Apps

John Joseph Hughes — news, coverage & facts — IJR

Early life

Hughes was born in the hamlet of Annaloghan, near Augher, in County Tyrone, part of the Province of Ulster in the north of Ireland. He was the third of seven children of Patrick and Margaret (née McKenna) Hughes who were from Errigal Truagh, County Monaghan. In reference to the anti-Catholic penal laws of Ireland, he later observed that, prior to his baptism, he had lived the first five days of his life on terms of "social and civil equality with the most favored subjects of the British Empire." He and his family suffered religious persecution in their native land; his late sister was denied a Catholic burial conducted by a priest, and Hughes himself was nearly attacked by a group of Orangemen when he was about 15. He was sent with his elder brothers to a day school in the nearby village of Augher, and afterwards attended a grammar school in Aughnacloy.

Patrick Hughes, a poor but respectable tenant farmer, was forced to withdraw John from school and sent him to work one of his farms. However, being disinclined to farm life, he was placed as an apprentice to Roger Toland, the gardener at Favour Royal Manor, to study horticulture. His family emigrated to the United States in 1816 and settled in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania. Hughes joined them there the following year. He made several unsuccessful applications to Mount St. Mary's College in Emmitsburg, Maryland, where he was eventually hired by its Rector, the Abbé John Dubois, S.S., as a gardener. During this time he befriended Mother Elizabeth Ann Seton, who was favorably impressed by Hughes and persuaded Dubois to reconsider his admission. Hughes was subsequently admitted as a regular student of Mount St. Mary's in September 1820. In addition to his studies, he continued to supervise the garden, and served as a tutor in Latin and mathematics as well as prefect over the other students.

At that time, the president of Mount St. Mary's was the brilliant Simon Bruté, who also lectured on Sacred Scripture and taught Theology and Moral Philosophy. (Bruté would later become the first bishop of the Diocese of Vincennes, Indiana.) Hughes would on numerous occasions consult with his former teacher for advice long after he had left Emmitsburg.

Archbishop

Hughes became an archbishop on July 19, 1850, when the diocese was elevated to the status of archdiocese by Pope Pius IX. As archbishop, Hughes became the metropolitan for the Catholic bishops serving all the dioceses established in the entire Northeastern United States. He convened the first meeting of the Ecclesiastical Province of New York in September 1854. After this he traveled to Rome, where he was present at the proclamation of the Immaculate Conception as a dogma of the Catholic Church by Pope Pius. Hughes served as President Lincoln's semiofficial envoy to the Vatican and to France in later 1861 and early 1862. Lincoln also sought Hughes' advice on the appointment of hospital chaplains. On 3 September 1855, Archbishop Hughes traveled to St. John's, Newfoundland for the consecration of the new Roman Catholic Cathedral.

In an address in March 1852, Hughes lionized what he referred to as the "spirit of the constitution," expressed hope that the "parties" of the republic would be completely "penetrated" by that spirit, and stated that the founders' achievements in the realm of religious freedom were "original" in history and that the constitution's "negation of all power to legislate" on "rights of conscience" made American law on that topic superior to that of other countries which had secured these rights "by some positive statute." In the same address, Hughes also expressed sentiments of religious toleration, stating that "we are indebted" to the "liberality of Protestantism," in light of the fact that the framers of the Constitution "were almost, if not altogether, exclusively Protestants." He averred that the strong leadership of Washington and the variety of opposing Protestant views were likely more influential to the framers' stance on religious freedom than was Protestantism itself.

Hughes also stated that "the great men who framed the Constitution saw, with keen and delicate perception, that the right to tolerate implied the equal right to refuse toleration, and on behalf of the United States, as a civil government, they denied all right to legislate in the premises, one way or the other." He affirmed the role of Catholic soldiers in American wars and declared, "I think I shall be safe in saying that there has not been one important campaign or engagement in which Catholics have not bivouacked, fought, and fallen by the side of Protestants, in maintaining the rights and honor of their common country." Hughes also said that "It is... out of place, and altogether untrue, to assert or assume that this is a Protestant country or a Catholic country. It is neither. It is a land of religious freedom and equality; and I hope that, in this respect, it shall remain just what it now is to the latest posterity" and also that "Catholics, as such, are by no means strangers and foreigners in this land.... The Catholics have been here from the earliest dawn of the morning."

Character

Monsignor Thomas Shelley in his study on Hughes described him as a very "complex character," with one side that was "impetuous and authoritarian, a poor administrator and worse financial manager, indifferent to the non-Irish members of his flock, and prone to invent reality when it suited the purposes of his rhetoric." But Shelley finds this did not detract from the effectiveness of Hughes, who established 61 new parishes along with many other institutions.

Historian Daniel Walker Howe writes that Hughes "labored to bring a largely working-class Irish community into a meaningful relationship with Catholic Christianity" while at the same time working "to conciliate middle-class Catholics and Protestant well-wishers whose financial support he needed for his amazingly ambitious program of building." Howe continues, "Although no theologian, John Hughes ranks high for political judgment and in the significance of his accomplishments among nineteenth century American statesmen, civil as well as ecclesiastical. He successfully coped with fierce party competition in New York, bitter battles over the public school system, revolutions in Europe, the rise of nativism across the United States, and soaring rates of immigration after the Great Famine of Ireland. He encouraged his people to hard work, personal discipline, and upward social mobility." "Crucially, he combined his staunch American patriotism with staunch devotion to a nineteenth-century papacy deeply suspicious of all liberalism, especially American." Hughes "succeeded in fostering a strong Irish American identity, one centered on the Catholic faith rather than on the secular radicalism of the Irish nationalists who competed with him for community leadership." This achievement, however, came "at the cost of losing to the Irish-American community the Irish Protestant immigrants."

According to his later successor, Patrick Cardinal Hayes, named archbishop of New York in 1919, Archbishop Hughes was severe of manner, and kindly of heart, but was not aggressive until assailed.