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Filmmaker Sam Katz looks at Philadelphia's Catholic history

Ask Sam Katz where he was born, and he will say "West Philly." Had the municipal finance expert been born Catholic instead of Jewish, however, he would likely reply, "St. Francis DeSales," the parish that bounded his first boyhood home.

"The character of ethnic Philadelphia and neighborhood Philadelphia is really about Catholic ethnicity and Catholic parishes," says Sam Katz, with producer Katie Oxx in St. Joseph's.    TOM GRALISH / Staff Photographer
"The character of ethnic Philadelphia and neighborhood Philadelphia is really about Catholic ethnicity and Catholic parishes," says Sam Katz, with producer Katie Oxx in St. Joseph's.    TOM GRALISH / Staff PhotographerRead more

Ask Sam Katz where he was born, and he will say "West Philly."

Had the municipal finance expert been born Catholic instead of Jewish, however, he would likely reply, "St. Francis DeSales," the parish that bounded his first boyhood home.

"Parish boundaries were social boundaries in Catholic Philadelphia," Katz remarked on a recent visit to Old St. Joseph's parish in Society Hill. "It used to be that you were 'intermarrying' if you married somebody from another parish."

What explains Katz's newfound interest in things Catholic?

He had a conversion. Still Jewish, the three-time mayoral candidate traded electoral politics six years ago for historical filmmaking, with three Emmy Awards already on the shelf of his History Making Productions.

After training his cameras in 2010 on the broad history of Philadelphia, he's turning them now on the great religious institution that embossed his native city like no other.

"The character of ethnic Philadelphia and neighborhood Philadelphia is really about Catholic ethnicity and Catholic parishes," he said as he sat in an upstairs room at St. Joseph's with the project's producer, Katie Oxx.

Titled Urban Trinity: The Story of Catholic Philadelphia, the project will tell the history of Catholicism from 1700 - when the region's few and marginalized "papists" were served by circuit-riding priests - to the present day.

In the planning stages for more than three years, Katz's project was suddenly invigorated last year when Pope Benedict XVI announced that Philadelphia would host the international World Meeting of Families in September 2015.

"The eyes of the world will be on Philadelphia," Katz said, because the five-day gathering is expected to be the occasion for Pope Francis' first papal visit to the United States.

He's not calling the timing a miracle, but Katz does see the moment as a "fortuitous opportunity to take a different lens to the story of Philadelphia.

"We're looking not at a religion, per se," he said, "but at a group of people who identified with a religion, and who went from being the most hated, persecuted group in the city to a position of significant power and influence."

With 1.4 million baptized Catholics in the five-county Archdiocese of Philadelphia, and 450,000 in the Diocese of Camden, Catholicism is the region's single largest religious denomination, claiming about 35 percent of the population.

Filming is due to begin in November, with the Connelly Foundation of Conshohocken serving as its principal sponsor and funder. Katz, 64, is executive producer.

The finished product will be a 75-minute documentary to be shown locally in three 25-minute segments on 6ABC just as the World Meeting of Families convenes. Hundreds of thousands of visitors are expected to attend, with more than a million coming if Pope Francis attends and celebrates a public Mass.

"Our first episode, 'Out of the Alley,' begins right here," Oxx said, gesturing toward Old St. Joseph's, the city's first Catholic parish. Founded by Jesuits in 1733, it sits hidden on cobblestoned Willing's Alley a block from Independence Mall.

"Out of the Alley," will span 1700 to 1844 and tell of the fierce tensions between early Catholics and the city's overwhelmingly Protestant majority that exploded into the notorious church-burning "Bible riots" of the 1840s.

It will also explore the friction between foreign-born bishops appointed by Rome and American Catholics, who demanded ownership of their parish properties and the power to elect their own clergy.

"What we see here are ideas of American democracy coming into conflict with Roman hierarchalism," said Oxx, an assistant professor of religious studies at St. Joseph's University. The university began at the parish in 1851 as a school of 30 male students.

The second episode will be titled "City of Parishes," Oxx said.

"It starts in the aftermath of the riots as Catholics are regrouping," and reaches to about 1920 and the slowing of the historic wave of immigration that brought millions of Europeans - many of them Irish, German, and Italian Catholics - to Philadelphia and other Eastern cities.

So great was the influx that St. Mary Magdalen de Pazzi parish, the nation's first for ethnic Italians, was bursting with 30,000 members in the late 19th century. The archdiocese scrambled to keep up, establishing 200 parishes between the anti-Catholic riots of 1844 and 1924, when Congress closed the door on most immigration.

By then, Philadelphia could boast the nation's first Catholic seminary, its own cathedral, an innovative parochial school system that had become the template for most other dioceses, and an imperious archbishop, Cardinal James Dougherty, who defiantly underscored Catholicism's newfound ascendancy by taking up residence in a 16-room mansion on City Avenue.

The third episode, "A Seat at the Table," will continue through to the present and cover what Katz called the "high point and the low point in the history of the archdiocese."

The highs include the continued ascendancy of Catholics in commerce and government; the city elected three Catholic mayors between 1962 and 1984.

Lows include the postwar flight of many Catholics from the city to the suburbs in the face of African American and Latino migration - forcing dozens of recent school and parish closings - and the devastating scandal of clergy sex abuse and cover-up that tarnished the reputations of Cardinals Anthony Bevilacqua and Justin Rigali.

Recent decades have also brought sharp declines in priestly vocations and Mass attendance, especially among the young.

"We're not shying away from these things," Katz said. "But we're putting them in the context of 350 years of history."

The struggle of Philadelphia's Catholic community is the key to the city's celebrated grittiness, Katz said to Oxx's apparent surprise.

"With each successive wave, the new arrivals joined the bottom of the ladder," he said. "And they fought each other and Protestants for jobs and space and turf and standing.

"That grittiness, that toughness, is still our character," he said. "It's still reflected on our playing fields and in our politics.

"It's the character," he said, "of Philadelphia."

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