ABSTRACT
By 1890, Michael Augustine Corrigan, the Archbishop of New York, had become the symbol of resistance to liberalism, if not the acknowledged leader of the conservative forces within American Catholicism. The conservative bloc had begun to form among the American hierarchy in response to Roman legislation and growing clerical liberalism that threatened to undermine episcopal authority. By the end of the century, the conservatives had completed the consolidation of the American Catholic ghetto that the Third Plenary Council had begun with its implicit endorsement of a Catholic subculture. The parochial school would remain at the center of that ghetto. Conscious of their minority status in an alien Protestant-dominated culture, Church leaders had to provide for the needs and growth of their people as best they could. The tragedy was that the conservatives in their successful completion of the Catholic subculture had abandoned any attempt to determine what it means to be an American Catholic.
