Faribault-Stillwater Plan

The Faribault-Stillwater Plan was a formal effort to resolve the persistent conflict between Catholic and public school educators over the content and control of local schools. Sponsored by Archbishop John Ireland of St. Paul, the plan was an arrangement in the early 1890s between the cities of Faribault and Stillwater, Minnesota, and local Catholic parishes to provide publicly funded education to Catholic children in parish school buildings. In form and content, the Faribault-Stillwater Plan closely mirrored similar arrangements in use in Lowell, Massachusetts; Poughkeepsie, New York; and several other American communities in the middle of the 19th century.

The Faribault-Stillwater Plan, as it came to be called, came to national attention when Archbishop Ireland spoke about the experiment at the 1890 meeting of the National Education Association held in St. Paul. By shining a spotlight on the plan, Ireland precipitated a controversy among Catholic educational leaders about the relationship between public and parochial education.

Conservative Catholic bishops were particularly suspicious of Ireland and his efforts to find a compromise with the public school establishment. Conservatives wanted a clear endorsement of Catholic education without compromise from Church leaders and, to that end, American archbishops discussed the merits of the Faribault-Stillwater Plan at their annual conference in November 1891. Unfortunately, these leaders did not resolve the conflict. The issues raised by the Faribault-Stillwater Plan became front-page news in the Catholic press in 1892 and received extensive coverage in the secular press as well.

In response to the controversy, Ireland, through his friend Cardinal James Gibbons of Baltimore, appealed directly to Pope Leo XIII for support and approval of the plan. Gibbons sent the Pope a lengthy summary of the proceedings of the 1891 conference of American archbishops and indicated that there had been no formal criticism of Ireland or his plan. The letter bolstered Ireland's case for compromise.

After months of consideration, the Pope issued a statement acknowledging the fundamental righteousness of the school legislation of the Third Plenary Council of Baltimore held in 1884—that all Catholic children should be educated in Catholic schools if at all possible—but also noted that the Faribault Plan could be “tolerated.”

Perhaps it was inevitable that such a mixed message would be open to individual interpretation. Ireland claimed that his concept of cooperative education had been vindicated. His opponents countered that the Pope had upheld the Third Plenary Council mandate that every parish should have a school. The Faribault Plan, argued the conservatives, was to be tolerated only as a special case.

Rather than calming the waters, the Pope's message stirred up the acrimony between the two sides. The matter should have become moot when tension in Faribault and Stillwater over the use of nuns as teachers led to a termination of the cooperative agreements between the public and parochial schools in those two communities. Ireland's well-publicized plan, therefore, was no longer a “threat” to parish school development. The Faribault-Stillwater Plan came to an end in 1892.

The controversy did not die, however, with the end of the experiment in those two communities. It exposed a deeper controversy within American Catholicism between liberal and conservative perspectives on the future of Catholic education. Efforts by the Vatican to end the matter only created more tension that came to a head at the 1892 meeting of the American archbishops with Archbishop Francesco Satolli, the personal legate of Pope Leo XIII.

...