant summarize. There are pressures already in the 19th century within the church itself to rein in elements of this piety and emotionalism. This becomes even more intense in the 1920s with the advent of the Liturgical Movement. I want to accentuate here that what was problematic with regard to the Liturgical Movement about much of catholic popular piety and emotionalism was not the fact of it per se this was obviously a reality in the churchs life, but what was problematic was its lace in the context of the liturgy which the liturgical reformers were trying to transform. During this time, catholics or lay catholics were in many ways radically disconnected. There was a radical disconnect between what was understood as the authentic nature of the liturgy and what catholics ought to be doing when they go to mass in terms of this being a corporate, collective, active expression of who we are as people and faith and the reality of any of them going and not having a clue whats going on at the altar and instead spending that time basically praying privately, saying the rosary doing various kinds of devotions and so forth. That issue is still being played out these days. Sometimes, we hear talk of a sort of to Church Meeting one of a more affluent upper social class and another church in america of a lower social class. This is also along ethnic and racial lines but theres also the question of given the complexity of this relationship and popular religiosity, the question of what it means to talk about, do we talk about two churches where theres a different understanding of the place and role of popular piety and the question is what happens if that gap gets too great . [applause] i want to say thank you again for the opportunity to be here. I want to talk on four points the Early Morning paddle panel, they have touched on a lot of things i want to talk about here. One is the issue of new immigrants. Second, the challenges, the Church Response to the presence, what does it mean for the church . Im going to play a little p rophet here and make some predictions. All of the new immigrants here are basically noneuropean. Most of the new catholics we have our noneuropeans. They a church not only as a Religious Center but a civ