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Hughes, John (1797–1864)

As bishop and later archbishop of New York, John Hughes was the foremost leader of the Catholic education movement in the middle decades of the 19th century. He not only defended the right of Catholics to educate their children in parish schools, but he also led a highly publicized effort to gain public funds for the support of these institutions.

Hughes was born in June of 1797 in County Tyrone in the north of Ireland, and emigrated with his family to Philadelphia in 1816. Sure of his religious vocation, he worked as a gardener to pay for his seminary education and ordination as a priest.

In January of 1838, the pope selected Hughes to assist and eventually succeed the aging bishop of New York. With this appointment, Hughes became the key figure in the transformation of the Church into an important force in urban educational affairs in the United States.

The Campaign for Educational Equity

Hughes's confrontational style made it inevitable that he would clash with the educational establishment in New York. In fact, the bishop's campaign against the Public School Society between 1840 and 1842 received national attention and is often considered to be a turning point in the Church's effort to establish parish schools.

Hughes objected to the Protestant orientation of the schools of the Public School Society on doctrinal and cultural grounds. These schools used only the King James Version of the Bible and taught that Catholicism was a primitive and depraved religion.

Hughes believed that these schools constituted a concerted effort to wean Catholic children from their ancestral religion and entice them to become Protestants. In an effort to build a rampart against this conspiracy, Hughes established eight free Catholic schools and a few pay schools enrolling about 5,000 children, one-fourth to one-third of all the Catholic children of school age in New York City in the early 1840s.

Hughes realized that a Catholic education for every Catholic child in New York would not be possible without additional financial support, most particularly a share of the state school funds. With the support of a sympathetic governor, Hughes petitioned the New York City Common Council for a share of the state school funds allocated to the city.

The Emergence of Nonsectarian Public Schools

The Public School Society challenged the petition as a threat to the very notion of a common school system. The Council agreed and rejected the Hughes petition, but also purged anti-Catholic passages from the Public School Society textbooks. Hughes was not satisfied and continued to press for a share of the state school funds.

He petitioned the state legislature for relief. The resulting law did not distribute funds to Catholic schools but it did end the control of state school funds by the Public School Society, put the public schools under the control of publicly elected ward commissioners, provided for a central board of education, and prohibited sectarian teaching in the schools.

The new law was no victory for Hughes. To be sure, control of New York City's public schools had changed from private to public control, but the majority of New Yorkers were Protestant and in all but a few of the city's wards, the public schools remained largely Protestant in tone and curriculum. The public schools of 1843 were much the same as those of 1841.

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