It will be Lent in just a few weeks and we will all be trying to find something to give up. Which is why the 58th Chapter of Isaiah is such a great gift to us today. It’s the chapter in which God tells us what to fast from.
fast from injustice and oppression,
fast from false accusation and malicious speech,
fast from selfishness and sin.
And what does such a fast look like? It looks like
sharing your bread with the hungry,
giving the homeless a place to call home;
clothing the naked and satisfying the afflicted.
In other words, such fasting from sin means the stranger, the poor and the hungry are received as we would receive Christ himself and their burdens become our burdens, as well.
Which is why the Church has always taken it as her special mission to welcome the stranger. Sometimes we have been very good at it, as when the Sisters of Providence opened their twelve bed hospital on Vernon Hill in 1893, charging patients only what they could afford and walking the streets of the canal district to find and care for indigent immigrants, be they from Cork or Quebec.
We’ve sometimes been very good at welcoming the stranger, and sometimes not-so-much.
Like back in the 1840’s, perhaps one of the most turbulent decades in Worcester’s history, marked by extreme ethnic strife, and it was all about the Irish and it all happened on the front steps of the Church.
The Church in those days was the first Church built in Western Massachusetts, Christ Church or Saint John’s as it came to be known. And the Irish, at first, were the few hundred folks who has come here to build the Blackstone Canal.
They used to refer to themselves as the Pioneers and they came mainly from the southern Irish counties and most spoke English. When they first arrived they lived in shanty towns down around Green and Water Streets. Life was not easy at first, with laws against new immigrants walking on Main Street, and signs in most windows reading “Rooms For Rent, No Irish Need Apply.”
They had worked hard, digging the canal with spades, shovels and wheelbarrows, organized by the professional Irish contractor Tobias Boland. When the canal was finished, they got jobs as coal miners, street builders who paved Main Street (although they still couldn’t walk on it at night), brick-makers and railroad builders, many of them owning their own tenements and some, like the canal boss Tobias Boland, having become very successful merchants. The same Toby Boland who bought up the land from Franklin Street to Vernon Square and laid out Temple and Winter streets on the site of a former swampland and built row-upon-row of tenements. Tobias, by the way, was there when the corner stone of Christ Church was laid, and when he died, he left his entire estate to Saint Paul’s Church. That’s us, so be warned: I am by no means the objective historian here.
But then came the great potato blight and nearly a third of the population of Ireland died or fled in famine ships, more than three thousand of them ending up in Worcester, almost doubling the city’s population with mostly illiterate farmers, from Mayo, Sligo, Galway, Donegal and Kerry. More of them spoke Irish than English and came from extreme poverty, as with those from Donegal, where in 1837 there were 10 beds, 43 chairs and 243 stools in a county of 9,000 people.
These new Irish were deeply suspicious of the Pioneers (whom they used to refer to as “lace curtain Irish”), for while the Pioneers called themselves Irishmen, they looked, talked and acted like Englishmen and Yankees to the new arrivals. And these lace certain Irish were the landlords and bosses of the unskilled and impoverished newcomers, first among them being Boss Boland, whom they came to refer to as “Lord Normsbury.”
And where was the Church in all this? Father James Fitton, second pastor of Saint John’s tried to reason with the new arrivals, dressing in workingman’s clothes and boots as he would visit their tenements and shops. But he was succeeded by Father Matthew Gibson, who had originally come to Worcester from Philadelphia in hopes of becoming a Jesuit at Holy Cross. Unfortunately, Father Gibson was an Englishman, anything but Irish, and described by his contemporaries as aristocratic and a bit haughty. Gone were the working man's clothes as he walked the streets (including Main Street) in a fancy purple over-coat with a white collar. Father Gibson’s appointment, one historian noted, “was a little like touching a match to a powder keg.”
Well to make a long story short, it all came to a head on Palm Sunday in 1847. A crowd of men from the surrounding towns were in Worcester for the job fair being run by the railroad and as evening came, most of them made their way to the taverns. When the Donlevie’s tavern (run by the sexton at Saint John’s) closed at sunset, his thirsty patrons were enraged and blamed it on that English pastor. They marched up Grafton Street, where they tried unsuccessfully to break into a brewery and then to burn down Toby Boland’s house. Their final stop was the Rectory, where Father Gibson came out and demanded that they leave, to which they dragged him in the street and threatened to tar and feather him, calling him the “landlord’s priest,” and the “Saxon tyrant.” Fortunately, Father Gibson managed to break away with the help of a friendly neighbor and took the night train to Boston.
Worcester was placed under interdict that Holy Week and later that year, Bishop Fenwick appointed Father John Boyce as co-pastor with Father Gibson.
Father Boyce, himself from the old sod, made himself a friend to Pioneer and working man alike, and ever so slowly the inter-nicene rivalries abated. Which is a good thing, since now the Irish had to contend with those Canadians who were coming town and taking their jobs and the Yankees, who had never quite warmed up to the presence of all these papists.
It was kind of a mess, mixed up with scoundrels and saints, sinners and opportunists. And its sometimes still a mess today, with the stranger cast as fearsome and malevolent, a creature to be kept at a distance, a problem to be solved rather than a brother to be embraced.
And yet the very same God says the very same thing to us as he did to them, we the Catholic daughters and sons of Worcester.
‘Fast from injustice and oppression, from false accusation and malicious speech, from selfishness and sin. Give the homeless a home, share your bread with them, and welcome the stranger.’
Saint Paul gives us good advice on this Presidents’ day: “Consider it all joy, my brothers and sisters, when you encounter various trials, for you know that the testing of your faith produces perseverance.” (James 1:2)
