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Church and School Triumphant: The Sources of American Catholic Educational Historiography

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 February 2017

Vincent P. Lannie
Vincent P. Lannie*
Affiliation:
Notre Dame University
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Extract

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.”

Type
Article I
Information
History of Education Quarterly , Volume 16 , Issue 2 , Summer 1976 , pp. 131 - 145
Copyright
Copyright © 1976 by New York University 

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References

Notes

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

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9. Ibid.Google Scholar

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11. Ibid., pp. 13, 16.Google Scholar

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23. Murray, , Popular History, p. 435.Google Scholar

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31. Hecker, , Catholic Church in the United States, p. 17.Google Scholar

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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