NOTE: Enjoy this excerpt from The American Daily Reader, by CatholicVote president Brian Burch and Emily Stimpson Chapman. To order the complete volume, visit the CatholicVote store today!
In 1849, thousands of cheering New Yorkers greeted Father Theobald Mathew, the famous temperance priest, when he first arrived in the United States from Ireland. The same held true in Boston, Philadelphia, and everywhere else Father Mathew visited. But not Pittsburgh. When the steamship Cornplanter docked there, on July 13, 1851, only a few people stood on the docks.
That’s not to say the city wasn’t eagerly awaiting Father Mathew’s arrival. Pittsburgh, like most of America, was enraptured with the priest. They knew that after he founded the Cork Total Abstinence Society in 1836, it took him only six months to convince 150,000 Irishmen to do the unimaginable: give up the drink. Now that he’d come to America, temperance advocates hoped he could do the same here. Mathew didn’t disappoint.
As he traveled the country, he persuaded hundreds of thousands of Catholics to take his famous temperance pledge. Lauded by bishops and politicians alike, he dined at the White House with President Zachary Taylor and became the second non-U.S. citizen admitted to the Senate floor (the first was the Marquis de Lafayette). The only people who didn’t love the priest were German immigrants (who had no intention of giving up their beer) and abolitionists angered by his silence regarding slavery.
For his first two years in America, Pittsburgh Catholics cheered those successes and waited anxiously for Mathew to visit them. So, why the empty docks when he finally came?
That was Mathew’s fault. The busy priest only sent word of his arrival the day before his ship docked, which gave his supporters no time to spread the news. During Mathew’s two-week stay in Pittsburgh, however, his fans came out in force, with more than 11,000 people in the city taking the pledge.
Four months later, in November 1851, Father Mathew sailed home to Ireland. He left behind a nation with 600,000 fewer drinkers. America wasn’t dry yet, but after Father Mathew’s visit, it was on its way.
