French Canadians and the Transnational Church: The Landscape of North American Catholicism, 1837-1901

Roughly 900,000 French Canadians left their homes in search of better opportunities in the U.S. between 1837 and 1929. Most of them settled in New England, where their ideas about nationalism and the doctrine of ultramontanism rocked the Catholic establishment in the last two decades of the 19th century. This paper explores the influence of immigration on larger debates over North American Catholicism. It examines the response of the New England episcopacy, whose Americanism helped to preserve the structure and ideas of the Irish-American religious establishment.