We Need Another “Dagger John.”

p/c NYT

My mother’s four grandparents came from Ireland to the United States. They settled in Chicago by way of New York City in the first half of the 20th century. But in the 19th century, the Irish immigrants were so involved in sex, violence and drink that their mortality rate in New York City was higher than African-Americans in either Chicago or Baltimore today.

City Journal (a non-Catholic production out of NYC) paints a bleak picture about the first Irish immigrants who crossed the Atlantic to the United States: “In 1847 about 40,000 died making the voyage, a mortality rate much higher than that of slaves transported from Africa in British vessels of the same period.”

Then, for the Irish who made it to NYC, life was one of violence, drink and early death.  “Death was everywhere. In 1854 one out of every 17 people in the sixth ward died. In ‘Sweeney’s Shambles’ the rate was one out of five in a 22-month period. The death rate among Irish families in New York in the 1850s was 21 percent, while among non-Irish it was 3 percent. Life expectancy for New York’s Irish averaged under 40 years.”

City Journal then describes what caused such death and destruction for the Irish in NYC: “An estimated 50,000 Irish prostitutes, known in flash-talk [slang] as ‘nymphs of the pave,’ worked the city in 1850… Violent Irish gangs, with names like the Forty Thieves, the B’boys, the Roach Guards, and the Chichesters, brought havoc to their neighborhoods. The gangs fought one another and the nativists—but primarily they robbed houses and small businesses, and trafficked in stolen property.”  (I’m not a fan of Scorcese’s lame Catholic movies, but Bishop John Hughes does make a brief cameo in The Gangs of New York.)

One stat above that you may have missed if you were reading too quickly is that 20% of the inhabitants of the NYC Irish-shantytown called Sweeney’s Shambles died prematurely. I challenge any reader to find inner-city crime rates this high even now in the 21st century—either among native-born blacks or even among illegal immigrants from Spanish-speaking countries. Even blacks on the south-side of Chicago today have a life-expectancy higher than 40 years old (the stat given above for the Irish arriving Ellis Island.)

Rarely can it be said that the conversion of hundreds of thousands of people is due to one cleric, but in this case, it is true: Bishop “Dagger John” Hughes, a fiery and stubborn Irish immigrant himself later became the unexpected Archbishop of New York City. There, he first defended Catholics and later converted them.  Yes, he converted hundreds of thousands of Irish immigrants with the help of his priests and nuns.

John Joseph Hughes was born in County Tyrone in Northern Ireland in 1797.  It’s important to note that Tyrone is in Northern Ireland, as this sets the stage for his resistance to later American persecution.  The Irish Hibernians write: “When John was 15, his younger sister, Mary, died and British law barred a Catholic priest from presiding at her burial; the best he could do was to scoop up a handful of dirt, bless it, and hand it to John to sprinkle on her grave.”

John’s father brought the remaining family to the United States in 1817 and settled in Chambersburg, PA. To this day, this is only 30 miles northwest of Mount Saint Mary’s Seminary in Emmitsburg, MD.  John Hughes sensed a call to the priesthood early and made several attempts to apply to that same seminary in the 19th century. However, he was turned down several times due to his lack of education.

But one day, he met the future-saint Elizabeth Ann Seton. Ironically a convert from Protestantism to Catholicism, Seton saw something extraordinary in him. The saint recommended him to formation staff and prevailed over the doubters. Alas, Hughes entered seminary and was ordained a priest in 1826 for the diocese of Philadelphia (not yet an Archdiocese.)

When Fr. Hughes was only 40 years old, Pope Gregory XVI named him coadjutor-bishop for the Diocese of New York in 1837. Only 13 years later, in 1850, Pope Pius IX elevated NYC from diocese to archdiocese. That same day, he elevated Bishop Hughes from bishop to Archbishop, becoming the first Archbishop of New York City. Because of his combative nature in defending the Catholic immigrants of the City, Archbishop Hughes quickly gained the name “Dagger John” even in the secular press.  More traits linked to this nickname will become clear later in this article.

Towards the end of his life, he began the construction of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, still standing on 5th Avenue in Manhattan to this day. He laid the cornerstone in 1858 before a crowd of 100,000 people. The ultimate cost would be $4 million, an unheard-of amount of money for Irish immigrants in the 19th century. Archbishop Hughes’ successor completed St. Patrick’s Cathedral.

But before that, starting in 1845, Bishop Hughes faced his greatest challenge. From 1845 to 1860, one million Irish perished in the Potato Famine. During those years, two million Irish came to the United States, mainly NYC.  Manhattan-based City Journal describes the squalid lifestyle:

“Cellars became dwellings, as did attics three feet high, without sunlight or ventilation, where whole families slept in one bed. Shanties sprang up in alleys. Without running water, cleanliness was impossible; sewage piled up in backyard privies, and rats abounded.”

At this point in my article, some left-leaning Catholic readers might be thinking: “If Archbishop Hughes was such a defender of the immigrants, then how is he so different from the liberal bishops of the United States today who currently defend the rights of the poor migrants being deported?” The first reply to this is because Archbishop Hughes was defending legal immigrants, even if they did turn out to be criminals and drunks (as stated in the beginning of the article with numerous stats.)

But the two main reasons I want to focus on why he is so different from current bishops in the United States is: 1) “Dagger John” defended Catholics against a hostile world. 2) “Dagger John” converted Catholics and believed there was no salvation outside of the Church.  Hence, the name of this article, “We need another ‘Dagger John.'”

“Dagger John” Defended His Catholics.

Even as a priest in Philadelphia, his flock was being treated as second-class citizens by the Protestants. In 1835, one of these Protestant pastors challenged him to a debate, which he happily took. The debate became one for the annals of American Catholic Church history. The Protestant pastor, John Breckenridge, tried to make it look like the Catholic Church (primarily using the example of the Inquisition) brought persecution to others.

Brilliantly, Fr. Hughes turned the tables on this accusation.  He used the example of growing up under Protestant England in Northern Ireland. He again recounted the story of the British not allowing his priest to even bury his young sister who died. Hughes’ presentation was so dazzling that he became an overnight Catholic celebrity on the East Coast.

This helped elevate him to bishop of NY. But the persecution of Catholics continued on the East Coast. In 1844, Bishop John got wind that in his original-diocese of Philadelphia, the Protestants and secularists had killed 30 Irishmen and burned two Churches and a convent. There were rumors the same thing might happen in NYC.

It was time for this rising bishop to make a public statement to the press. He publicly stated: “If a single Catholic Church burns in New York, the city will become a second-Moscow.” This was a reference to the violence in Russia at the time.  In other words, NYC would burn if another Church did.

NYC was stunned. An Archbishop had just threatened to unleash an unruly Irish mob on the city if another Catholic Church was taken down. The Protestants and secularists blinked. Not a single Church burned in NYC after he made that threat.  A non-Catholic reporter in NYC complained that Bishop John Hughes was “more a Roman gladiator than a devout follower of the meek founder of Christianity.”

But what if there are times in Catholic Church history when we need a leader who doesn’t act like a doormat?  Catholic Culture recently reported: “1,500 Catholic churches in France have been damaged by vandalism since the year 2000.”  What if the current bishops of France stood up to Muslims and secularists with public threats as Dagger John took on the violent Protestants of NYC?  Some say this tough-guy approach is not the way of the Gospel.  But I reply to this:  No where in the Gospel does it say Catholics are called to be doormats.  And… it worked.

“Dagger John” Converted the Catholics to True Catholicism.

But this Irish bishop didn’t let the Irish Catholics off the hook for their mis-behavior, either. As you read at the beginning of this article, the Irish men were drunk gang-members and many women were prostitutes. Instead of handing over the Catholics to the world, the flesh and the devil, Bishop John took every means not only to defend his flock from the world, but even to convert his flock from the world. How many US bishops today can say they even desire to do this?

City Journal (again, a solid but non-Catholic production—which is important to remember as you read its rather natural than supernatural description of the sacraments) writes of how Bishop “Dagger John” approached those hundreds of thousands of Irish Catholics in NYC in the mid-19th century:

“With unerring psychological insight, Hughes had his priests emphasize religious teachings perfectly attuned to re-socializing the Irish and helping them succeed in their new lives. It was a religion of personal responsibility that they taught, stressing the importance of confession, a sacrament not widely popular today—and unknown to many of the Irish who emigrated during the famine, most of whom had never received any religious education. The practice had powerful psychological consequences. You cannot send a friend to confess for you, nor can you bring an advocate into the confessional.”

As for the women, he turned them from being prostitutes to following Mary, the Mother of God:  “He did this by putting Catholicism’s Marian Doctrine right at the center of his message. Irish women would hear from the priests and nuns that Mary was Queen of Peace, Queen of Prophets, and Queen of Heaven, and that women were important. The ‘ladies of New York,’ Hughes told them, were ‘the children, the daughters of Mary.’  The Marian teaching encouraged women to take responsibility for their own lives, to inspire their men and their children to good conduct, to keep their families together, and to become forces for upright behavior in their neighborhoods.”

As for the Irish men, he got them off the bottle:  “Since alcohol was such a major problem for his flock, Hughes—though no teetotaler himself—promoted the formation of a Catholic Abstinence Society. In 1849 he accompanied the famous Irish Capuchin priest, Father Theobald Mathew, the ‘apostle of temperance,’ all around the city as he gave the abstinence pledge to 20,000 New Yorkers.”

Bishop John did all of this without selling out on the classic dogmas of the Catholic Church. He firmly believed in “No salvation outside the Catholic Church.” In fact, “Dagger John” once famously stated: “The goal of the Catholic Church is to convert all pagan nations and all Protestant nations. It is the commission given by God to His Church. Everyone should know we have our mission to convert the world, including the inhabitants of the United States.”

Again, I challenge any reader to find a single US bishop who still believes such perennial and basic dogma. Unfortunately, every US bishop currently holds to the heresy of religious indifferentism, as promoted in that pastoral (non-dogmatic and non-binding) Vatican II. (“Religious indifferentism” is the heresy that any religion will get you to heaven.) “Dagger John” would have none of it. He wanted every person—Catholic, Protestant, and pagan—to go to heaven. And he was willing to pay the price for this, even in light of all the names he would get called in the secular press.

Still, none of this is pie-in-the sky. The intractable perseverance of “Dagger John” changed the outlook for Irish immigrants not only in New York City, but even as they channeled through NYC to the rest of United States, including my great-grandparents coming from Ireland to NYC to Chicago fifty years later.

City Journal recounts his legacy that affected even the Irish who settled outside NYC: “Hughes worked hard to get jobs for his flock. The nuns in his diocese became employment agencies for Irish domestics: rich families knew that a maid or cook recommended by the nuns would be honest and reliable. The nuns encouraged Irish women to run boarding houses for new immigrants and to become fruit and vegetable vendors… Hughes encouraged the formation of the Irish Emigrant Society, out of which the Emigrant Industrial Savings Bank later grew. The society helped find people jobs in sail making, construction, carriage repair and maintenance, and grocery stores. The society expected those it sponsored to behave properly on the job and work conscientiously, so as to reflect credit upon their patron.”

By the time he died, 60% of the Irish women of the city had taken the no-alcohol abstinence pledge and 30% of the men had taken it. In the end, 100,000 of his converted flock stood in Manhattan as he placed the cornerstone for his swan song, St. Patrick’s Cathedral. He would not live to see the final spire put on that $4M project of St. Patrick’s. But it is still standing on 5th Avenue in NYC today as a testament to the indomitability of the Catholic Church. Equally impressive is the life of “Dagger John” which also stands as a concrete testament as to what just one bishop can do for his flock when he fears neither the world, nor the flesh, nor the devil.

Thank you to donors.