New Book Explores Newport’s Catholic History

John F. Quinn, chairman of Salve Regina’s History Department, spent a decade assembling the collected facts & stories

Newport can thank the French — specifically the French soldiers who arrived at the seaport in 1780 to assist the colonists in their battle against the British — for making the City-by-the-Sea a welcoming community for Catholic migrants from Ireland, Italy, and Portugal to settle in during the 1800s, knowing they would be safe to practice their faith freely.

“The Rise of Newport’s Catholics: From Colonial Outcasts to Gilded Age Leaders,” traces the evolution of Catholicism in Newport and provides the fascinating back stories of some of the local landmarks the Church faithfully built as their numbers increased.

Author John F. Quinn, chairman of Salve Regina University’s History Department, spent a decade — mostly summers when he wasn’t teaching classes — working on the book. It is a must-read for anyone who went to parochial school in Newport, ever received a Sacrament or attended a wedding, christening, or funeral at one of the city’s four Catholic churches, has a relative buried or a plot awaiting them in St. Columba’s Cemetery, or simply is interested in Newport history.

Among the stories told:

• Thousands of French troops and the dozen priests who accompanied them introduced Catholicism to colonial Newport. They celebrated the first Catholic Mass in the Rhode Island colony in 1780 in the chapel they created inside the Colony House.

• Irish migrants crossed the Atlantic Ocean in the1820s to work on the construction of Fort Adams and made up the first wave of Catholics to take up residence and establish an identity in Newport.

• In 1828 Rhode Island’s first Catholic chapel was set in an abandoned schoolhouse on Barney Street and dedicated to St. Joseph.

• After the Civil War, Newport became a popular vacation spot for the well-to-do. While many Irish Catholics went to work in the hotels or private estates where the vacationers stayed, others established businesses that catered to their needs, such as florists, landscapers, and construction workers.

• By the 1880s, Italian and Portuguese migrants had settled in Newport and the Catholic population swelled.

• Wealthy Episcopal residents donated substantial funding and/or property for Newport’s Catholic residents to build churches and parish schools.

• George T. Downing, a prominent Black businessman in the city, was an advocate for Irish migrants and worked to reform voter eligibility requirements for their benefit.

Published by the University of Massachusetts Press, “The Rise of Newport’s Catholics” has received enthusiastic reviews from academics. Although it closes with more than fifty pages of footnotes detailing the multiple sources Quinn employed during his deep research, it does not read like a textbook or scholarly journal.

“It’s meant to be accessible to the average reader,” says Quinn, a New Jersey native who moved to Aquidneck Island in 1992 to take a job at Salve Regina, where “they wanted someone who could teach Irish history.”

He earned a bachelor’s degree from Georgetown University and master’s and doctoral degrees from the University of Notre Dame. A revised version of his dissertation was published as “Father Mathew’s Crusade: Temperance in 19thCentury Ireland and Irish America.”

Father Mathew and his Total Abstinence Society are included in Quinn’s book, as are a scholarly priest who became the focus of scandal when he allegedly refused to perform a Catholic funeral for a child whose parents sent her to a Newport public school instead of their parish school — the priest denied the claim — and a recount of a local woman whose charity to the Church led to the pope naming her a duchess.

But back to those French soldiers…“They really broke the ice for the Catholic community in Newport,” says Quinn. “The French kind of disarmed everyone and got them to drop their suspicions of Catholics.”

“The Rise of Newport’s Catholics: From Colonial Outcasts to Gilded Age Leaders,” is available online from UMass Press