Congenial Occupiers

When a mob set fire to the Charlestown Convent near Boston in the summer of 1834, many New England newspapers reacted with indignation to the “outrage.” A Newport newspaper, however, went a step further. The Rhode-Island Republican urged the nuns to move their convent and school to Newport:

We would recommend to the Ursulines, if they should revive their institution . . . to turn their attention to this Island, to this healthy and delightful spot, to which scholars may be sent with the greatest expedition and facility. Here they may avail themselves not only of the free political institutions of Rhode Island, but also of the more liberal standard of public opinion where religious freedom runs in the streams and floats in the breeze. . . . The Catholics have recently built a handsome new Church in this town, and are a large society well received by this community, and who have the good wishes of all.

A group of Newport residents picked up on the newspaper’s proposal and invited the bishop of Boston, Benedict Fenwick, to relocate the sisters to Newport and re-establish the school. The bishop and the sisters must have considered the invitation seriously because the bishop’s own newspaper, The Jesuit, noted that “the attention of the Catholic Bishop has been drawn toward Newport . . . where the well known liberality and generous feelings of the inhabitants, would always be a guarantee or safeguard from an infatuated or infuriated mob.” In the end, the Charlestown community decided to disband. The sisters had sought compensation for their lost property, but the Massachusetts legislature rejected their appeal. Lacking the funds to rebuild, the sisters dispersed, moving to convents in Canada and Louisiana.

Three years later, Fr. John Corry, the pastor of Newport’s Catholic chapel, received word from Bishop Fenwick of his coming transfer to Providence. Disappointed at the news, Corry confided to his friend Reverend Arthur Ross, whose Baptist church was located close to the Catholic chapel, “I have never seen a town in the United States, among whose inhabitants there is less intolerance and religious bigotry. I have for six years, been more or less among them, and during that time period, none have denied me the common civilities of life, because I was a Catholic priest, but always treated me with the greatest respect.”

Most of New England in the nineteenth century was inhospitable territory for Catholics, to say the least. A convent of the Sisters of Mercy in Providence was surrounded and nearly attacked, a Jesuit priest in Maine was tarred and feathered and left for dead by his assailants, Know Nothings were elected governors of Rhode Island and Massachusetts, and “No Irish Need Apply” notices were commonplace in newspapers and store windows throughout the region. These nativist episodes have been ably addressed by a number of scholars. But no historian has yet looked at Newport and tried to explain why the Catholics’ experience there was so different.

First, it is important to note that Newport was not always so welcoming. In the colonial era, Catholics were very scarce and were viewed with suspicion. In the years leading up to the revolution, Newporters celebrated Guy Fawkes Day with as much gusto as the people of Boston did. Effigies of the pope were paraded down Thames Street and then were burned in a great bonfire to mark the anniversary of the 1605 Gunpowder Plot, in which Fawkes and several other Catholic conspirators planned to kill England’s King James I. Newport ministers such as the Congregationalist Ezra Stiles warned about the dangers of popery, and the editor of the Newport Mercury used his press to produce anti-Catholic pamphlets.

During the American Revolution, however, thousands of French soldiers and sailors landed in Newport and stayed there for almost a year. Top officers such as the Comte de Rochambeau and Admiral Charles de Ternay took up residence in Newport’s finest homes, and the Colony House was transformed into both a hospital for ill soldiers and a Catholic chapel. While waiting for military instructions, the French rebuilt much of the city, which the British had damaged during their occupation. They also socialized with the residents, dancing and dining with them and charming them thoroughly. The French officers and priests were learned and refined, not at all what the people of Newport had expected. By the time the French departed to set out on the Yorktown campaign, one of their officers noted, “There was now a universal sigh of regret.” The people of Newport were going to miss their congenial occupiers.

Newport had long been a religiously diverse seaport. While much of New England was dominated by Puritans, Newport had Quakers, Jews, Congregationalists, Episcopalians, and several varieties of Baptists living and working together. When Newporters finally encountered Catholics in the form of these French troops, they were willing to accept them just as they had accepted the other religious minorities in their midst. While almost all of the French left Newport in 1781, they made a lasting impression on the residents of Newport. When Irish Catholics started arriving in Newport in the 1820s to work on Fort Adams, they were received well. They had no trouble establishing a Catholic chapel, Rhode Island’s first, in 1828. The Fort Adams laborers were a hard-drinking lot and got into brawls from time to time. Still, the local press downplayed problems at the fort, with one paper declaring that the Fort Adams workers had “proved themselves, with few exceptions, respectable in their vocations, and peaceable and respectful in their demeanor.” In the years following, Newporters would repeatedly come to the aid of the Catholics in their community. During the Civil War, Newport’s newspapers paid tribute to the city’s Irish immigrants, who fought and, in some cases, died for the Union. In 1864, the Newport Mercury hailed the courage of the city’s Irish soldiers who “marched shoulder to shoulder with those who in former years wanted to deprive them of the rights of citizenship.”

After the war, Newport emerged as the nation’s leading summer destination for wealthy tourists. Attracted by the city’s fine beaches and mild climate, some visitors stayed for weeks at one of its grand hotels. Others who wanted to avoid the crowded hotels chose to build luxurious homes of their own. These hotels and summer cottages provided numerous opportunities for Newport’s Irish residents. While the Irish in many New England cities toiled in mills and fought the owners for better wages, in Newport a number of Irish prospered by catering to the needs and wants of the summer colonists. Thomas Galvin, for example, operated a successful nursery, Michael Butler ran a profitable floral business, and Michael McCormick was a highly regarded builder. By the end of the century, Newport’s Catholics were no longer an Irish monolith; Italian and Portuguese immigrants began arriving in the city in the 1880s and were also able to find jobs supporting the summer colonists.

Newport’s Catholics received considerable help as well from their Protestant neighbors, especially from Episcopalians, who were closer to them theologically than were the other Protestant denominations. George Downing, a prominent black Episcopalian in Newport, led the efforts in the 1880s to help immigrants obtain the vote in the state. In the 1890s, when the pastor of Saint Joseph’s, a new parish, was trying to establish a parochial school, George Babcock Hazard, a wealthy Episcopalian, stepped forward and funded it. To express his gratitude, the pastor named the school for Hazard. Twenty years later, another wealthy Episcopalian, George Gordon King, donated parcels of land when Saint Augustin’s parish was being established in Newport’s heavily Irish Fifth Ward. At the same time, still another well-heeled Episcopalian and former mayor, Frederick Garrettson, helped the Daughters of the Holy Ghost establish Saint Clare’s Home for elderly women and a daycare center for young children in the center of Newport.

By the end of the nineteenth century, Patrick Boyle, an Irish Catholic, had become mayor of Newport and would hold the office for sixteen years. Boyle worked well with the Vanderbilts, Astors, and other summer colonists while not neglecting the needs of the city’s year-round residents. After World War I, the Gilded Age came to a close. The summer colonists, burdened by increasing taxes and frustrated by Prohibition, were no longer entertaining lavishly. Many were eager to dispose of their properties, and several donated them to communities of nuns or brothers, who then turned the mansions into residences or schools. By 1930, Catholics had established a remarkable infrastructure in Newport. In a city of just twenty-five thousand, there were four Catholic parishes, three grammar schools, two high schools, a retreat center, a cloistered convent, an orphanage, two homes for the elderly, and a daycare center for the children of working parents.

At this point, Catholics had become embedded in Newport’s political, economic, and cultural fabric. Catholic organizations inherited and repurposed many of the summer colonists’ grand properties, and that expansion continued after World War II. In 1947, the Mercy sisters acquired Ochre Court from the Goelets and established Salve Regina College. In 1957, the Sisters of Saint Joseph of Cluny acquired a portion of the Arthur Curtiss James estate and established the Cluny School. Meanwhile, in nearby Portsmouth, another community of sisters, the Faithful Companions of Jesus, established Saint Philomena’s School in 1953, locating it across the street from the Portsmouth Priory.

In the 1960s, however, this remarkable infrastructure started to unravel. After John F. Kennedy was elected president, Catholics recognized that they had entered America’s mainstream, and some began to question if they needed to maintain separate schools and hospitals any longer. At the same time, the decisions of the Second Vatican Council were dramatically changing all aspects of Catholic life. Masses, offered in Latin for centuries, began to be celebrated in the vernacular; contemporary music often replaced Gregorian chant in the liturgies. Many nuns moved out of their convents, dropped their religious garb, and took up new work outside of the classrooms. Many sisters, priests, and brothers also embraced ecumenism, entering into sympathetic dialogues with Protestants and Jews.

While some Catholics were enthusiastic about these changes, others were shaken by them. Soon fewer Catholics were attending Mass regularly, and far fewer were entering the priesthood or religious orders. For Newport residents, the eroding presence of the Church was compounded by the U.S. Navy’s decision to move its entire Atlantic Fleet to Norfolk, Virginia, in the early 1970s. The city’s population dropped, and with fewer children in the community and fewer sisters and brothers available to teach them, Catholic schools and other institutions began closing. Just as Catholics had once repurposed empty mansions to suit their needs, Newport’s unused Catholic facilities have been adapted for new uses. The Cenacle is now Harbor House, a senior residence, though the liturgical artist Ade Bethune led the successful effort to preserve its 1914 Gothic chapel. Saint Mary’s Convent was moved to Thames Street and is now the Admiral Fitzroy Inn; the Stella Maris Home is also an inn. De la Salle High School and the Knights of Columbus Hall are apartment buildings, the Carmelite Monastery is a private residence, and the girls’ high school is the headquarters of the Preservation Society of Newport County. What had taken Catholics many decades to assemble came undone relatively quickly. Yet much of the infrastructure remains.

This essay is adapted from The Rise of Newport’s Catholics: From Colonial Outcasts to Gilded Age Leaders (University of Massachusetts Press, 2024)