E DUCATION
Catholic Education in America: BY J. A. GRAY J. A. Gray is a writer and editor, and most recently served as communication manager for the Archdiocese of San Francisco.
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or more than a century and a half, Catholic schools have been the largest educational system in the United States that is not owned and run by the government. Today Catholic elementary and secondary schools enroll more than 1.6 million students; in undergraduate and postgraduate programs offered by 226 Catholic colleges and universities there are another 850,000 students earning degrees and gaining vocational expertise. Catholic schools and teachers and administrators – and the donors who support them – have created an invaluable resource for millions of families, Catholic and non-Catholic alike, of all classes, stations and races. Catholic educators seek to engage the whole person – both mind and soul – and they recognize an enduring responsibility to provide schooling for the nonwealthy, the underserved and the immigrant. American Catholic education is undeniably a great achievement, and like any great undertaking it has required faithfulness, ingenuity and sacrifice. But its history has also had elements of a battle, with powerful enemies. And that battle seems never to be quite over. CATHOLICS IN THE NEW UNITED STATES The English colonial implantation had a two-century-long habit of near zero tolerance for Catholics. Catholicism had been generally illegal, and Catholics were persona non grata. In 1790, when the 13 colonies became the 13 states, Catholics numbered only 35,000 in a population of 4 million; and by 1820 the number of American Catholics was still no more than 200,000. A revered pioneer from the early 1800s is St.
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Elizabeth Ann Seton (1774–1821), a native of New York who worked in Maryland with the support of Bishop John Carroll (the nation’s first and only bishop 1790-1800) to found a teaching order of sisters and establish schools in several Eastern cities. Seton is a heroine of Catholic education, but she labored in the vineyard during a simpler era of anti-Catholic discrimination, when Catholics were few on the ground. Two decades after her death came the dawn of a new era, in which our Protestant brethren would have to count their papist neighbors in millions rather than thousands. A DELUGE OF CATHOLICS Upheaval and turmoil in Europe – political, economic and cultural – with violent revolutions in 1830, 1848 and onward, displaced many ordinary people, many of them Catholic peasants and workers (Irish, German, Italian, Polish). In 1845, Ireland was struck by what has been called “the 19th century’s greatest natural disaster,” the Potato Famine, which did not end until 1852. In these few years, Ireland lost a million dead and saw another million flee the Emerald Isle, seeking new homes. The Irish Catholics who entered the U.S. between 1845 and 1850 numbered about 500,000, and they and their co-religionists from other Catholic countries swelled the Catholic population to 1.6 million. The Catholic Church had suddenly become the nation’s largest single Christian denomination. A PROTESTANT HEGEMONY At this very moment, beginning in the 1830s, the civic-minded elites of the U.S. were inventing something new: public schools. These were schools owned and run by the government, funded by taxes, free from tuition, available to all children. They were
Photo of some members of the Presentation School class of 1904, taken at the school on Powell Street in San Francisco. Religious founded and 2022 | CATHOLIC staffed schools for CatholicsJANUARY in California and the SAN restFRANCISCO of the country. Photo courtesy Presentation Archives, San Francisco
