The more liberal Christianity of the early nineteenth century prepared the soil for the common school idea. It softened differences in belief and ritual among the different Protestant religious groups, enabling them to cooperate in a common educational enterprise, and it stressed the role of education in improving the temporal lot of the individual and of society. The new religious outlook, by transcending the individual Protestant sect, made possible a "non-sectarianism," which could remain Protestant and yet not belong to a particular Protestant sect. (p. 20)

During the century and a half of the colonial period, the Roman Catholic Church in America can be said to have lived in the catacombs. Catholics were suspected and feared. As a group, they lived their lives outside the cultural and political activities of the community. Though many of the more onerous disabilities and penalties were lifted at the opening of the national period, only four states in their constitutional conventions gave Catholics political equality with Protestants.

The rigid penal legislation in existence in every colony at the time of the Revolution —modeled on that of the mother country —curtailed the freedom of Catholics to worship, to participate in civic life, and to educate their children. The school situation was particularly intolerable. The schools were belligerently Protestant. The hymns, homilies, and prayers in common use contained references derogatory to the Catholic Church. The texts and books were filled with crude distortions of history and dogma calculated to perpetuate hatred of "Popery." The Catholic child was made to feel out of place in the colonial school, and yet his parents were liable to a stiff fine if they sent him out of the colonies for his education. Catholics themselves were barred from teaching. Even in Catholic-founded Maryland the legislature in 1704 had passed ‘An Act to Prevent the Growth of Popery,’ among whose bristling provisions was one that threatened any Catholic with deportation, who should keep school, board students, or instruct children.

Earlier, however, the first Catholic school in the British colonies had been established in Maryland by the Jesuits. Records are dim and incomplete, but the foundation seems to have been made about 1640 at Saint Mary's City. Under normal conditions this school might well have been what it never had the chance to be: a collegiate institution whose venerability would today equal Harvard's.

The next recorded foundation was probably in 1673 at Newton, a center of underground Catholic activity in the Maryland colony. The Revolution of 1688, which chased James II from his throne and put his Protestant daughter Mary and her husband William of Orange thereon further darkened Catholic fortunes on the other side of the Atlantic. The Newton School was closed, as was another brief-lived Jesuit school in New York City. The next attempt, the school at Bohemia Manor in the northeast corner of Maryland, seems to have been favored by its proximity to more tolerant Pennsylvania, for it was in operation from 1744 until it had to close in 1765. During these few years the scions of many old Catholic families were enrolled at Bohemia Manor, including the Neales, Brents, and Carrolls. Some fifteen other Catholic schools, many of them for the children of German immigrants, were begun in Pennsylvania prior to the Revolution. (p. 24-26)

The anti-Catholicism that marked the decades before the Civil War, however, was seldom found in an undiluted form. The hundreds of thousands of Irish and German Catholics who entered the United States during these years were, to begin with, foreigners. Between 1830 and 1840 the immigrants amounted to only about 3 per cent of the total population but in the next ten years made up nearly 7 per cent. Such an influx by itself would have upset a small populace long isolated from direct European influence. The Irish, however, brought with them their strong love for the Church of Saint Patrick and their enthusiastic hatred of the English. The German immigrants, for their part, tending to identify the German language and culture with their Catholicism, sturdily defended both against the encroachments of New World civilization. The immigrants were disdained, resented, and feared by native Americans. Their Old World customs and language made them annoyingly different. Their cheap labor flooding the market represented an economic threat. Above everything, however, as communicants of the Roman Church they were, in their growing numbers, suspected of endangering the dearly won liberties of Protestant America. The Catholic immigrant was feared, consequently, for more than his Catholicism. (p 27-28)

That there was serious leakage from the Church is a matter beyond dispute. Bishop Bernard J. McQuaid of Rochester, N.Y., could quote a famous Presbyterian minister as openly avowing "that the Bible and the Common Schools were two stones of the mill that would grind Catholicity out of Catholics", and a Methodist minister as boasting that in twelve years the Catholics had lost 1,900,000 children.

Catholic efforts to obtain relief from this intolerable situation took two forms. The bishops asked that Catholic youngsters in the public schools be excused from classroom reading and discussion of the Protestant Bible, and that the school taxes collected from Catholic parents be used to educate their children in church schools. As one member of the hierarchy stated the Catholic position: "It is not to deprive Protestants of their Bible in their schools; it is to educate Catholic children in Catholic schools with our own money, under state supervision if you please. We do not want Protestant money, nor any state money that was not taken from our purses."

In the matter of Bible reading the courts offered no redress for Catholic petitioners. In fact, strong legal support for the religious status quo in the public schools was supplied by an 1854 ruling of the Maine Supreme Court (Donahue v. Richards), allowing school authorities to compel the reading of the King James version of the Bible. This precedent held for nearly forty years. In Boston and New York Catholic students were expelled from the public schools for refusing to read the Protestant Bible. Only in 1890 did a Wisconsin court in the much-agitated Edgerton Bible case reverse the precedent set in Donahue v. Richards.

New York City was the scene of the first important struggle by Catholics to obtain a proportionate share in the common school fund, and the outcome here set a national policy that, with minor exceptions, has endured to the present day.

Between 1795 and 1825 the state had given financial aid to all educational institutions in New York City, most of which were under church auspices. The Free School Society was founded in 1805 "for the education of such poor children as do not belong to, or are not provided for by any religious society." Shortly, it adopted a new title, the Public School Society, and soon became the most powerful educational organization in the city. In 1824 the state legislature authorized the city council to select the institutions for which the state would provide funds. The following year a committee of the council recommended that in the future no distribution of any part of public funds should go to religious societies. Since the school fund, in the opinion of the committee was "purely of a civil character," it could not be entrusted to religious bodies without "a violation of an elementary principle in the politics of State and country."  From 1825 on, New York City's share of the state school fund went exclusively to the nonsectarian Public School Society, except for minor grants to orphanages and mission schools. This, it is interesting to note, was the first major move toward the secularization of the common schools.

The question of state support for religious schools was reopened in 1840, when Governor William H. Seward in his message to the state legislature recommended the establishment of state-supported denominational and language schools for immigrant children. Bishop (later Archbishop) John Hughes publicly urged the justice of the claims of the religious school. In his petition to the council of New York City, he stressed that the basis of the claim by Catholic schools for support was not the religious character of the corporation but their civic character. In other words, he urged that just as Catholic citizens are taxed for the school fund in their capacity as citizens and not as Catholics, so they should be aided as citizens and not as Catholics. The bishop's presentation fell on deaf ears.

Non-Catholics were easily persuaded that the Catholic campaigns to get a share of the common school funds for their own schools and to eliminate the Protestant Bible from the public schools were a concerted attack on the foundations of the Republic. The bitterness engendered over the school question in New York spread to other parts of the nation and fueled the Nativist attacks on Catholics that marred the 1840's. In view of the foregoing, it is entirely understandable that the attitude of the Catholic bishops and people hardened to the point where strong measures were taken to protect the religious faith of Catholic children.

The school question and other long accumulated problems of church organization and discipline brought the Catholic bishops of the United States together in 1829 for the first of the seven Provincial Councils of Baltimore that took place between that year and 1849.

In the 1829 meeting the seven bishops prepared a joint letter to American Catholics urging the necessity of Catholic schools. The bishops insisted that the grave danger of loss of faith for Catholic boys and girls, particularly those from poor families, required the establishment of schools free from the defects, which, in Catholic eyes, seriously marred available schools. The textbooks were a particularly sore point. "The schoolboy can scarcely find a book," said the bishops, "in which some one or more of our institutions or practices is not exhibited for otherwise than it really is, and greatly to our disadvantage."

By 1840, the year of the fourth council, the situation had shown no improvement. The bishops urged pastors to protest what was still a universal practice: Catholic pupils in the public schools were required to join in reading the Protestant Bible, in reciting Protestant prayers, and in singing Protestant hymns. The anti-Catholic bias in the textbooks was again deplored. The bishops called attention to the fact that their protestations were not prompted through "any unkind feeling" to their fellow citizens, nor through any reluctance to work for the common good of the nation, "but because we have found by a painful experience, that in any common effort it was always expected that our distinctive principles of religious belief and practice should be yielded to the demands of those who thought proper to charge us with error."

Anxiety hung even heavier over the fifth Provincial Council, convened in 1843. The long-smoldering political Nativism had leaped into flames and the cry of "No Popery!" was heard up and down the land. "We have seen with serious alarm," the sixteen bishops said, "efforts made to poison the foundations of public education, by giving it a sectarian hue, and accustoming children to the use of a version of the Bible made under sectarian bias, and placing in their hands books of various kinds replete with offensive and dangerous matter."

In addition to these public exhortations of the entire hierarchy, individual bishops and bishops in regional councils drew up statutes ordering pastors to establish parochial schools and parents to send their children to these institutions. Nowhere was this done with more exactness than in the Midwest. The Second Provincial Council of Cincinnati ordered that all pastors of souls, "under pain of mortal sin," were "to provide a Catholic school in every parish or congregation subject to them, where this can be done." The bishops of this region were largely responsible for the vigor of the decrees on education passed in the fall of 1884 by the Third Plenary Council of Baltimore. One fourth of all the legislation of this last and greatest of the American Church Councils dealt with the school question firmly and in detail. The note of exhortation is absent from the council's words on education; this council decreed.

The seventy-one bishops and archbishops of the council ordered that within two years a parochial school was to be erected near each church and was to be maintained "in perpetuum." Postponement could be allowed only on account of grave difficulties and with episcopal approval. Catholic parents were ordered to send their children to the parochial schools, ‘unless either at home or in other Catholic schools they may sufficiently and evidently provide for the Christian education of their children, or unless it be lawful to send them to other schools on account of a sufficient cause, approved by the bishop, and with opportune cautions and remedies.’

Where no Catholic school existed or where the existing one was not "fit to educate properly the children in keeping with their station in life," Catholic parents could in good conscience be excused from this obligation. This step, however, required the approval of the local bishop and was to be accompanied by proper provision for the moral and spiritual welfare of the child. (p. 29-33)

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