SCHOOL MINISTRY

History

Catholic Education II

This is the second in a series of six articles about the history of Catholic elementary education in the United States.   These articles celebrate Catholic Schools Week, January 23 through 30.

Early Catholic Education

The Constitution (1787) and the Bill of Rights (ratified in 1791) brought about legal religious tolerance of Catholics in the new United States and created the possibility that they could participate fully in national life. The appointment of John Carroll as bishop of Baltimore in 1790, and the holding of the first national synod in 1791, laid the groundwork for establishing laws and policies for Catholic schools across the new nation.  

By 1829, when the U.S. bishops assembled for the First Provincial Council of Baltimore, they were able to write that it was absolutely necessary that Catholic schools be established in the U.S. This expression of concern was grounded in two realities.  

• The bishops feared Catholic loss of faith in an essentially Protestant nation.

• They were deeply concerned about the European immigrants especially, people who were largely Catholic as they arrived, but who were looked down upon and marginalized by an often militant Protestant culture, especially in New England.  

So, the Second Provincial Council of Baltimore in 1833 began the move toward sponsoring Catholic education across the country be establishing a working committee to prepare textbooks that would be suitable for Catholic school students.

With these events, the machinery of Catholic education in the United States was gearing up toward what would become the largest and most effective Catholic education system in the world.

Catholic Elementary Free Schools

The earliest Catholic schools in the United States that were aimed for broad-based, popular education were free schools attached to boarding schools. The first was St. Angela's in New Orleans, founded by the Ursuline sisters in 1727. Academies also had free schools attached to them. Georgetown Visitation Academy opened a free school in 1798. In 1810, St. Elizabeth Ann Seton began a free school attached to St. Joseph's Academy, Emmitsburg, Maryland. These schools, and others like them, subsidized by benefactors and religious orders, provided the "three Rs" for those unable to afford private (academy) Catholic education.

The Parochial School

The first parochial school - parish based elementary education - was founded in 1782 at St. Mary's Parish, Philadelphia. By the time the Diocese of Philadelphia was founded in 1808, three parishes had schools. The trustee controversy of the 1830s, in which laity tried to assume control of Catholic parishes and pastor appointments, and the Nativist uprising of 1843, during which anti-Catholic riots arose and churches were burned, both slowed down the development of schools in the Philadelphia area. But Catholic parochial education in the United States began in Philadelphia, and caught on.  

By 1838, the archdiocese of Baltimore had 19 parochial schools. By 1840, the Diocese of New York had ten, most located in church basements. Sisters of Charity from Emmitsburg taught in about half of these schools, lay folks helping pastors taught the rest. The dioceses of Boston and Bardstown (now Louisville in Kentucky) followed suit.

The pattern for establishment of the Church in our nation - mission territory - was uniform.  An immigrant priest came to a territory, founded a mission and began to evangelize. As other priests came and missions expanded, women religious came to assist.  When the territory grew, it was organized into a diocese and a pioneer bishop was appointed. The diocese then assisted the larger parishes in founding schools, usually in church basements or in an extra room.  

These first elementary parochial schools, like the private and public schools of their day, were small, ungraded and crudely fashioned. Many were taught by persons who hardly had an elementary education themselves. In some schools, though, Priests and sisters who had been educated in European universities, though, taught. In convents especially, superiors made every effort to give the sisters basic training in the content and methods of elementary education.  

The subjects were reading, spelling, arithmetic, geography and history. The textbooks were those in common use: Noah Webster's Speller and History, Jedidiah Morse's Geography, and Nicholas Pike's Arithmetic. The school day lasted six to seven hours. The school week was six days. The school year was ten months. The course of study lasted as long as it needed to, or as short, depending on the age and progress of the student.

The Teachers

The genius of parochial education in the United States was that the schools were staffed - from the beginning right up until the last ten years or so here at Holy Spirit - by women religious. Their dedication and their methods are legend in the Catholic community in the United States.  Some of the early religious foundations were American in their origins: Order of the Visitation (Georgetown), Sisters of Charity (Baltimore), Sisters of Loretto (Marion County, KY0, Dominican (Bardstown), Oblate Sisters of Providence (Baltimore). Very many were from Europe, particularly France: Religious of the sacred Heart of Jesus, Sisters of St. Joseph (Lyons) Sisters of Providence, Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur.  

Before the Great Immigration

Thus, before the great immigration began in the 1840s, and in just about a single generation (1810-1840), the budding Catholic Church in the United States had established about 200 Catholic parochial elementary schools. Half of these were west of the Alleghenies.