Ursuline Convent Riots

The Ursuline Convent riots occurred August 11 and 12, 1834 in Charlestown, Massachusetts, near Boston in what is now Somerville, Massachusetts. During the riot, a convent of Roman Catholic Ursuline nuns was burned down by a Protestant mob. The event was triggered by reported abuse of a member of the order, and was fueled by the rebirth of extreme anti-Catholic sentiment in antebellum New England.

Massachusetts, founded in the 17th century, had a long history of intolerance toward Roman Catholicism. From its inception, little tolerance was exhibited by the Puritan leadership of the colony even toward Protestant views that did not accord with theirs. When the Province of Massachusetts Bay was established in 1692, its charter enshrined tolerance for other Protestant sects, but specifically excluded political benefits for Roman Catholics. After American independence, there was a broadening of tolerance in the nation, but this tolerance did not particularly take hold in Massachusetts. The arrival of many Catholic Irish immigrants ignited sectarian tensions, which were abetted by the Protestant religious revivals of the Second Great Awakening.

The idea of establishing an Ursuline school in Boston originated with Father John Thayer, a Massachusetts native who converted to Roman Catholicism after a transformative experience in Rome in 1793. Thayer died in 1815, having recruited several nuns in Ireland for the project, and donated his estate to the cause. In 1820, the Most Reverend Jean-Louis Lefebvre de Cheverus, bishop of the newly created diocese of Boston, oversaw the opening of the convent in the rectory of the Boston cathedral. A school for girls was set up in the convent, intended to educate the area's poor. Approximately 100 students were eventually enrolled. The early years of the school were plagued by tuberculosis, which claimed the lives of the the convent's first mother superior and several of the the sisters. A new leader, Mother Mary Edmond St. George, was recruited from the Ursuline convent in Trois Rivieres, Quebec, where the Boston nuns had trained.

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