For the past three years, I’ve been grateful for the idyllic peace of summer weekends in Philadelphia beginning Memorial Weekend. That’s something I no longer take for granted. 

Like many, I’m now haunted by the urban violence during the George Floyd protests of early summer 2020. Philadelphia’s serial explosions were exceptionally extensive and painful. A nonviolent protest was joined by hostile confrontations, fires, looting, and vandalism in several areas for weeks, fueled by various grievances, hot emotions and perhaps cool opportunism. Police were injured; 2 looters died. Neighborhoods suffered terribly on top of the devastation of the pandemic. 

The violence assaulted, even destroyed, our everyday places, not just public event sites. Today, as we try to heal, many probe the growing data to assess what happened—and what the episode reveals about us. As with other cataclysmic events, blame, polemics, and factionalism roil as “our” crisis becomes part of broader histories. 

Still. . . a redeeming act of courageous humanity during a comparable episode in nineteenth-century Philadelphia gives me hope that someday we might find counterparts in our 2020 riots. 

The notorious setting: Philadelphia’s bloody anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic Nativist Riots of May and July 1844, the worst of several such upheavals in US cities and considered by some a foreshadowing of the Civil War. Violence and fires flared throughout the city and outlying districts, hitting Catholic homes, churches, seminaries and institutions despite militia intervention. At least 15 died and more were injured. 

The quiet story within this tumult features St. Stephen’s second rector, Dr. Henry William Ducachet. Though often dismissed as a lightweight society figure, he rescued Philadelphia’s Catholic bishop (whose school Bible-reading policy helped to trigger the riots) at the new proto-Cathedral (St. John the Evangelist) under siege three blocks from St. Stephen’s; the two gathered nuns and children at a nearby orphanage amidst the fighting around them. Ducachet sheltered all in his rectory far to the north, between two other hot spots. Though a stranger, a cleric for the enemy, the Episcopal rector’s demeanor and obvious agony at the Protestants’ aggression had won their trust and willingness to follow him through the riots--no small achievement. 

The account of Ducachet’s saving the imperiled “Romanists” came to light in his memorial sermon twenty years later, provided by an unnamed Catholic admirer. I loved learning about it online through the sermon’s published form, but I really hope to find period newspapers and a Nativist Riot history that report the incident and others like it. It didn’t solve the bigger problem but it added a slender healing thread within the fraught fabric that someone within the beleaguered group publicly witnessed.

So I also hope someone unearths and highlights cases of anyone who took similar risky action to protect the “enemy” in 2020. The City of Brotherly Love still bleeds from both instances of fratricidal violence. Our hunger for demonstrated heart today—and the reality of its ongoing exercise--appear regularly in our news and social media. Such humanity, whether in global crises or in our everyday lives, reassures and inspires. If you know of any, please speak up. . .. And have a wonderful and peaceful summer!

PS Pondering new evidence against the Ducachet rescue story  

A new history of the 1844 Nativist Riots, received after this post was submitted, includes strong evidence against the Ducachet story. Bishop Kenrick’s own memoir claims he stayed with a nearby Catholic before fleeing to Baltimore and returning home. The superioress of the orphanage reported to the order’s leader in Baltimore that all (including 99 children) stayed in place, braced to flee. Kenrick rejected the option of sheltering with a New York Episcopal clergyman Stephen Tyng who was considered unfriendly to Catholics (Zachary M. Schrag, The Fires of Philadelphia. . . 2021, 151). I’m more interested in why the Ducachet story came to be and was communicated. That a Catholic credited this nearby Episcopal rector with an important and daring Catholic rescue that he was committed to broadcast suggests Ducachet's reputation for generosity under hostile conditions in Catholic circles. There are several accounts of his successful peacemaking among warring factions within the Episcopal church at the same time.

— Suzanne Glover Lindsay, St. Stephen’s historian and curator