The denizens of Harvard Square uniformly worshipped in the New England Puritan tradition until the middle of the eighteenth century, when Rev. East Apthorp established a mission for the Church of England. The first gathering of a more diverse nature was the encampment in 1775 in Harvard College and on the Cambridge Commons of the Continental Army, a force including Catholics from Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Canada. When George Washington was informed of the plans for the annual Guy Fawkes procession ("for the observance of that ridiculous and childish custom of burning the Effigy of the Pope"), he halted the event, expressing his surprise at the lack of common sense and propriety in such an activity.
For decades after its completion in 1803, the old Cathedral of the Holy Cross on Franklin Street was the only Catholic church in the Boston area. That building, designed by Bulfinch, was hardly convenient for Cambridge Catholics, but their number was miniscule. A collection of small villages--the Old Village (now Harvard Square), East Cambridge, and Cambridgeport--Cambridge continued to be almost uniformly Protestant and English speaking. The 481 names on the 1822 voter list included only four that sounded "foreign." When the parish of St. Mary's, Charlestown, was created in 1828, it ranged over the large area north of the Charles River.
Then came the Irish immigration of the 1830's and 40's. At first just a few families, with men working in factories, women employed as domestics, and children occupied in an array of tasks, they moved across the bridges into East Cambridge. At this time, the parts of Cambridge were so separated, both physically and psychologically, that no one at Harvard had to pay much attention to the new Catholics in East Cambridge. The attention they did pay was divided. The morning after Protestants burned the Ursuline Convent in Charlestown in 1834, Royal Morse, an auctioneer, roused the citizenry of the Old Village to guard Harvard against anticipated Catholic retaliation, and about fifty graduates of the college spent the night there, armed with muskets and ball cartridges, prepared to fight the imaginary danger. On the other hand, typical of the intellectuals concerned for civil liberties, Judge Story led a meeting to protest the outrage in Charlestown and to affirm the rights of "our Catholic brethren."
Soon the immigrants overwhelmed the natives, with over a thousand Irish living in East Cambridge in 1840. Through the zealous efforts of the convert Daniel H. Southwick, a Sunday-school was organized there and money was raised for a church. When constituted in 1842, the "St. John's Church," later to become Sacred Heart Parish, comprised the entire towns of Cambridge and Somerville and much to the west. The pastor there, the Rev. John B. Fitzpatrick, was made coadjutor-bishop of the diocese in 1844 and two years later this man, the first priest of the first parish in Cambridge, succeeded Bishop Fenwick as the Bishop of Boston. The Rev. Manasses P. Dougherty was appointed pastor of St. John's.
