Mass Moments reminds us today that on August 12, 1834 the Catholic convent housing the Ursuline order of nuns in Charlestown, Massachusetts was sacked by a Protestant mob – then burned to the ground. Catholics were not welcome in the early days of Massachusetts – in fact they were banned by law. By 1780 the state’s new constitution guaranteed freedom of religion and the non-threatening well-educated French Catholics were tolerated as the descendants of British Protestants were overwhelmingly dominant. It was the arrival of the Irish immigrants that turned the tide of feeling. Boston’s Irish Catholic population doubled in the 1830s – thereby, the religious, ethnic, economic and political tensions mounted as fast as the Irish increase. Although the Ursulines – devoted to the education of women – were engaged in teaching both Catholic and Protestant young ladies of good families, they and their convent became the misplaced focus of mob wrath that night – fueled by false stories and superstitious fears. When the night was over, the stately convent lay in ruins as the Protestant firefighters ignored the blaze and the nuns and students who escaped in nightclothes were standing in farm fields. The ruins remained as a reminder of the mob act for forty years. The site was leveled in 1875, and the bricks were incorporated into Boston’s Cathedral of the Holy Cross.

On this day …in 1834, the Ursuline Convent in Charlestown lay in ruins. The night before, a Protestant mob sacked it and burned it to the ground. The nuns who lived in the elegant building and their students at the female academy they ran were forced to flee for their lives. The rioters were mostly poor Yankee laborers who feared and hated Irish Catholic immigrants. While some of Boston’s wealthiest Protestants sent their daughters to the Ursuline Academy, most Yankees harbored a deep prejudice against Catholics. Long suspicious of “popery,” Protestant Boston was receptive to the malicious rumors that swirled about the convent. The convent burning was a prelude to the fierce anti-Catholicism that would greet the famine Irish who flooded into Boston a decade later.

Read the full article here at MassMoments.com.