Redstate

Of which I am one, have a couple of genuine hero's. One of my favorites was an Irish immigrant gardener who became the first Catholic archbishop of New York, Dagger John Joseph Hughes

"How important a figure was John Hughes in American history? Suppose the mass immigration from Ireland of the mid-nineteenth century had turned into a disaster for the country. How likely is it that the open immigration of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries would have been permitted? Nativism would have won, and America would be an unrecognizably different country today--and an immeasurably poorer one."

How Dagger John Saved New York's Irish

We are not the first generation of New Yorkers puzzled by what to do about the underclass. A hundred years ago and more, Manhattan's tens of thousands of Irish seemed a lost community, mired in poverty and ignorance, destroying themselves through drink, idleness, violence, criminality, and illegitimacy. What made the Irish such miscreants? Their neighbors weren't sure: perhaps because they were an inferior race, many suggested; you could see it in the shape of their heads, writers and cartoonists often emphasized. In any event, they were surely incorrigible.

But within a generation, New York's Irish flooded into the American mainstream. The sons of criminals were now the policemen; the daughters of illiterates had become the city's schoolteachers; those who'd been the outcasts of society now ran its political machinery. No job training program or welfare system brought about so sweeping a change. What accomplished it, instead, was a moral transformation, a revolution in values. And just as John Wesley, the founder of Methodism in the late eighteenth century, had sparked a change in the culture of the English working class that made it unusually industrious and virtuous, so too a clergyman was the catalyst for the cultural change that liberated New York's Irish from their underclass behavior. He was John Joseph Hughes, an Irish immigrant gardener who became the first Catholic archbishop of New York. How he accomplished his task can teach us volumes about the solution to our own end-of-the-millennium social problems.

John Hughes's personal history embodied all the virtues he tried so successfully to inculcate in his flock. They were very much the energetic rather than the contemplative virtues: as a newspaper reporter of the time remarked of him, he was "more a Roman gladiator than a devout follower of the meek founder of Christianity." He was born on June 24, 1797, in Annaloghan, County Tyrone, the son of a poor farmer. As a Catholic in English-ruled Ireland, he was, he said, truly a second-class citizen from the day he was baptized, barred from ever owning a house worth more than five pounds or holding a commission in the army or navy. Catholics could neither run schools nor give their children a Catholic education. Priests had to be licensed by the government, which allowed only a few in the country. Any Catholic son could seize his father's property by becoming a Protestant.

When Hughes was 15, an event he was never to forget crystallized for him the injustice of English domination. His younger sister, Mary, died. English law barred the local Catholic priest from entering the cemetery gates to preside at her burial; the best he could do was to scoop up a handful of dirt, bless it, and hand it to Hughes to sprinkle on the grave. From early on, Hughes said, he had dreamed of "a country in which no stigma of inferiority would be impressed on my brow, simply because I professed one creed or another."

Fleeing poverty and persecution, Hughes's father brought the family to America in 1817. The 20-year-old Hughes went to work as a gardener and stonemason at Mount St. Mary's college and seminary in Emmitsburg, Maryland. Working there rekindled in him a childhood dream of becoming a priest, and he asked the head of the seminary, John Dubois, if he could enroll as a student. Dubois, a French priest who had fled Paris during the French Revolution armed with a letter of recommendation from Lafayette, turned him down, unable to see past his lack of education to the qualities of mind and character that lay within. This was no ordinary gardener, Dubois should have recognized; indeed, as he went back to his gardening chores, Hughes wrote a bitter poem on the shamefulness of slavery and its betrayal of America's promise of freedom. Not one to forget a slight, Hughes harshly froze Dubois out of his life when he became prominent and powerful. Indeed, in later years, Hughes won the nickname of "Dagger John," a reference not only to the shape of the cross that accompanied his printed signature but also to his being a man not to be trifled with or double-crossed.

With the good luck that marked his career, Hughes met Mother Elizabeth Bayley Seton, who visited Mount St. Mary's from time to time, and impressed her deeply with all those talents that Dubois had failed to see. A Protestant convert to Rome who had become a nun after her New York blueblood husband died, Mother Seton was a powerful influence on American Catholicism and was canonized as America's first and only native-born saint after her death. When she wrote to Dubois, recommending the un- educated immigrant laborer for admission to the seminary, her prestige carried the day. Ad-mitted in September 1820, Hughes graduated and was ordained a priest in 1826. His first assignment: the diocese of Philadelphia.

Just the first couple of paragraphs from an outstanding article everyone should read when you get a chance.

When else do you have the opportunity to drink green beer. Sláinte! (to your health)

is being celebrated tomorrow at my kids public school.

While I'm all for the activities planned,I had to pause and wonder why celebrate St Pat's day and call Chrismas vacation "Winter Holiday"?

little green shamrock cut-outs aren't seen as a religious symbol..............yet.

read up on St. Patrick...Cahill's "How the Irish Saved Civilization" is an excellent portrayal of Patrick's life...which was not about leading snakes out of Ireland, but rather, bringing faith to Ireland.

A recommended read to everyone, well written, scholarly but entertaining book.

Contrary to popular opinion, Irish lives were cheaper than slaves:

Builders of the New Basin Canal, which connected the downtown American sector of New Orleans with Lake Pontchartrain, preferred to hire Irishmen because the work was dangerous, and they did not want their valuable slaves injured or killed. Laboring in water up to their hips, canal diggers were very susceptible to yellow fever, malaria, and cholera. Estimates of the number of Irishmen buried along the New Basin Canal ranged from 3,000 to 30,000, and a popular song mourned their passing:

     Ten thousand Micks, they swung their picks,

          To dig the New Canal

     But the choleray was stronger 'n they.

          An' twice it killed them awl.

http://lsm.crt.state.la.us/education/irish3.htm

And shared sympathies on the Know-Nothings. Descendant of Italian immigrants, hears the same stories. It's a shame that there was deep conflict between the Italians and the Irish; they were so alike in so much of their experience.

and we celebrate St. Joseph's day in my house too- the only deep conflict between Irish and Italians I'm familar with is when I forget to take out the garbage or leave the toilet seat up ;)