Where groups of immigrants to North America were united in nationality and religion, the growth of their church paralleled of the community. This was true whether they were Protestants or Catholics, whether they established their own settlements or formed communities with other groups. In Halifax, for example, each church has developed with the growth of the city itself.
But it has happened that Catholics have moved into communities already established by Protestant groups, where the climate of opinion was strongly opposed to them. In some places where this happened, the Catholics were absorbed into the dominant Protestant group and after a generation were indistinguishable from the rest. In other places the Catholics, despite or perhaps because of the antipathy they aroused, were able to hold on to their faith and establish the Church. In such places the Catholic Church has had long years of struggle to exist, but has gradually become accepted as an important part of community life. Such is the history of the Catholic Church in Amherst.
Previous to 1848 there were few if any Catholics in Amherst. The first Catholics there found themselves among people strongly suspicious of their religion. Descendants of the first New England settlers, for the most part Baptists, on religious grounds were strongly opposed to the Catholic religion. Descendants of the original men from Yorkshire, who on their arrival in Cumberland were already at odds with their traditional Anglican religion, could not be sympathetic to the hier-archical church like the very one their ancestors had abandoned.
Moreover, the first Catholics were laboring people, uneducated, "hewers of wood and drawers of water," who could add little to community leadership. In the Protestant mind their religion from the beginning was closely associated with their social status.
Yet after the century that the Church has been in Amherst, despite hardship and much poverty, it has undeniably become part of the local scene. One-third or more of the population are Catholics. With its active parochial schools, its two thriving parishes, the Church in Amherst cannot be ignored. It has earned the right to be heard.