What Parish Are You From?: A Chicago Irish Community and Race Relations

by Eileen M. McMahon

For Irish Americans as well as for Chicago's other ethnic groups, the local parish once formed the nucleus of daily life. Focusing on the parish of St. Sabina's in the southwest Chicago neighborhood of Auburn-Gresham, Eileen McMahon takes a penetrating look at the response of Catholic ethnics to life in twentieth-century America. She reveals the role the parish church played in achieving a cohesive and vital ethnic neighborhood and shows how ethno-religious distinctions gave way to racial differences as a central point of identity and conflict.

For most of this century the parish served as an important mechanism for helping Irish Catholics cope with a dominant Protestant-American culture. Anti-Catholicism in the society at large contributed to dependency on parishes and to a desire for separateness from the American mainstream. As much as Catholics may have wanted to insulate themselves in their parish communities, however, Chicago demographics and the fluid nature of the larger society made this ultimately impossible. Despite efforts at integration attempted by St. Sabina's liberal clergy, white parishioners viewed black migration into their neighborhood as a threat to their way of life and resisted it even as they relocated to the suburbs.

The transition from white to black neighborhoods and parishes is a major theme of twentieth-century urban history. The experience of St. Sabina's, which changed from a predominantly Irish parish to a vibrant African-American Catholic community, provides insights into this social trend and suggests how the interplay between faith and ethnicity contributes to a resistance to change.

Genres: History

238 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 1995

Reviews

[Griffin · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was torn over whether to give this a 3 or a 4. There's some very impressive and thought-provoking research into the life of a small community whose experiences are indicative of broader trends among white ethnic communities in Chicago during the twentieth century, but McMahon's scholarship is undermined by an overly sentimental regard for the Irish Catholic world of her life that frequently colors her analysis in unfortunate ways. At times this means making rhetorical mountains out of factual molehills, alchemizing modest, even trivial evidence into dubiously grandiose, hagiographic statements about the glory of a community she not only admires but fawns over. At other times, it means cautious apologetics for the racism of white Catholics. Certainly she criticizes white antipathy for Black people and sympathizes with the discrimination and violence the latter have faced, yet she often seems torn between trumping up instances of Catholic anti-racism on the one hand and emphasizing the supposedly understandable roots of the majority of the community's bigotry on the other. I do agree that the ferocious white reaction to changing demographics must be examined (though not excused, as this book at times comes very near to doing) with respect to their attachment to a tight-knit, hard-won middle class existence oriented around a very particular shared religious and ethnic (more so than racial, at least before World War II) identity, to chide Martin Luther King's integration campaign in white neighborhoods for be "disregard[ing] local sentiment" and making "a moral judgment against [whites'] way of life," is, I think, appalling.

Additionally, I also have to dock points for McMahon's baffling choice to render her interviewees' names as "G. Hendry" or "J. Nelligan," and forcing readers to turn to the notes section to learn their first names. I genuinely can't understand why she did this.

[Tim Lacy · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book explains why St. Sabina's parish matters in Chicago's Catholic history and Chicago history in general. The time period covered is roughly 1880 to 1980. In this case study McMahon also explains, along the way, why Chicago functions as a "city of neighborhoods"---how that came to be, why it matters, and, incidentally, how it affects Chicago's politics, culture, and social life. By the end, you also understand the significance of Fr. Pfleger in Chicago and to U.S. Catholicism. A sense of loss pervades the text, mostly because the oral histories obtained and underscored are primarily from Irish families that ended up leaving St. Sabina's. The overall story, then, feels like a tragedy.

[kathleen · Rating 2 out of 5]

this book dragged on far too long

[Cori · Rating 2 out of 5]

Informative, but the focus on one parish was a turn off for me as I hoped to learn more about parishes all over the city, particularly the northside.