Catholic parishes and mutual aid: how Boston's Irish survived

Irish Catholic parishes Boston mutual aid: the two worked as halves of one system, because neither could manage alone. Parish priests fed, sheltered, and buried new arrivals street by street, while lay organisations such as the Charitable Irish Society raised cash, found positions in service, and paid fares onward. Between 1847 and 1857, that combination was often the only safety net a Boston Irish family had.

Boston’s Irish community before the famine

Boston’s oldest Irish organisation predates the famine by more than a century. The Charitable Irish Society was founded on March 17, 1737, by twenty-six men of Ulster birth or ancestry, for “the relief of poor, aged and infirm persons, such as have been reduced by sickness, shipwreck and other Accidental misfortunes.” For its first several decades, membership was restricted to Protestants; the qualification was formally dropped in 1760, and by the society’s 1808 constitutional revision, “any person of Irish birth or descent” was eligible to join.

Catholic membership of the Charitable Irish Society had already been rising for two decades before the famine. Bernard Fitzpatrick, father of the future bishop, served as the society’s president in 1830, and the Reverend Thomas J. O’Flaherty, a priest and former Vicar-General of the diocese, served as president in 1831, the only clergyman ever to hold the office. At the society’s 1837 centenary dinner, held before 250 guests with Governor Edward Everett in attendance, president James Boyd welcomed the growing number of Roman Catholics joining the organisation, and the toasts that evening included one to Daniel O’Connell, the Irish MP who had carried Catholic Emancipation through the British Parliament eight years earlier.

That goodwill sat alongside real danger. The Ursuline Convent in Charlestown was burned by a Protestant mob in August 1834. Three years later, on June 11, 1837, a clash between a Protestant fire company and an Irish funeral procession on Broad Street turned into a riot serious enough that the predominantly Irish Catholic Montgomery Guards militia, formed that January under the patronage of Charitable Irish Society members Andrew Carney, Thomas Mooney, and Edwin Palmer, was called out to help restore order. The guards were harassed by Protestant crowds even while carrying out that duty, and the unit was disbanded within a year. By 1845, the year the potato blight first reached Ireland, Boston had an estimated 8,000 Irish-born residents, and the pattern was already set: the Catholic parish and the immigrant benevolent society were the two institutions the community could rely on when trouble outran what any one family could handle.

How the famine overwhelmed a small safety net

Word of the total failure of the 1846 potato crop reached Boston on January 20, 1847, carried by the Royal Mail Ship Hibernia along with news that the British government’s Irish Public Works Relief Programme was due to close that March. The Charitable Irish Society had already begun raising money the previous winter: former president the Reverend Thomas J. O’Flaherty had opened a special Irish Charitable Fund in late 1845 and, working alone, collected $1,000 of it within nine days. By the time the Hibernia’s news arrived, Boston’s response moved from one society’s effort to a citywide one.

Between 1846 and 1851, roughly 130,000 famine refugees arrived in Boston, a volume no single institution had been built to absorb. Rising public relief costs, disease, and petty crime were blamed on the newcomers by much of the city’s Protestant press, even as thousands of ordinary Bostonians of both faiths kept giving.

Parish priests as first responders

The daily work of catching people as they came off the ships fell largely to parish clergy. St. Mary’s Church on Endicott Street in the North End, dedicated in 1836 and staffed by Jesuits from 1847, sat close to the wharves where the famine ships landed. In December 1846, its pastor, the Reverend Patrick Flood, together with Charitable Irish Society member Thomas Mooney, took in five orphaned children, aged two to fourteen, found alone on the docks. Their mother had died during the crossing from Liverpool aboard the Anglo-Saxon. Within a week, Flood and Mooney had raised $553 for the children’s care before placing them in St. Mary’s Male Orphan Asylum.

A short distance away, at St. Patrick’s Parish on Northampton Street, the Reverend Thomas Lynch, a native of County Cavan, became known for the material help he gave newly landed immigrants. His fluency in Gaelic mattered as much as his charity: many of the arrivals from the south and west of Ireland had little English and found Boston’s crowded, unfamiliar streets overwhelming. Lynch kept boots and shoes on hand at his house, distributed clothing made at the parish, and let destitute families sleep in the church basement until other shelter turned up.

Bishop Fitzpatrick’s diocesan appeal

The Catholic Church Boston 1850s residents knew had been reshaped by the man who took charge of it just as the famine began. John Bernard Fitzpatrick, the first Boston-born bishop of the city, became the third Bishop of Boston on August 11, 1846. Five months into his tenure, on February 7, 1847, he launched a diocesan-wide appeal for famine relief. It eventually raised $24,000, sent directly to Archbishop William Crolly in Armagh.

The appeal moved fast because parish and society networks overlapped. Andrew Carney, a Catholic businessman and Charitable Irish Society member, personally donated $1,000 and served as treasurer of the diocesan fund. The Reverend James O’Reilly, a close associate of the late O’Flaherty, raised $1,300 in cash and $700 in pledges in a single day. By the time the Hibernia sailed out of Boston again in early February 1847, it carried $72,600 in relief funds bound for Ireland. Over Fitzpatrick’s twenty years as bishop, the diocese grew from 40 priests to 300, and he added an orphanage, a hospital, and a college to serve a Catholic population that famine immigration had multiplied many times over.

Catholic relief did not stay separate from the city’s wider response. On February 18, 1847, some 4,000 people attended a public meeting at Faneuil Hall that formed the New England Relief Committee, drawing in Boston’s Protestant merchant elite alongside Charitable Irish Society members such as Andrew Carney and Patrick Donahoe. Within days, Captain Robert Bennet Forbes had secured the release of a US Navy sloop, the Jamestown, to carry provisions to Ireland; it reached Cork on April 12, 1847, after a fifteen-day crossing, with roughly 800 tons of food aboard. The committee went on to send $151,000 in relief that year, part of an estimated $300,000 that left Boston for Ireland during 1847 alone. That level of cross-denominational cooperation did not survive the decade, which is part of why the parish and society network mattered so much once it had gone.

Irish Catholic parishes Boston mutual aid after 1847

Citywide fundraising for Ireland fell away after 1847, but the local need for aid in Boston did not. The Charitable Irish Society, though small (it added only thirty new members through the entire 1850s, reaching 130 by 1860), kept its ledgers open. Between 1848 and 1854 it distributed $766 to about 660 people. When the Irish Immigrant Aid Society formed in 1850 to help place young immigrant women in domestic service and to cover the cost of onward train fares for those seeking work further west, the older society backed it with annual grants of $300 for the next seven years. By 1852, it was also contributing directly to the poor gathered at the city’s Emigrant Hall.

Patrick Donahoe, editor of the Boston Pilot and a Charitable Irish Society president in both 1851 and 1854, used his newspaper to campaign against the nativist politics that were about to make the decade harder still.

Mutual aid against a hostile political climate

In the 1854 state elections, the anti-immigrant Know Nothing (American) Party swept the Massachusetts governorship and nearly every seat in the legislature. Once in office, the new majority barred foreign languages from public school instruction and set up a so-called “nunnery committee” with authority to make surprise inspections of Catholic convents. Boston politicians, who had attended the Charitable Irish Society’s dinners for decades, stopped coming; none were invited to, or appeared at, the society’s dinners for the rest of the 1850s.

It was in this climate that the parish and society network mattered most. Public officials had withdrawn their goodwill, and the wider ecumenical fundraising of Black ‘47 had long since dried up, so what remained was largely internal: priests who knew their parishioners by name, and a small, ageing benevolent society whose members kept showing up for each other regardless of who held the State House.

What historians cannot know

The written record favours organisations that kept minute books. The Charitable Irish Society’s surviving ledgers, held today at the Massachusetts Historical Society, record grant amounts and often names, which is why historians can state precisely that $766 went to 660 people between 1848 and 1854. Parish relief left a thinner trail. A meal given at a rectory door, a night’s shelter in a church basement, a pair of boots handed to a barefoot arrival: these transactions were rarely written down, and where they were, as with the Reverend Flood’s $553 collection, it is usually because a newspaper happened to cover it. The true volume of informal parish charity in Boston during these years is almost certainly larger than what survives in any surviving account book, and it cannot now be reconstructed with confidence.

Boston’s Irish Catholic parishes and the city’s older benevolent societies did not simply run parallel programmes. A priest who took in an orphaned family off the docks and a lay treasurer counting out a society’s grant money in the same week were drawing on the same, overlapping circle of parishioners, donors, and volunteers. That overlap, more than any single institution, is what let Boston’s Irish community absorb an influx that its own civic leaders openly worried could not be absorbed. The years just after the famine, when public sympathy had curdled into Know Nothing politics, tested how far the arrangement could stretch without outside help. Readers who want the fuller arc of that decade, from Boston’s earliest Irish arrivals in 1847, through the neighbourhoods where families settled, can trace where Boston’s Irish lived in the years these parishes served, and see how the political backlash described here played out in the Know Nothing Party’s campaign against Irish Catholics.

Sources and further reading

• Catherine B. Shannon, “‘With Good Will Doing Service’: The Charitable Irish Society of Boston (1737-1857),” Historical Journal of Massachusetts, vol. 43, no. 1 (Winter 2015), Institute for Massachusetts Studies, Westfield State University.
• Charitable Irish Society of Boston, “CIS History, Part II,” organisational history, charitableirishsociety.org.
• Robert H. Lord, John E. Sexton, and Edward T. Harrington, History of the Archdiocese of Boston in the Various Stages of Its Development, 1604 to 1943, vol. 2 (Boston: Pilot Publishing Co., 1944).
• Massachusetts Office of the Secretary of the Commonwealth, Commonwealth Museum, “Irish Immigration and the Know-Nothings,” online exhibit.
• Jesuit Archives and Research Center, RG 10.19, St. Mary’s Church, Boston, Massachusetts, finding aid.