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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 February 2017
Delegates to the 1907 Catholic Educational Association in Milwaukee expressed a remarkably optimistic mood. The twentieth century seemed to portend the fulfillment of American Catholic educational dreams. The Catholic Church had a magnificent educational past, declared the Reverend William Turner (1871–1936), scholar, religious journalist, professor and librarian at Catholic University, and future bishop of Buffalo, but it had long been distorted by anti-Catholic historians. There was desperate need for an accurate history of Catholic education written by a scholarly Catholic and “from the sources themselves.” Though it was obvious that an historian should write this history, it was even more obvious that this historian also be a professional educator. For “unless the person who writes a history of education has a knowledge of pedagogical methods and has some practice and experience, the history, I think, had better not be written.”
1. Catholic Educational Association Bulletin, IV (1907), 291.Google Scholar
2. His obituary in the New York Times, September 10, 1940, declares that “he received advanced degrees from both Catholic University at Washington, D. C, and Notre Dame.” Google Scholar
3. “There is lots of material, but it is hard to get at, so little has been done in that way up to the present.” James A. Burns to Francis Howard, Washington, D. C, February 14, 1905, Archives of the National Catholic Education Association.Google Scholar
4. Burns, James A., The Catholic School System in the United States; Its Principles, Origin and Establishment (New York, 1908) and The Growth and Development of the Catholic School System in the United States (New York, 1912). When the first volume was re-published in 1912, it came out under a slightly changed title: The Principles, Origin and Establishment of the Catholic School System in the United States. Volume one is generally known by this second title. Subsequently volume one will be referred to as Burns, , Origin and volume two as Burns, , Growth. Google Scholar
5. Burns, , Growth, p. 6.Google Scholar
6. Burns, , Origin, p. 15.Google Scholar
7. Shea, John Gilmary, The Catholic Church in Colonial Days, 1521–1763, Vol. I (New York, 1886); History of the Catholic Church in the United States, 1763–1815, Vol. II (New York, 1888); History of the Catholic Church in the United States, 1808–1843, Vol. Ill (New York, 1888); History of the Catholic Church in the United States, 1844–1866, Vol. IV (New York, 1892).Google Scholar
8. Shea, John Gilmary, “The Progress of the Church in the United States, from the first Provincial Council to the Third Plenary Council of Baltimore,” American Catholic Quarterly Review, IX (July, 1884): 481–482.Google Scholar
9. Ibid.Google Scholar
10. Hecker, Isaac, The Catholic Church in the United States: Its Rise, Relations with the Republic, Growth and Future Prospects (New York, 1879). This was a pamphlet of twenty-six pages which had initially appeared in Catholic World in 1879.Google Scholar
11. Ibid., pp. 13, 16.Google Scholar
12. Brownson, Orestes, “Catholic Schools and Education,” Brownson's Quarterly Review (January, 1862): 66–84.Google Scholar
13. In one sense Catholic schools embodied a longer tradition than public schools since they traced their lineage back to Christ's injunction to “teach all nations.” Google Scholar
14. Shea, I, p. 83. Cf. Hughes, Thomas, “Educational Convoys to Europe in the Olden Time,” American Ecclesiastical Review, 29 (1903): 24–39.Google Scholar
15. Shea,III, p. 142.Google Scholar
16. Shea,IV, pp.211–212.Google Scholar
17. Ibid., p. 667.Google Scholar
18. Murray, John O'Kane, A Popular History of the Catholic Church in the United States (New York, 1876).Google Scholar
19. Ibid., pp. 429–431.Google Scholar
20. Ibid.Google Scholar
21. Ibid., p. 431.Google Scholar
22. “Proceedings of the First Plenary Council of Baltimore (1852),” quoted in Meiring, Bernard J., “Educational Aspects of the Legislation of the Councils of Baltimore, 1829–1884” (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of California, Berkeley, 1963), pp. 141–142.Google Scholar
23. Murray, , Popular History, p. 435.Google Scholar
24. For example, Shea, III, p. 453.Google Scholar
25. Shea, III, pp. 523–543; IV, pp. 46–56.Google Scholar
26. White, Charles I., “Sketch of the Origin and Progress of the Catholic Church in the United States of America,” in Darras, J. E., A General History of the Catholic Church: From the Commencement of the Christian Era until the Present Time, 4 vols. (New York, 1866), IV, p. 661.Google Scholar
27. Ibid, p. 662.Google Scholar
28. Bayley, James R., A Brief Sketch of the Early History of the Catholic Church on the Island of New York, Second Edition (New York, 1870), p. 113.Google Scholar
29. Murray, , Popular History, pp. 435–436.Google Scholar
30. Ibid., p. 435. “Everything in America is neither good nor American'” responded Murray.Google Scholar
31. Hecker, , Catholic Church in the United States, p. 17.Google Scholar
32. [Hecker?, Isaac], “The School Question,” Catholic World, XI (April, 1870): 91–106.Google Scholar
33. Ibid., p. 92.Google Scholar
34. Ibid., pp. 93–94. Hecker felt that the exclusion of the Bible from the public schools would only exacerbate the matter. “This would only make the schools purely secular, which were worse than making them purely Protestant; for, as it regards the state, society, morality, all the interests of this world, Protestantism we hold to be far better than no religion—unless you include under its name free-lovism, free-religion, woman's rightsism, and the various other isms struggling to get themselves recognized and adopted, and to which the more respectable Protestants, we presume, are hardly less opposed than we are.” Ibid., p. 94.Google Scholar
35. White, , “Sketch,” p. 654.Google Scholar
36. The same point of view had been expressed by James Gordon Bennett in the New York Herald and Horace Greeley in the New York Tribune in the 1840's.Google Scholar
37. White, , “Sketch,” p. 655.Google Scholar
38. Murray, , Popular History, p. 483.Google Scholar
39. Ibid., pp. 557–563.Google Scholar
40. Brownson, , “Catholic Schools and Education,” pp. 66–84.Google Scholar
41. Byrne, William, History of the Catholic Church in New England, 2 vols. (Boston, 1899), II, p. 618.Google Scholar
42. Lambing, Andrew, A History of the Catholic Church in the Dioceses of Pittsburg and Allegheny (New York, 1880), p. 518.Google Scholar
43. Ibid., pp. 518–519.Google Scholar
