The Irish Chieftain of American Catholicism - Dagger John Hughes

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Call clickgrainger.com or just stop by. Grainger, for the ones who get it done. And we continue with our American stories and as you know we love telling immigrant stories. Today we bring you an epic one about a man who would help some of the most persecuted immigrants of his time pursuing their own American dream.

Here's our own Joey Cortez with the story. Richard McCann is the author of the book, John Hughes, Lion of American Catholicism. Imagine a young man arriving from a foreign country to the United States in the year of 1819. It's November. It's the beginning of winter time.

It's cold. He's just come from his native county, Tyrone in Ireland, a young man in a new country, a strange country, but in his heart and in his soul with a burning desire to find a life for himself in a place that obviously he wasn't able to find in his own country. Because he was born a Catholic and Protestant English controlled Ireland.

John Hughes famously noted that for the first five days of his life, he enjoyed social and civil equality with the most favored subjects in the British Empire. But that ended on the day of his baptism. Here's Bill Duggan on the backstory of Catholic persecution in Ireland. Most of England, Ireland and Scotland was Catholic.

And when Henry VIII wanted to divorce his wife and marry Anne Boleyn, he did not get a dispensation from Rome. And thereby he founded the Church of England. And so from then on, the Catholic religion itself was persecuted.

And then it was heavily persecuted. Most of Scotland converted to the Protestant religion, the Church of England. Of course, the English, England converted to the Church of England, but the Irish people wouldn't in general. And this created such a hatred against the Irish, the Catholic at the time.

So when you look at all of this, the discrimination, the hatred of the English over the Irish, one could only say that it was an extremely difficult place to live. At the time that John Hughes was growing up in County Tyrone, it was still an age that was fraught with a lot of religious dissension and religious animosity between Catholics and Protestants. The Hughes family was a Catholic family. They lived in a largely Protestant area in County Tyrone in a place called Anologon. And there were a number of Protestant families around the Hughes family.

And there were various groups and various factions that were constantly warring with each other on a sectarian basis. Now, John Hughes' father was a man of tremendous integrity, a man who was upright and respected in the communities of both the Catholic as well as Protestant peoples. And in one instance, John was coming back from school one day, and he was stopped on the road by a group of men who were on with muskets and bayonets. And what they were going to do to the youngster, one can only speculate. But one of the men in the party, this was a Protestant group, they recognized him as being the son of John Hughes, Sr. And as a result, they let him go because they all agreed that the father was an upright man and not a man that was the focus of any animosity on their part. And as a result, he was spared and he was allowed to continue on his way. In another instance in his youth, one that really colored his perceptions of the world he was leaving, occurred when his youngest sister died and was being buried, and the Catholic priest was not allowed to enter into the cemetery area because of the prohibitions in place because of the penal laws that still existed.

Some dirt was scooped up and it was given to a person who scattered it over the corpse, or over the coffin rather, before it was lowered into the ground. And this left a terrible burning resentment in the heart of John Hughes about the fact that his people were second-class citizens in Ireland and that his own sister couldn't be buried by a priest of their own faith in the proper fashion. And so John and his family moved to America to seek a better life. But little did they know, America had been wrought with nativist, anti-Catholic bigotry for some time. Roman Catholicism was a religion that was virtually under prohibition in every colony of the old 13 colonies. The oldest prohibitions were in Virginia where, as early as 1642, there were laws passed saying that anybody ordained by the Pope of Rome or any deacon or any person associated with that religious sect would be subject to persecution.

And I mean persecution in the sense that they would be hung, or they would be in some way put to death. Massachusetts was not very far off from that. The Puritans of Massachusetts had a particular disdain for Roman Catholicism and even though there were no known Catholics in the colony of the Massachusetts Bay for some 20 years after its founding, it still did not prevent them from passing a series of laws directed against the practice of Roman Catholicism and prohibitions against its clergy.

This was true throughout all of the colonies and it was a very bad situation. So Catholics were a small minority but they were a persecuted minority. As long as they basically remained out of sight, they would not comment the kind of turbulence around them that, you know, was associated with the kind of overt bigotry that we would see later on with church burnings and attacks against the clergy. And so John Hughes came into an environment in the United States where Roman Catholicism was sort of like, you know, America's best kept secret. It was there, it was quietly tolerated, but if it became too vocal or if it became too big and too present, it would sort of engender the most serious kind of reaction by Protestants against its existence. The onset of the famine came while he was here in the U.S. Father Hughes started to receive in famine Irish in his ministry and started to understand just how much hatred was out there.

So as we move forward, he was promoted archbishop by Pope Gregory in 1837, which was pretty remarkable since he was ordained priest in 1826, becoming a bishop in 1837 at old St. Patrick's Cathedral, which is where he had moved to from Philadelphia because of the emerging growth of the Irish Catholic that had been coming in on famine ships. They call them coffin ships, but, you know, the Irish were just getting off the land. And the reason they were getting off the land is the landowners were the English aristocracy. They were forcing them off. They were, you know, paying their passage just to get them out of Ireland. The food was not there and they were starving, so they put them on the cheapest passage they could find to get them out of the country. And they started to land in places like Newfoundland and Nova Scotia all the way down the coast. And many of them even walked across borders from Canada into the U.S. because that was the cheapest passage.

But then you had Boston and you had New York and Philadelphia and Baltimore and on down to Savannah as well. These Irish coffin ships would come in and just unload the cargo of people, people with nothing more than the rags on their back. A lot of them died on the voyage, the journey across. Where I grew up, there's a cemetery from the Irish famine that housed 7,500 famine Irish that died on the coffin ships coming over on Staten Island.

They buried them on Potter's Field, which happens to now be a golf course called Silver Lake Golf Course, and they're buried on the 18th fairway. John Joseph Hughes, then Bishop Hughes, was made archbishop, but he then had to find a solution to this crisis. So he started very strong to support the Irish Catholic emergence into New York. And at one time, the Irish made up more than half of the city of New York in population.

That's how many tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands eventually had been deported into New York. And New York became just a robust area of Irish Catholics coming in, just destitute and starving. And Hughes had an enormous challenge to try and help the people find a way and be somewhat housed and fed and all that. And of course, being so devoutly Catholic, the Irish are at the time and still are, they always turned to the church, so it came onto Hughes' shoulders to try and help and find ways to support them. And you've been listening to Richard McCann and Bill Duggan tell the story of John Hughes and the bigger story of the Irish immigration into this country in the late 19th century. And my goodness, the numbers are staggering.

Over 50% of the citizens of the folks who lived in New York City, Irish and of course Catholic, and the clash that continued here. When we come back, more of this remarkable story, the story of Archbishop John Hughes and the larger story of the Irish immigration story here on Our American Stories. Music For each person living with myasthenia gravis, or MG, their journey with this rare neuromuscular condition is unique. That's why Untold Stories Life with myasthenia gravis, a new podcast from iHeartRadio in partnership with Argenics, is exploring the extraordinary challenges and personal triumphs of underserved communities living with MG. Host Martine Hackett will share powerful perspectives from people living with the debilitating muscle weakness and fatigue caused by this rare disorder. Each episode will uncover the reality of life with myasthenia gravis. From early signs and symptoms to obtaining an accurate diagnosis and finding care, every person with MG has a story to tell. And by featuring these real-life experiences, this podcast hopes to inspire the MG community, educate others about this rare condition, and let those living with it know that they are not alone.

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Learn more at KeySoulCare.com. Music And we're back with our American stories. And we continue with the story of Archbishop John Hughes, an Irish immigrant who stood toe-to-toe with anti-Catholic nativists in this country. Let's return to Richard McCann with the story. In New York as bishop, he fought nativism and bigotry literally toe-to-toe and nail-to-nail with some of the greatest bigots of the time. So Hughes is an enormous presence in New York at the time. He was fiery. He was tough. Some called him an Irish chieftain at the time.

But he had to be. He had to stand up to so many things. Music He engaged in a series of debates with the Reverend John Breckinridge, who was a noted Presbyterian minister. John Breckinridge had graduated from Yale.

His father had been attorney general of the United States under Thomas Jefferson. He was a noted Presbyterian theologian. And he was sort of watching this emerging Catholic priest, this young John Hughes. And he wanted to have a shot at him in terms of debating the various points of Catholicism and Protestantism. And so in a series of debates that lasted from 1833 until 1836, both in written as well as oral form, Hughes and Breckinridge argued a number of points about the differences of the two religious beliefs. The first set of debates which took place starting in 1833 was over the rule of faith, a debate about the rule of faith.

Which rule of faith was more valid, that of the Catholic Church or that of Protestantism? And from 1835 until 1836, a number of oral debates they conducted was on the issue as to whether or not the Catholic Church in any of its principles was inimicable to civil or religious liberty. It was those debates that made John Hughes sort of a national figure in the Catholic Church in the United States. Never before had debates of this type taken place. Never before had a Catholic cleric stood toe to toe with a member of the Protestant clergy.

And in this case, a member of the clergy as prominent as Breckinridge was. John Hughes was trying to, in the process of the debate, show that the entire Protestant movement was invalid because the rule of faith, according to Hughes, was something that had come into creation after the Reformation started. Christ had established his church.

Christ never told any of the apostles to write the scriptures. The scriptures were written. The canonical books were set back in the first century of the Christian era. And that was, you know, in addition to what the sayings of councils were and papal decrees and so on, that formed the basis for the rule of faith, which was followed pretty much by the Catholic Church, by the universal church, until the time of the Reformation. Once the Reformation began, there was a new rule of faith that broke completely from that past. And so John Hughes maintained that the Protestant rule of faith could not have existed from the beginning of Christ or the Christian church because it had only come into existence since the beginning of the Reformation.

So there was a period that was a complete break from what the traditions of the past had been. From the standpoint of Breckinridge, Breckinridge attacked the Catholic Church from the position of its idolatry, its worship of the pope, kind of viewing the pope as a dictator, the pope not being in any way the creature of scripture or the product of scripture or the product of anything about the church itself. From the standpoint of Protestants, the Bible, the word, is the very essence of Protestant belief. Catholics, on the other hand, the fonts of Revelation for Catholics derive from scripture, but they also derive from tradition. And tradition being councils, decrees, various pronunciations of popes regarding articles of faith and so forth. So for Protestants, if it's not a part of the word, if it's not a part of scripture, part of the Bible itself, it doesn't exist.

It's not valid. His response was that the whole idea of scripture evolved over a period of time. All of the books of the Bible, the accepted books of the Bible, the New Testament, the counter to the New Testament was something which didn't just happen overnight.

It happened over a period of many, many, many years. Christ himself didn't make that determination. Those works were inspired. They were written by the gospel writers and so forth. And so according to use, the Protestant view of the word only, the Bible only, was not a valid point because the Bible, as they accepted it, as they regarded it from the standpoint of it being the firm basis of their beliefs, didn't exist at that particular time.

It took a number of years before all of those books came together and were accepted as the basis for faith. And that's what use was attacking. Breckenridge's only compelling response was to resort to a lot of the age-old tactics of being critical. I'll give an example of one of the line of attacks that Breckenridge used. He criticized the pope for setting aside a day for blessing all of the animals in the Vatican, all the donkeys and all of the animals. And yet at the same time, he was condemning Bible societies as being, you know, the spreaders of heresy. And Breckenridge condemned the pope for establishing a sort of a precedence of beasts of burden over what the word of God was. But those were typical types of tactics that were used to attack Catholicism at that particular time. A number of conversions took place during the period of the debates in question. Catholics and Protestants were very interested in these debates.

And the reason they were interested was because nothing of the type had ever taken place in the past. And so a number of Protestants, one, the Reverend McCalla, who was a noted Presbyterian minister, he approached Bishop Hughes, rather he approached Father Hughes at that time. He wasn't yet a bishop.

He was still a priest. He approached Father Hughes with the idea of trying to obtain from Hughes a book or a source of books where he could read and study the things in support of the arguments that Hughes was making to show where McCalla was wrong in his thinking and where he might be enlightened. And there were a number of people who approached Hughes as a result of that. In the wake of the debates and in the wake of the exchanges between Breckenridge and Hughes, Hughes acquitted the Catholic Church and himself very well in the face of Breckenridge. So much so that there was grumbling among a number of Protestants, mostly Presbyterian leaders, that Breckenridge was not the person who should have been the one representing the Protestant point of view. So actually Breckenridge came down somewhat in the estimate of some of his own people because he was not forceful enough in showing up the Catholic Church as some kind of a charlatan religious experience and making more of the fact that it was a religion based on superstition and idolatry.

Hughes kind of destroyed that entire concept. And as a result, Breckenridge sort of suffered from the standpoint of reduced esteem in the eyes of his own people. And what those debates achieved was it did a few things. First of all, Roman Catholicism, which up until that time was still largely a persecuted and minority religious faith in the United States, suddenly emerged from the shadows. It suddenly acquired recognition as a legitimate faith. Its clergy were now looked upon not as the superstitious minions of a pope in Rome, but rather an educated, intelligent clergy because Hughes defended himself and acquitted himself quite admirably against, frankly, the better speaker who was Breckenridge, the better educated who was Breckenridge. But Hughes acquitted himself in a marvelously wonderful way in a way that gave new legitimacy to Catholicism and in a way that made Roman Catholics feel as if they had a solid leader to express their particular point of view. You see, up until that time there was a great reluctance for Catholics to become involved in any controversies with Protestants. Even the Catholic clergy advised their people to be passive in the face of attacks by Protestants so as to not rock the boat, not to stir the pot. And Hughes changed all that because, first of all, his personality was such that he was always game for a fight.

And secondly, because he felt that it was his obligation to defend and to protect his faith against the onslaught of the kinds of bigotry that was so prevalent at that time against Catholicism in the United States. And you're listening to Richard McCann tell a heck of a story. When we come back, more of this remarkable story, this story in a way of Irish American immigrants, is captured by the story of Archbishop John Hughes here on Our American Story. For each person living with myasthenia gravis, or MG, their journey with this rare neuromuscular condition is unique. That's why Untold Stories Life with myasthenia gravis, a new podcast from iHeartRadio in partnership with Argenics, is exploring the extraordinary challenges and personal triumphs of underserved communities living with MG. Host Martine Hackett will share powerful perspectives from people living with the debilitating muscle weakness and fatigue caused by this rare disorder. Each episode will uncover the reality of life with myasthenia gravis. From early signs and symptoms to obtaining an accurate diagnosis and finding care, every person with MG has a story to tell. And by featuring these real-life experiences, this podcast hopes to inspire the MG community, educate others about this rare condition, and let those living with it know that they are not alone.

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Wear it like no one else. How rude, Tanneritos. A Full House rewatch podcast is here. Join us as hosts Jodie Sweetin and Andrea Barber look back on their journey together as the iconic characters we all love, Stephanie Tanner and Kimmy Gibbler.

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You can listen to How Rude, Tanneritos, on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. Brought to you by the Hyundai Tucson. It's your journey. And we continue with our American stories, and we return to the final portion of Archbishop John Hughes' story. Hughes immigrated to America from Ireland, became a priest, and eventually the Archbishop of New York during a time when Catholics were some of the most persecuted people in the country.

Let's return to Richard with the rest of the story. John Hughes was faced with a massive problem on his hands with the Irish immigrants. You have to realize that the Irish had been separated from their church for almost 150 years prior to the famine.

There was no real institutional church to speak of. Priests were considered felons. They were on the run. They set mass in hedges. They set them in forlorn places and mountain areas. They were subject to persecution and death if they were caught. So Hughes not only had to re-church his people, making them solid Catholics again, he was also faced with a tremendous humanitarian crisis from the standpoint of, how am I going to feed these people? How am I going to house them?

How am I going to do things to get them involved in employment? And so for John Hughes, the answer was that he had to create a system, a social system, that encompassed virtually all the building blocks of life. Now he did that in a number of different ways. He did that, first of all, by launching an extensive parish building program. When Hughes became Bishop of New York in 1842, there were only a dozen parishes in the entire portion of the New York diocese, and that was mostly in Manhattan. Most of the churches that existed at that time were in debt, badly in debt, so he directed the full effects of his religious institution of the Catholic Church to serving the needs of the immigrant community, from aid societies to parish expansion to building of churches where the church became the central building of the Irish neighborhood, a place where people could meet, a place where they could worship, a place where they could exchange news, a place where they could meet their neighbors, to employment prospects, to helping people provide food for their families, to even establishing of banks, the Immigrant Savings Bank, which opened in 1852 to promote thrift and savings amongst the Irish. And the greatest example being that Hughes and his priests were also involved in being a part of the bank.

They made their deposits there. The parishes made the Immigrant Bank its depository for parish funds. And it was by that example that Hughes was able to direct the massive efforts of the Catholic Church into rebuilding a people who had been destroyed by famine and who had been destroyed by persecution in their own native country. Leading to a revival of Irish Catholics, which did not sit well with the American nativists. In 1844, there was a group of nativists who had been invited to New York to parade in the wake of the burning of St. Augustine's in Philadelphia. St. Augustine's was a Roman Catholic Church, which was burnt to the ground by nativists. And the nativists who had participated in that church burning had been invited by a fellow nativist group in New York to come to New York and to parade in New York and to, of course, celebrate the triumph of nativism and to show solidarity with their Philadelphia nativist brothers.

Now, John Hughes was aware of what was happening. And he told his people, his Catholics, that they were not to go near this parade, that they were not to in any way involve themselves because he believed that the nativist mob would make any excuse whatsoever to turn the situation into a situation where it would seem as if the Catholics had provoked a riot and they had attacked the Protestant nativist mob. Archbishop Hughes went to the mayor of New York and said to him that if one church in New York is burned, this place will look like a second Moscow. Now, what he meant was that during that time, early years in the early 1800s, Moscow was burned to the ground by protests and revolutionaries. I could read you the actual transcript of their conversation.

I can tell you exactly word for word what they said to each other. Are you afraid, asked the mayor, this is Mayor Robert Hunter Morris, that some of your churches will be burned? No, replied Hughes, but I am afraid that some of yours will be burned. We can protect our own.

I came to warn you for your own good. So Hughes was in effect telling the mayor of New York, listen, if one of our churches is touched, there's no guarantee that your churches aren't going to be attacked and I'm letting you know that you better be prepared to protect your own. And then at that point, Robert Hunter Morris said to Hughes, do you think, Bishop, that your people would attack the procession? In which Hughes responded, I do not. But the Native Americans want to provoke a Catholic riot.

And if they can do it in no other way, I believe they would not scruple to attack the procession themselves for the sake of making it appear that the Catholics had assailed them. Then Robert Hunter Morris said to Hughes, what then would you have me do? As if it wasn't obvious what he should do.

To which Hughes replied, I did not come here to tell you what to do. I am a churchman, not the mayor of New York. But if I were the mayor, I would examine the laws of the state and see if they were not attached to the police force, a battery of artillery, a company of infantry and a squadron of horses.

And if you do find out, they should be called out. Moreover, I should send word to Mayor Harper, the mayor elect, who has been chosen by the votes of this party, meaning the nativists, and they should warn him not to carry out their design, otherwise there will be a riot. I urge him to use his influence in preventing his public reception of the delegates, the delegates being, of course, the mob that was coming from Philadelphia. Now here was an example of how John Hughes, a Roman Catholic churchman, faced off against the mayor of the city of New York, who also was sort of an anti-Catholic himself, and he told him in no uncertain terms, if you attack our people, if you attack our churches, there are going to be repercussions, and those repercussions aren't going to be nice. It was not what you call turn your cheek Christianity.

It was what you call an affirmative response to the threat of violence. Now, in preparation for any situation, old St. Patrick's Cathedral, located down on Martin Mulberry Street, between prints on Martin Mulberry Street, which was the original St. Patrick's Cathedral of New York City, the sidewalks in those days were made of wooden planks, and so the planks were torn up. They were brought inside the walls of the cathedral because there was a cemetery there, and there was a wall that surrounded it, and members of the Ancient Order of Hibernians, a Catholic organization that had been organized in Ireland in the 1500s to protect the mass of the priest and the church, assumed defense of the St. Patrick's campus. They brought holes through the walls of the cemetery, which to this day can still be seen if they haven't been filled in, and they were prepared to be holes for musket fire, where muskets could be stuck through the holes, and they were surrounding or preparing the perimeter of the campus for an attack by Nativists, and Hughes made it very clear if that happened, there was going to be retaliation. To make a long story short, the Nativists did not riot. There were no attacks against Catholic churches.

There were no attacks against Catholics. John Hughes had prevailed, and he made it quite clear that as a Catholic bishop he was going to defend his people. This was quite in contrast to what happened in Philadelphia and places like St. Louis, where Catholic churches had been attacked, and in Boston, Massachusetts as well. Catholic churches had been attacked.

They had been burnt to the ground, but this did not happen in New York because John Hughes made it very, very clear that if anything of the sort happened, there would be definite retaliation. So he was a very courageous and a very steadfast bishop in that respect. They called him Dagger Hughes, John Dagger Hughes, and that's pretty much because he signed his name with a cross, and at the bottom of the cross it slipped down looking like a little bit of a dagger.

So he got that nickname, John Dagger Hughes, but, you know, his personality, he was not your gentle neighborhood priest. He was a fighter. He defended his people. He had to.

There was nobody there for them. The boot of England followed them over here to the U.S., and, you know, he had to stand up and give them dignity and find a way to have them pull themselves up by their bootstraps and move on with life and try and find a way, at least not for their current generation, but for their future generations. John Hughes helped pave the way for the Roman Catholic Church to become the largest and most powerful denomination in the United States. It certainly might not have been true when Hughes lived, but by the beginning of the 20th century it certainly was. And because of that influence and because of that power, and I'm not saying that John Hughes did that all by himself, but he was a major contributory factor to that. And, in a way, John Hughes and his experience as Bishop of New York and the issues that he dealt with as Bishop of New York, we see the fulfillment of that, the culmination of that, in the election of John Kennedy as the 35th President of the United States. From helpless immigrants coming off of a ship in New York Harbor without penny or purpose, barely able to take care of themselves, to putting an Irish Catholic in the White House, the Irish immigrants had come of age in America. And a special thanks to Joey for putting that piece together.

And thanks to Bill Duggan and Richard McCann. And Richard McCann's book, John Hughes, Lion of American Catholicism, can be found on Amazon and all the usual suspects. The boot of England followed Catholics to the United States. Destroyed by famine and persecution in their home country, they faced resistance here. And, as always, men of courage, men of faith, in this particular case, challenged other men of faith. Martin Luther King did the same thing with a letter from a Birmingham jail. That letter was addressed directly to pastors and priests throughout the South who weren't doing the right thing, and he challenged them to do the right thing.

The story of Archbishop John Hughes, a great faith story in this country, a story of Irish immigrants, and so much more, here on Our American Story. eBayMotors.com. Let's ride. Eligible items only. Exclusions apply. Real people with MG, so their experiences can help inspire the MG community and educate others about this rare condition.

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