Persecuted to Powerful: Exhibiting a History of New York’s Catholics

Hundreds of years ago, there was a tiny religious minority so despised and persecuted that it was forced to build its own educational, social-welfare and political infrastructure just to survive in the city of New York. Improbably enough, this subculture ultimately seized power from the entrenched majority, became the city’s largest Christian group, created institutions that affected everyone in the five boroughs and permanently changed what it meant to be a New Yorker.

Yet a museum has never devoted a major exhibition to the history of this transformational group — that is, until Friday, when “Catholics in New York, 1808 to 1946,” opens to the public at the Museum of the City of New York.

The show, with some 400 objects and images, includes political banners, parochial school report cards, yearbooks going back to the 19th century, vestments, school uniforms, trophies, academic medals and a pew rental receipt. There are holy cards, ceremonial swords, parade sashes and a first communion outfit from 1941. And there are more than 100 family photographs, as well as oral histories on audio and video conducted for the exhibition.

“They started as a tiny group, yet changed the city for New Yorkers who were not Catholic, changing the nature of politics, social welfare and public life,” said Sarah M. Henry, the museum’s chief curator.

The city’s Roman Catholics have been troubled lately by controversy after controversy, and the exhibition makes it clear that their religion has drawn criticism from its earliest years.

Through the generations, negative characterizations of the church changed along with the power of the church — from nativist xenophobia about “the Catholic Menace” to more modern conflicts: anti-Communist fervor, school closings, sexual abuse of children by priests, and the censuring of politicians who favor abortion rights.

Though the show coincides with the bicentennial of the founding of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York, the exhibition was conceived and curated independently by the museum, which received no financing from the archdiocese, it said.

The archdiocese and its archives, churches and religious orders lent more than 20 objects to the exhibition, and Cardinal Edward M. Egan is expected to attend the invitation-only opening reception on Thursday. In addition, museum curators took out advertisements in diocesan publications asking for historic artifacts and documents for the 4,000-square-foot exhibition, which will be on view until Dec. 31.

Previously, in both historical circles and popular discussion, “for the most part there has been a focus on discrete ethnic groups — the Irish, Italians and Germans, for example — forgetting that most of them had one thing in common: They were Catholic,” said Terry Golway, an exhibition adviser who directs the Kean Center for American History at Kean University in Union, N.J.

In recent years, historians have offered new insights about the complex diversity of the Catholic experience in the city, as well as its highly localized organization, its painful accommodation of successive waves of immigrants, and the tremendous differences in Catholic identity within neighborhoods and parishes.