The Making of a Midwestern Catholicism

Abstract

This chapter uses Iowa City’s history of transnational, multiethnic Catholic cultures to trace the complex and varied origins of a regional Midwestern Catholic culture. Iowa can in a sense be seen as indicative of the Catholic experience in the Lower Midwest, where diverse ethnic Catholic enclaves scattered across a largely rural landscape that also attracted large numbers of worshippers from various Protestant denominations, especially Methodists and Congregationalists. Iowa City provides an excellent setting to trace the formation of a regional Catholic Midwestern culture rooted in plural ethnic diasporas and transnational connections. In the antebellum and early postbellum periods, the town encompassed the diverse, heterogenous character of nineteenth-century Midwestern Catholicism, including significant numbers of Irish, German, and Bohemian (Czech) Catholics. Amid the centrifugal pressures initially exerted by their diversity, this chapter argues, Iowa City’s Catholics experienced in miniature larger processes that would play out across the Midwest and among American Catholics more generally. Uneasily integrated for several decades in a single parish housing the town’s three significant ethnic Catholic communities, St. Mary’s Parish would fracture in favor of ethnic separatism, the formation of distinct ethnic parishes, in the latter decades of the nineteenth century.