From Corruption to Holiness: Claiming Catholicism in the New York Police Department

This paper explores how New York City religion, politics, and urban space were shaped by a massive scandal over police corruption and brutality at the turn of the 20th century, and the New York Police Department’s turn to institutional Catholicism in response. After the revelations of the Lexow Committee (1894-95), the NYPD began to identify with the Catholic Church, through public processions, an annual St. Patrick’s Day Communion Breakfast, and a discourse of the sacred moral work of policing. While the majority of NYPD officers had been Catholic since the department’s founding in 1844, Catholicism had not previously been part of NYPD institutional practices or discourses. I argue that deliberately claiming Catholicism was crucial not only for departmental morale and for the spiritual needs of its officers in a period of moral crisis, but especially for cementing the cultural legitimacy of the NYPD in the aftermath of a massive scandal.