Wednesday was Ash Wednesday, a day in which many Christians receive ashes as a sign of penance before Lent. Catholics have a particular liking for this holiday, so much so that Chapel Hill’s Newman Parish reserved the Great Hall in the Union for a midday Ash Wednesday service.
In North Carolina — and the South in general — Protestantism is pretty much the default. It’s called the Bible Belt for a reason, and that Bible is usually the King James Version. According to Carolina Demography, Protestant North Carolinians outnumber their Catholic neighbors by about 8 to 1.
However, as more migrants arrive in the state from Latin America, the Catholic Church comes with them; since 1990, the number of Hispanic North Carolinians has grown ten times over, and the number of Catholics more than doubled during the same time period.
We North Carolina Catholics aren’t a new phenomenon though. We’ve been here since the English planted their flags on the Outer Banks and Pamlico Sound. Mostly living in the state’s major towns like Bath and New Bern, Catholics formed a small but not insignificant portion of the early North Carolina European population. In 1784, Father Patrick Cleary became the then-province’s first Catholic priest, settling in New Bern.
Following the Revolution, Catholics continued to make their presence known on the state level; in 1781, Catholic Thomas Burke was elected governor of the newly independent state. Another Catholic wouldn’t serve as governor of North Carolina until Mike Easley was inaugurated in 2001.
Like in the rest of the United States, early North Carolina Catholics were discriminated against; the anti-Catholic Know Nothing party saw some electoral success in southwestern North Carolina. The 1920s iteration of the Ku Klux Klan took particular disliking toward Catholics who immigrated from the North and Europe.
Massive surges in the populations of Evangelical Protestantism during the 19th and 20th centuries pushed Catholic North Carolinians to near-obscurity; by 1960, Catholics consisted of less than one percent of the state’s population. However, the recent surge in the state’s Hispanic population has rapidly increased the state’s Catholic population, going from a rounding error in 1960 to 4.3 percent in 2010. As of 2017, North Carolina is home to the nation’s largest Catholic parish, St. Matthew’s in Charlotte.
Catholics in North Carolina have certainly left their mark on the state. Some of the most beautiful buildings in the state were the doing of Catholics. The Basilica of St. Lawrence in Asheville, the Sacred Heart Church in Raleigh, the Basilica Shrine of St. Mary in Wilmington and the Cathedral of St. Patrick in Charlotte are all architectural beauts built on behalf of the beatified.
We’re also responsible for the Filet-o-Fish being a thing — we’re not supposed to eat meat on Fridays, and Catholics are a pretty big market in Cincinnati where the sandwich debuted (if I’m being perfectly honest though, I’d rather not claim that one as a “win.”)
