For my final project I have started to narrow down and define the focus of the project. The overall theme of my project is going to emphasize the diversity of the different European immigrant groups that came to the United States in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I want to emphasize to my audience that the various European ethnic groups had different experiences in the United States based on cultural and religious differences. Specifically, I want to highlight the religious differences between Roman Catholic immigrants and the Greek Catholic Carpatho-Rusyn immigrants. I want my audience to be able to understand the source of those differences and how religious differences between these two groups of Catholics led to conflict in the United States.
So far I have done research on the establishment of the first Greek Catholic Churches in the United States by the initial Carpatho-Rusyn immigrants in the 1880s, the Greek Catholic perspective of the conflict with Roman Catholic in the United States, and the various reactions of the Carpatho-Rusyn people to the conflict. I am planning to conduct more research on the perspective of the leadership of the Roman Catholic Church regarding the Greek Catholic Church’s presence in the United States, and the response of the Vatican to the conflict between the Roman Catholics and the Greek Catholics.
So far most of the primary sources I have found are newspaper articles, letters, and papal decrees that were compiled together into a book by Father John Slivka called Historical Mirror: Sources of the Rusin and Hungarian Greek Rite Catholics in the United States of America 1884-1963. This book presents sources about the establishment of the Greek Catholic Church in the United States and the conflict the arose between the leadership of the Roman Catholic Church and the Greek Catholic priests from the perspective of the the Greek Catholic priests.
My biggest challenge so far has been in deciding how I want to organize and design my project. So far I have not been able to decide how I want my audience to interact with my primary sources and how best to present the information to my audience.
The next steps are to find some sources from the leadership of the Roman Catholic Church in the United States and then to gather all of the primary sources I have together in order to better organize them.
The image I have chosen to include in my final project is an 1893 image that depicts members of the Greek Catholic Union at their first formal gathering in Scranton,PA. I chose to include this image because it depicts the early founders of the Greek Catholic Union, the first and largest organization established by Greek Catholic Carpatho-Rusyn immigrants to preserve and promote their unique culture and religious faith against attacks like those of the leadership of the Roman Catholic Church in the United States. I will provide my intended audience with some background information about the Greek Catholic Union and they will analyze this photo alongside some articles from the Greek Catholic Union’s newspaper Amerikansky Russky Viestnik.
