• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 7829 0

a powerful religious order into his bailiwick overridden by his desire to have the prestigious organization run his college. The Jesuits, finding the idea of a base in New York City appealing, purchased Fordham from the diocese in 1846. The following year they opened St. Francis Xavier, on West 16th Street in Manhattan, also to prepare men for the priesthood, the bar, and the medical professions. The same goals motivated the Christian Brothers to launch Manhattan College in 1849. All three institutions would be supported by—and in turn help create—a Catholic middle class. For females, Hughes arranged for the Madames of the Sacred Heart to begin the Academy of the Sacred Heart (1841), which moved in 1847 to the grounds of Jacob Lorillard’s estate in Manhattanville. By 1850 local graduates and arrivals from Europe had brought the ratio of priests to parishioners down from one to eight thousand to (a still overwhelmed) one per forty-five hundred.

Hughes’s third enterprise was to bring the children of the immigrants into the Faith. With the city and state having refused financial support to Catholic schools, the bishop made organizing parochial schools his top priority. A crash program, which ran up an immense diocesan debt, brought the number of Catholic schools to twenty-eight by 1854, embracing ten thousand pupils. A decade later, fifteen thousand students were attending twelve select and thirty-one Catholic free schools in New York, and there were another twenty-eight institutions in the Diocese of Brooklyn.

To staff these schools, Hughes traveled to Ireland, England, and France seeking help from religious teaching orders. Several accepted his call. In 1848 the Christian Brothers from France opened their first two schools for boys, St. Vincent de Paul’s Academy on Canal Street and De La Salle Academy on 2nd Street near Second Avenue; the order would run many others. For instructing girls, Hughes relied on nuns from, among others, the Sisters of Mercy, Sisters of Notre Dame, Sisters of the Good Shepherd, and, above all, Sisters of Charity.

Mother Seton’s Sisters of Charity had become legendary in New York City for their work during the cholera epidemic of 1832. Like the other orders, it was not under Hughes’s direct control. In 1846, however, thirty-two of the fifty sisters chose to form a separate community, the Sisters of Charity of St. Vincent of Paul. Now they reported directly to the bishop (and their superior, Mother Angela Hughes, the bishop’s youngest sister). At his direction, the women organized the Academy of Mount St. Vincent. In 1847 they purchased the Jacob Dyckman estate at McGowan’s Pass, five miles north of the city in the vicinity of 105th Street and Fifth Avenue. By the mid-1850s their convent had seventy sisters (half of them Irish born), eleven Irish servant girls, nine male employees (also Irish), several buildings with classrooms for nuns, and a free school for local children. In 1856 they moved again, to a fifty-acre tract fifteen miles from City Hall in Westchester County. Once part of Frederick Phillipse’s confiscated lands, the Hudson River estate had been home most recently to the celebrated actor Edwin Forrest. In 1847 he had built Font Hill there, a Norman castle. Now it became part of Mount St. Vincent de Paul. By 1859 a great new red brick building housed a convent for novices and an academy for training the teachers who would staff many of the city’s parochial schools (and other welfare institutions) from that day to this.

Last, Hughes secured ample final resting space for his parishioners. In 1848 the church purchased the old Alsop estate on the Maspeth side of Penny Bridge, which traversed Newtown Creek. Here Calvary Cemetery was laid out, and for the convenience of funeral corteges, steamboat service was inaugurated from East 23d Street. Other cemeteries quickly followed, such as Holy Cross in Flatbush (1849) and Mount Olivet on the old Hallett Estate in Maspeth (1851).

By 1850, reflecting Hughes’s accomplishments, and the importance the Vatican increasingly attached to New York, the