Hostname: page-component-77c89778f8-sh8wx Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-17T09:51:05.177Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Understanding American Catholic Educational History

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 February 2017

Marvin Lazerson
Marvin Lazerson*
Affiliation:
University of British Columbia
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

How does one study Catholic history? It is easy to acknowledge that, on the whole, it has not been studied well. As Andrew Greeley tirelessly reminds us, Catholics have been of only peripheral interest to historians and social scientists. The historiography of American Catholicism has traditionally been directed at confirming Catholic beliefs and commitments to the Church's institutional structure. The argument generally offered is that the flock, threatened by a Protestant environment and by attacks on Catholics, sought consolation in the Church and forged structures essentially compatible with loyal Americanism. Initial historical writings stressed the heroism and piety of early Catholic missionaries, immigrant patriotism, and Catholic difficulties in times of anti-Catholic agitation. Religious questions and Church institutions, the hierarchy (especially the “liberals” within it), the Irish (except where the non-Irish are presented as a “problem”), and neglect of the years since World War I except as a measure of the triumph of Roman Catholicism as an American middle class religion have been its hallmarks. Only the internal Church controversies between liberal and conservative clergy and the ethnic tensions of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have suggested the complexity and subtlety of American Catholicism.

Type
Research Perspective
Information
History of Education Quarterly , Volume 17 , Issue 3 , Fall 1977 , pp. 297 - 317
Copyright
Copyright © 1977 by New York University 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Notes

1. O'Brien, David J., “American Catholic Historiography; A Post-Conciliar Evaluation,” Church History, 37 (March, 1968): 80–94; Cross, Robert D., The Emergence of Liberal Catholicism (Cambridge, 1958); Barry, Colman, The Catholic Church and German Americans (Milwaukee, 1953).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2. Gleason, Philip, The Conservative Reformers: German-American Catholics and the Social Order (Notre Dame, 1968); Gleason, Philip, ed., Catholicism in America (New York, 1970); O'Brien, David J., American Catholics and Social Reform: The New Deal Years (New York, 1968).Google Scholar

3. The complexities posed in writing about Catholics is apparent in the work of Greeley, Andrew M. As a sample, see The Catholic Experience (Garden City, 1967); Ethnicity in the U.S. (New York, 1974); That Most Distressful Nation (Chicago, 1972); Priests in the U.S. (Garden City, 1972); with McCready, William C. and McCourt, Kathleen, Catholic Schools in a Declining Church (Kansas City, 1976); The American Catholic (New York, 1977).Google Scholar

4. Lannie, Vincent P., “Church and School Triumphant,” History of Education Quarterly, 16 (Summer, 1976): 131–145.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

5. Cross, Robert D., “The Origins of Catholic Parochial Schools in America,” American Benedictine Review, 16 (1965): 194–209.Google Scholar

6. Kaestle, Carl, The Evolution of an Urban School System: New York City, 1750–1850 (Cambridge, 1974); Michael Katz, Class, Bureaucracy and Schools (New York, 1971); Cremin, Lawrence A., American Education: The Colonial Experience (New York, 1970).Google Scholar

7. Katz, Michael B., “The Origins of Public Education: A Reassessment,” History of Education Quarterly, 16 (Winter, 1976): 381–407; Tyack, David, “The Kingdom of God and the Common School,” Harvard Educational Review, 36 (Fall, 1966); 447–469; Rothman, David, The Discovery of the Asylum (Boston, 1971); Dawley, Alan and Fahler, Paul, “Working Class Culture and Politics in the Industrial Revolution,” 9 Journal of Social History (June, 1976); Bowles, Samuel and Gintis, Herbert, Schooling in Capitalist America (New York, 1976).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

8. Handlin, Oscar, Boston's Immigrants (Cambridge, 1941).Google Scholar

9. Dolan, Jay P., The Immigrant Church: New York's Irish and German Catholics (Baltimore, 1975), p. 99.Google Scholar

10. Sanders, James W., The Education of an Urban Minority: Catholics in Chicago, 1833–1865 (New York, 1977), pp. 43–44.Google Scholar

11. Dolan, , Immigrant, pp. 121–140.Google Scholar

12. Sanders, , Education, pp. 56–60.Google Scholar

13. Through most of the nineteenth century the Vatican seems to have supported national parishes as a way of avoiding conflicts among the various nationality groups and as an efficient means of providing pastoral care for the non-English speaking. Tomasi, Silvano, Piety and Power: The Role of the Italian Parishes in the New York Metropolitan Area, 1880–1930 (New York, 1975).Google Scholar

14. Ravitch, Diane, The Great School Wars: New York City 1805–1973 (New York, 1974); Lannie, Vincent P., Public Money and Parochial Education (Cleveland, 1968); Greeley, Andrew M., The Catholic Experience, pp. 101–125; Kaestle, , Evolution ; Katz, , Class. In discussing the origins of parochial schools in Chicago, Sanders concludes, “It was the backdrop of rapid anti-Catholicism in Chicago generally and alleged Protestant bias of the public schools in particular that prompted a total effort to build within the City a Catholic educational island.” (39) See also the discussion of Catholic schooling in St. Louis in Troen, Selwyn, The Public and the Schools: Shaping the St. Louis System (Columbia, 1975), pp. 31–54.Google Scholar

15. Dolan, , Immigrant, pp. 164–165; 47–62. On trusteeism, see Guilday, Peter, “Trusteeism,” Historical Records and Studies, 18 (1929): 7–73; Fecher, V.J., A Study of the Movement for German National Parishes in Philadelphia and Baltimore (1787–1802) (Rome, 1955).Google Scholar

16. Dolan, , Immigrant, pp. 72–73. In St. Louis, eighty percent of the children of German parents attended segregated schools in 1860. When the German community on the basis of its political influence was able to have German language instruction introduced into the public schools after 1864, the proportion of German children in public schools was reversed. By 1880, four of five German children were attending the public schools. Troen, , Public, p. 64.Google Scholar

17. Dolan, , Immigrant, p. 104.Google Scholar

18. Ibid, pp. 106–109.Google Scholar

19. Merwick, Donna, Boston's Priests (Cambridge, 1973), p. 39.Google Scholar

20. Dolan, , Immigrant, pp. 105–107.Google Scholar

21. Sanders, , Education, pp. 132–137.Google Scholar

22. Ulrich, Robert J., “The Bennett Law of 1889: Education and Politics in Wisconsin,” doct. diss., University of Wisconsin, 1965; Kuchera, Daniel, Church-State Relations in Education in Illinois, Catholic University of America, Educational Research Monograph, 19 (1955), #1, 108–133; Lord, Robert H., et. al, History of the Archdiocese of Boston, 1604–1943 (New York, 1944), III. See Tyack, David, “The Perils of Pluralism,” American Historical Review, 74 (Oct., 1968): 74–98.Google Scholar

23. Weisz, Howard R., “Irish-American and Italian-American Educational Views and Activities, 1870–1900: A Comparison,” doct. diss. Columbia University, 1968, pp. 97–162 notes that many Irish hoped for accommodation with the public schools, but were frequently treated to “insults to their people and religion by teachers and textbooks; administrative penalties against Catholic children; prejudice against Irish Catholic teachers; prejudice against the Irish and other Catholics in the election of school boards.” Google Scholar

24. Ibid., pp. 163–210.Google Scholar

25. Ibid., pp. 278–279; Kuchera, , Church-State, p. 135, n. 2; Thernstrom, Stephan, Poverty and Progress (Cambridge, 1964), pp. 171–180; Lazerson, Marvin, Origins of the Urban School (Cambridge, 1971), pp. 19–24.Google Scholar

26. Buetow, Harold A., Of Singular Benefit (New York, 1970), pp. 144–161, 176–177; Weisz, , “Irish-American,” pp. 285–308.Google Scholar

27. Connors, Edward M., Church-State Relationships in Education in the State of New York, Catholic University of America, Educational Research Monograph, 4 (1951), 02, 110–125.Google Scholar

28. Morrissey, Timothy, “Archbishop John Ireland and the Faribault-Stillwater School Plan of the 1890's,” doct. diss., University of Notre Dame, 1975, pp. 128–145. Morrissey's excellent dissertation covers Ireland's educational thought and the Faribault/Stillwater school controversies in detail.Google Scholar

29. Morrissey also notes the opposition of a small group in the hierarchy usually identified with the liberals. The liberal-conservative split within the American hierarchy is discussed in Cross, , Emergence. Google Scholar

30. Morrissey, , pp. 306–307. On opposition to the parochial schools among Irish Catholics, see Weisz, , “Irish-American” pp. 62–96. Many of Weisz's arguments are summarized in his “Irish-American Attitudes and the Americanization of the English Language Parochial School,” New York History, 53 (April, 1972): 157–176.Google Scholar

31. Cross, Robert D., “The Changing Image of the City Among American Catholics,” Catholic Historical Review, 48 (April, 1962): 38.Google Scholar

32. Sanders, , Education, p. 48.Google Scholar

33. Greene, Victor, “For God and Country: The Origins of Slavic Catholic Self-Consciousness in America,” Church History, 35 (1966): 446–460.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

34. Sanders, , Education, p. 50.Google Scholar

35. Ibid, p. 54.Google Scholar

36. Sanders, Education, p. 70. Also see Vecoli, Rudolph J., “Prelates and Peasants: Italian Immigrants and the Catholic Church,” Journal of Social History, 2 (Spring, 1969): 217–268; Covello, Leonard, The Social Background of the Italo-American School Child (Leyden, Netherland, 1967); Olneck, Michael R. & Lazerson, Marvin, “The School Achievement of Immigrant Children, 1900–1930,” History of Education Quarterly, 14 (Winter, 1974): 453–482.Google Scholar

37. The Bishop of Pittsburgh had expressed concern as early as 1852 that “our feeble hierarchy” might be swamped by the religious orders over which it had little direct control. Ellis, John Tracy, Perspectives in American Catholicism (Baltimore, 1963), p. 140. The centralization of authority is ably discussed in Merwick, , Boston Priests. Google Scholar

38. See Sanders, , Education, pp. 105–140.Google Scholar

39. On the continuing conflict between Chicago's Poles and the hierarchy, see Shanabruch, Charles, “The Catholic Church's Role in the Americanization of Chicago Immigrants, 1833–1928,” doct. diss., University of Chicago, 1975, pp. 558–570. See also Galzer, Nathan and Moynihan, Daniel P., Beyond the Melting Pot (Cambridge, 1963).Google Scholar

40. Sanders, , Education, p. 141.Google Scholar

41. Chicago may have been extreme in its disorganization since many other cities moved toward greater administrative centralization before 1910. But in the large cities at least the differences were of quantity not kind.Google Scholar

42. On developments in public education, see Tyack, David, The One-Best System (Cambridge, 1974).Google Scholar

43. Sanders, , Education, p. 147. The idea that centralization and bureaucratization were responses to consumer demands has been insufficiently studied by educational historians. What exactly this meant and how the interplay between consumer desires and policy decisions worked also remains very unclear.Google Scholar

44. Sanders, , Education, pp. 141–179 discusses Chicago. On national trends, see Catholic Educational Review, established in 1911; Sister Eugenia Marie Golden, “Aspects of the Social Thought of the National Catholic Educational Association, 1904–1957,” doct. diss., Fordham University, 1958; Buetow, , Singular Benefit, pp. 233–241, & passim,; and Weisz, , “Irish-American Attitudes,” pp. 328–358.Google Scholar

45. Clarke, Stephen J., “Two Schools and Two Ideas: A Study of Progressivism and Character Education in the Public Schools of the City of Boston, Massachusetts, and the Parochial Schools of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Boston, 1920–1940,” doctoral dissertation, Harvard University, 1965, p. 2. See also Schrag, Peter, Village School Downtown (Boston, 1967).Google Scholar

46. Sanders, , Education p. 139. Given this line of argument, it is not surprising that the first major study of the effects of Catholic schooling published in 1966 found few differences between public school and Catholic school students. Greeley, Andrew M. and Rossi, Peter, The Education of Catholic Americans (Chicago, 1966). See also Madaus, George F. and Linnan, Roger, “The Outcome and Catholic Education,” School Review, 81 (Feb., 1973): 207–232.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

One last comment should be made. This essay has treated neither social class nor race in the development of Catholic schools. On the whole, there is little available for the pre-World War II period and much must be inferred from highly disparate sources. James Sanders discusses “the poverty factor” in Chicago, but it is the least satisfying of his book, simply reaffirming that Catholic immigrants were poor but were upwardly mobile during the twentieth century. In the late nineteenth century, upper class Catholics tended to oppose parochial school building, but over time, and certainly after 1945, they became strong supporters of separate schools. Both questions of race and class will be addressed in forthcoming work.