A Quaker, Bavarian monk and Catholic king: Exploring Catholic history in Pennsylvania, New York and New Jersey

In this continuing series on the origins of Catholicism in the 50 states, the Catholic history of the mid-Atlantic offers a particularly revealing case. In New York, Pennsylvania and New Jersey, Catholic life took shape unevenly, shaped as much by law and political culture as by migration and missionary effort.

For much of the colonial period, Catholics across the region lived under legal restriction or social suspicion, yet Pennsylvania stood as a remarkable exception, offering a degree of religious freedom unmatched elsewhere in the British Atlantic world. Even so, Catholic life throughout the region was often sustained quietly through family networks, informal gathering places, and the ministry of itinerant priests.

Of these three colonies, Pennsylvania was different from the start. Situated at the center of the original 13 colonies (a position that would later earn it the name the “Keystone State”), Pennsylvania was founded in 1681 by William Penn as a Quaker experiment in religious liberty. The colony rejected the rigid religious establishments that shaped many of the other English colonies and instead made room for freedom of conscience. For Catholics, that openness mattered in real ways.

In 1733, Jesuit priests established St. Joseph’s Church in Philadelphia, creating the only place in the English-speaking world where Mass could be celebrated publicly. Some years later, Pennsylvania would mark another Catholic first. At nearby St. Mary’s Church in Philadelphia (founded in 1763), the first Catholic parochial school in the new nation was established in 1782.

Sadly, this openness would not last. At the time of the American Revolution, Catholics comprised roughly 1 percent of the population (about 25,000 people) concentrated largely in Pennsylvania and Maryland. In the decades that followed, sustained immigration from Ireland and the German lands dramatically altered both the size and visibility of Catholic communities, especially in eastern cities.

What had once seemed a manageable religious minority increasingly appeared, to some Protestants, as a cultural and political threat. These anxieties erupted violently in Philadelphia in 1844, when nativist mobs burned two Catholic churches and a seminary, marking one of the most destructive episodes of anti-Catholic violence in the antebellum United States.

Yet the Catholic history of Pennsylvania in these same years was not confined to urban conflict and persecution. In the western part of the state, a different chapter was unfolding. In 1846, the Bavarian-born monk Boniface Wimmer founded St. Vincent Archabbey in Latrobe, establishing the first Benedictine monastery in the United States.

His work laid the foundation for Benedictine monastic life in America and underscored the breadth and diversity of Catholic growth in Pennsylvania, from embattled immigrant parishes in Philadelphia to enduring institutions of prayer, education and stability on the expanding frontier.

The story of the origins of Catholic life in Pennsylvania demonstrates both the early vitality of the Church and the fragility of tolerance once Catholics became more visible.

New York began from a different place altogether, where Catholic communities emerged slowly and cautiously, carving out space in a city and colony where legal acceptance and social trust were harder won.

Founded by the Dutch in 1624, New York began with only a minuscule Catholic presence. When the French Jesuit Isaac Jogues passed through the colony in 1643, having narrowly escaped torture at the hands of the Mohawk, he found that the entire Catholic community consisted of just two people: a Portuguese woman and an Irish man. At his own request, Jogues later returned to missionary work in upstate New York, where he was killed in 1646, earning the crown of martyrdom.

The fortunes of New York’s Catholic community began to improve after the colony passed to English control in 1664 when King Charles II granted the colony to his brother James, the Duke of York, who would embrace Catholicism in 1672.

The colony’s brief Catholic moment began in 1682 when English Jesuits were invited into the colony and established a school that quickly gained a strong reputation. Known for their educational excellence, the Jesuits attracted not only Catholic pupils but also the sons of the Protestant elite, one of the few moments in colonial New York when confessional lines blurred rather than hardened. One of these Jesuits celebrated the first Mass in New York in late October 1683 on the site of what is now the Alexander Hamilton Custom House near The Battery.

Ultimately, this period of relative openness would not last. James’ accession to the throne in 1688, quickly followed by the birth and baptism of a Catholic son, made it clear to many English Protestants that the crown might remain Catholic for generations. The result was the Glorious Revolution of 1688, which abruptly reversed the fortunes of Catholics throughout the empire.

In New York, Jesuits fled by the skin of their teeth and the public practice of Catholicism was outlawed for nearly a century. During these long decades, Mass survived only in secrecy, usually celebrated by priests traveling in disguise and ministering quietly to scattered and vulnerable communities.

Conditions began to soften with the birth of the new republic. In 1785, New York’s first Catholic parish was established, and the following year St. Peter’s Church opened its doors, marking the first permanent Catholic church in the state.

Growth, however, was slow and uneven. The Diocese of New York was established in 1808, but its first bishop died before ever reaching his see. His successor, John Connolly, did not arrive until 1815. What he found was a vast and fragile mission territory: just three churches and no more than six or seven priests to serve a diocese that encompassed all of New York state and the northern half of New Jersey.

Scattered across some 33,000 square miles were approximately 15,000 Catholics, many isolated by distance, poverty and lingering suspicion, dependent on an overstretched clergy and a still-precarious freedom to practice their faith.

New Jersey entered the orbit of the new diocese with a layered colonial past. Even before English rule, Swedish settlers established communities along the Delaware River in the 1630s as part of New Sweden, while Dutch settlements took root in the north along the Hudson River and Upper New York Bay.

By 1664, control of the region had passed to English hands, and New Jersey emerged as a proprietary colony under Sir George Carteret and Lord Berkeley, whose relatively open approach to religion briefly allowed a small Catholic presence. That tolerance proved short-lived, however, as suspicion hardened into exclusion and, by the end of the 17th century, anti-Catholic laws curtailed Catholic civil and religious life, much as they did in neighboring New York.

In New Jersey, the survival of Catholic practice depended less on institutions than on ingenuity and courage. When Jesuit missionary Father Theodore Schneider passed through the colony in the 1740s, he found Catholics scattered and vulnerable, often concentrated around industrial sites such as the ironworks.

To reach them, he traveled incognito, presenting himself as a physician and relying on his medical knowledge to move freely where a known priest could not. The danger was real as his presence sometimes aroused suspicion, and his journeys were marked by repeated threats of violence. With no printed liturgical books to carry safely, Schneider relied on a missal he had copied by hand, celebrating Mass quietly. His ministry underscores how fragile and contested Catholic life remained in New Jersey deep into the era of the American Revolution.

A more settled Catholic presence in New Jersey began only at the close of the 18th century with the founding in 1799 of the state’s first parish in Trenton.

From those tentative beginnings, Catholic life in New Jersey expanded steadily, and today the state is home to more than 3 million Catholics — a striking contrast to the fragile and often perilous conditions under which the faith first took root, and a reminder of how far New Jersey’s Catholic community has come since those early days.

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