ABSTRACT
As scholars and churchmen have long recognized, the flood of nineteenth- and twentieth-century European immigrants to the United States decisively shaped the American Church, creating for it both opportunities and problems. Although the newcomers in considerable measure accounted for Catholicism’s explosive growth from less than two hundred thousand members in 1820 to nearly twenty million a century later, their need for priests, churches, and schools greatly strained the Church’s resources. Exacerbating this financial burden were the immigrants’ ethnic sensitivities which prompted demands for separate national parishes staffed by priests speaking foreign languages. These demands also risked splintering the unity of the Church in the United States along lines of nationality and complicated the already vexing problem of defining the nature and limits of episcopal authority. 1
