Can There Be a “Catholic President”?

You might have to leave the Blue Cities to find Christian Catholics.

He may not have been the first to do so, but Archbishop John Hughes, who was born in Ireland and tended to favor the Irish in his flock did not set up Parochial Grammar Schools to merely educate the children in this flock or prepare them for higher education. In fact,

Hughes also campaigned actively on behalf of Irish immigrants, and attempted to secure state support for parochial schools; the effort failed.

He protested against the standard use of the King James Bible in public schools by the Public School Society, a private organization which operated the schools of New York City. He claimed that it was an attack on Catholic constitutional rights of double taxation, because Catholics would need to pay taxes for public school and also pay for the parochial school to send their children, to avoid having their children indoctrinated by teachers following the Protestant teachings footnoted in that translation of the Bible. However there are no footnotes in the King James Bible. [This is Wikipedia, so this writer has bias, or is too literal, or is too Secular to understand Hughes’ objection. This approach is why I often choose Faith over Reason.]

When he failed to secure state support, he founded an independent Catholic school system in New York, as did other Catholic centers. The resulting parochial school systems which became an integral part of the Catholic Church’s structure two decades after Hughes died, at the Third Plenary Council of Baltimore (1884). It mandated that all parishes nationwide have a school and that all Catholic children be sent to those schools.[8]

I am biased, of course. I was raised Lukewarm but Pious Post-Vatican II Catholics who were intelligent enough to read Gunter Grass and listen to Opera but probably did not understand the the full meaning of Humanitae Vitae, or the degree to which the silence of the Parish priests when seeing couples who hitherto would have had 2 or 3 children only having 1 or at best 2 encouraged Lapsing.

The Blue Cities have many many of the sort of Catholic who would have found “Dagger John” to be rude, crude, and socially unacceptable, and no understanding whatsoever of how he helped them to be there to muffle-wuffle, often enough not even particularly mellifluously.