Crossing Parish Boundaries

Timothy B. Neary's excellent study of the Catholic Youth Organization (CYO) represents an important counterpart to works that emphasize the role of working-class Catholics in segregation and racial violence. Neary acknowledges the discrimination and segregation in Catholic parochial life, but with his focus on the CYO, he takes a more optimistic view, at least for the period through the late 1940s. Neary explains why black converts poured into the church in the wake of the first Great Migration. Above all, Catholic schools offered high academic standards, discipline, and an element of status. Parish organizational life brought the opportunity for community building, and affiliation with the Irish Catholic establishment brought entrée to machine politics, patronage, and jobs. The aesthetics of Catholic architecture and ritual also offered beauty and elevation in often-blighted neighborhoods. The hierarchy equated black parishes with “national” parishes, no different from those of other ethnic groups. A shift from ethnically based national to territorial parishes, however, and continued relegation of African Americans to all-black congregations, clearly represented a form of Jim Crow

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