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By 1840, nearly half of New York City residents were foreign born. Many were Irish Catholics, who were generally poor and desperate for an education. Yet in New York, they found that the public schools, while free and open to all, were effectively, Protestant…
As historian Father Richard Shaw says, “Irish Catholic children…were being expected to attend schools where the King James Bible was read, where Protestant hymns were being sung, where prayers were being recited, but most importantly where textbooks and the entire slant of the teaching was very much anti-Irish and very much anti-Catholic.”
…Bishop John Hughes launched a protest. A forty-three-year-old Irish immigrant known as “Dagger John,” Hughes was fierce and uncompromising. He proclaimed, “We are unwilling to pay taxes for the purpose of destroying our religion in the minds of our children…”
These children deserved their own schools, Bishop Hughes believed. He demanded that the New York Public School Society, the Protestant civic leaders in charge of education, make city funds available for Catholic schools. Controversy over the use of the Protestant Bible in the public schools escalated nationwide. In Pennsylvania in 1843, a Catholic church was burned to the ground and thirteen people were killed in a conflict known as the Philadelphia Bible riots.
Two years later, the Public School Society was replaced by the New York City Board of Education, an elected body. Growing numbers of Catholic children enrolled. Meanwhile John Hughes was named archbishop of New York in 1850, and he used his considerable power to help create a privately funded national system of Catholic schools. It became the major alternative school system in the United States.
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