HUNGARIAN CATHOLICS IN AMERICA 157 



100,000. They are numerous in New Jersey and Connecticut; 

 and every city, mining town, iron works, and factory village 

 in Pennsylvania has a large contingent; probably a third of 

 the Hungarian population resides in that State. Cleveland and 

 Chicago both have a very large Hungarian population, and 

 they are scattered in every mining and manufacturing centre 

 throughout Ohio, Indiana and Illinois, while West Virginia has 

 numbers of them in its mining districts. 



For a long time after the Hungarian immigration began no 

 attention was paid, from the racial standpoint, to their spir- 

 itual needs as Catholics. They worshipped at German and 

 Slavic churches and were undistinguishable from the mass of 

 other foreign Catholics. During the eighties their spiritual 

 welfare was occasionally looked after by priests of the Slavic 

 nationalities in the larger American cities, for they could often 

 speak Hungarian and thus get in touch with the people. About 

 1891 Bishop Horstmann of Cleveland secured for the Txlagyars 

 of his city a Hungarian priest, Rev. Charles Bohm, who was 

 sent there at his request by the Bishop of Vac to take charge 

 of them. The year 1892 marks the starting-point of an earnest 

 missionary effort among the Hungarian Catholics in this coun- 

 try. Father Bohm's name is connected with every temporal 

 and spiritual effort for the benefit of his countrymen. Being 

 the only priest whom the Hungarians could claim as their 

 own, he was in demand in every part of the country and for 

 over seven years his indefatigable zeal and capacity for work 

 carried him over a vast territory from Connecticut to Cali- 

 fornia, where he founded congregations, administered the 

 sacraments, and brought the careless again into the Church. 

 He built the first Hungarian church (St. Elizabeth's) in Cleve- 

 land, Ohio, as well as a large parochial school for 600 pupils, 

 a model of its kind, and also founded the two Hungarian Cath- 

 olic papers, "Szent Erzsebet Hirnoke'' and "Alagyarok Vasar- 

 napja." The second Hungarian church (St. Stephen's) was 

 founded at Bridgeport, Connecticut, in 1897, and the third 

 (St. Stephen's) at McKeesport, Pennsylvania, in 1899. Be- 

 sides those named, the following Hungarian churches have 

 been established : ( 1900) South Bend, Indiana ; Toledo, Ohio ; 

 (1901) Fairport, Ohio; Throop, Pennsylvania; (1902) Mc- 

 Adoo and South Bethlehem, Pennsylvania ; New York City, 

 New York; Passaic, New Jersey; (1903) Alpha and Perth 



