[On July 7, 1946, Frances Xavier “Mother” Cabrini became (posthumously) the first American to be canonized as a saint by the Catholic Church. So this week for the 80th anniversary of that occasion I’ll AmericanStudy Cabrini and four other American saints, leading up to a weekend post on Catholics in 2026 America!]
How a Bohemian-born saint highlights an inspiring and vital stage in Pennsylvania’s German American and Catholic histories.
I’ve written about Ben Franklin’s anti-German prejudices in multiple places over the years, including this very early blog post and this much more recent Saturday Evening Post Considering History column. The latter column in particular has further info about Franklin’s evolution toward and eventual embrace of that sizeable and important community in his adopted home of Pennsylvania (leading to his founding role in the German-serving college that would become Franklin & Marshall), so I’d ask you to check out that column if you would and then come on back here for further thoughts on German American histories in this foundational American setting.
Franklin’s personal evolution by the end of the Revolutionary era unfortunately did not mean that Pennsylvania as a whole was becoming more tolerant toward either German Americans or other perceived “foreign” communities such as Catholics. Indeed, early 19th century Philadelphia saw multiple nativist riots that targeted such communities, culminating in the hugely destructive 1844 riots that Zachary Schrag writes about in his brilliant book The Fires of Philadelphia: Citizen-Soldiers, Nativists, and the 1844 Riots Over the Soul of a Nation (2021). Those riots most certainly did not burn out the city’s or state’s nativist tendencies, as a dozen years later, Philadelphia hosted the February 1856 national convention for the Know-Nothing Party (they called themselves the American Party, but I refuse to use that one), nominating former president Millard Fillmore as their presidential candidate. John Neumann had been Bishop of Philadelphia for exactly four years by the time of that convention, a reminder of just how fraught things were for an immigrant American Catholic Bishop in 1850s Philly.
But it’s also possible, and important, to flip that final point around and say this: 1850s Philadelphia was a perfect place for John Neumann to do the work of community-building for immigrant as well as Catholic residents. He did that work in a huge variety of ways, far beyond simply encouraging the construction of new parish churches (although he did that too): the creation of a mutual savings bank, Beneficial Bank; extensive support and resources for the city’s Italian American community (he spoke Italian fluently); saving an African American women’s congregation, the Oblate Sisters of Providence (which had been founded by Haitian refugees), from dissolution; and, most influentially and enduringly, organizing the first diocesan school system in the country, a system of Catholic schools that became a model for such institutions around the nation. As we’ve seen throughout this series, every person who becomes a saint has done meaningful work for their communities and world—but I’m not sure anyone I’ll write about this week did more to model and work toward the best of American diversity and inclusion than did John Neumann.
Last saint tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you think?
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