A further security of the American Catholic Church against the growth of any "Liberal Catholic" party like those of continental Europe is the absolutist organization of the hierarchy under the personal government of the pope. In these last few centuries great progress has been made by the Roman see in extinguishing the ancient traditions of local or national independence in the election of bishops. Nevertheless in Catholic Europe important relics of this independence give an effective check to the absolute power of Rome. In America no trace of this historic independence has ever existed. The power of appointing and removing bishops is held absolutely and exclusively by the pope and exercised through the Congregation of the Propaganda. The power of ordaining and assigning priests is held by the bishop, who also holds or controls the title to the church property in his diocese. The security against partisan division within the church is as complete as it can be made without gravely increasing the risks of alienating additional multitudes from the fellowship of the church.[312:1]
During the whole of this dreary decade there were "fightings without" as well as within for the Catholic Church in the United States. Its great and sudden growth solely by immigration had made it distinctively a church of foreigners, and chiefly of Irishmen. The conditions were favorable for the development of a race prejudice aggravated by a religious antipathy. It was a good time for the impostor, the fanatic, and the demagogue to get in their work. In Boston, in 1834, the report that a woman was detained against her will in the Ursuline convent at Charlestown, near Boston, led to the burning of the building by a drunken mob. The Titus Oates of the American no-popery panic, in 1836, was an infamous woman named Maria Monk, whose monstrous stories of secret horrors perpetrated in a convent in Montreal, in which she claimed to have lived as a nun, were published by a respectable house and had immense currency. A New York pastor of good standing, Dr. Brownlee, made himself sponsor for her character and her stories; and when these had been thoroughly exposed, by Protestant ministers and laymen, for the shameless frauds that they were, there were plenty of zealots to sustain her still. A "Protestant Society" was organized in New York, and solicited the contributions of the benevolent and pious to promote the dissemination of raw-head-and-bloody-bones literature on the horrors of popery. The enterprise met with reprobation from sober-minded Protestants, but it was not without its influence for mischief. The presence of a great foreign vote, easily manipulated and cast in block, was proving a copious source of political corruption. Large concessions of privilege or of public property to Catholic institutions were reasonably suspected to have been made in consideration of clerical services in partisan politics.[313:1] The conditions provoked, we might say necessitated, a political reform movement, which took the name and character of "Native American." In Philadelphia, a city notorious at that time for misgovernment and turbulence, an orderly "American" meeting was attacked and broken up by an Irish mob. One act of violence led to another, the excitement increasing from day to day; deadly shots were exchanged in the streets, houses from which balls had been fired into the crowd were set in flames, which spread to other houses, churches were burned, and the whole city dominated by mobs that were finally suppressed by the State militia. It was an appropriate climax to the ten years of ecclesiastical and social turmoil.[314:1]