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the terrible mistake, however, of trying to turn Italian immigrants into Americans in one generation. They failed, of course, and the Italian culture preserved in Murray Hill today is a monument to that failure. Bishop John Farrelly Bishop John P. Farrelly succeeded Bishop Horstmann in 1909. He was also a Propaganda alumnus and had the same View of transculturalism as did his predecessor. But he did not pursue it in the same way as Horstmann did. Farrelly wanted the new parishes he had begun in the developing suburbs around the core city to be truly American -- that is to say, territorial parishes. In spite of the fact that immigration statistics indicate that more than half of the Catholic immigrants to this country came here after 1900, these newly arriving people in the Cleveland area received scant attention from Bishop Farrelly. But like his predecessor Bishop Horstmann, Bishop Farrelly did continue to encourage the national parishes which had already been begun. He focused his attention primarily on the upwardly mobile children of the immigrants of the nineteenth century and carried on the work of acculturation which had already begun especially in the Irish and German communities. It was during his episcopate that the First World War occurred, however, and much of his sensitivity with regard to the incoming European Catholics was dulled by the superpatriotic fervor which swept the country during the war. This was especially .....
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Most Rev. John P. Farrelly, Bishop of Cleveland
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true after the United States declared war on the Central Powers, Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. For peoples from these countries to seek to preserve their ethnicity was especially difficult during the war. Perhaps the Germans suffered the most. In their churches the German language sermons and devotions were done away with, so much so that today there is precious little preserved of the German culture in the older German parishes. It was crucial to Bishop Farrelly that the Catholics of Cleveland be seen as loyal Americans. He therefore urged, although he did not order, German pastors to preach in English. He urged the use of English in the German schools with no consideration for the values in culture that the preservation of German might have represented. Strangely enough, the German pastors went along with this violence done to their culture, although they continued to lead private devotions and hear confessions in German to accommodate the needs of their people. For his part, Bishop Farrelly really never perceived this to be a problem. He himself came from Nashville, Tennessee, where there were only Catholics and Protestants. Nationality in Tennessee made little difference. Only religious affiliation made a difference. Farrelly lacked therefore any real sense of sympathy for the cultural needs of his newly arrived people and this lack of sympathy was accented by the partisan feelings generated in this country by the war. .....(continued next page)
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