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Life
?-1797; first archbishop of New York; b. Co. Tyrone, son of tenant farmer; sought to join priesthood; emig. US 1817; employed as mason’s helper on bridgemaking project, Emmitsberg; engaged as gardener at Mount St. Mary seminary, 1819, and proceeded to priesthood, occupying the John Hughes Cabin; as archbishop he encouraged the Irish to abandon clannishness and integrate: ‘My feelings, my thoughts, have been so much identified with all that is American that I have almost forgotten I am a foreigner’; delikes Irish politicians; formed cadres of 1-2,000 men to defend Catholic churches during anti-Catholic rallies of 1844, and issued the celebrated warning, ‘if a single Catholc Church were burned in New York, the city would become a second Moscow’; d. 24 June.
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CriticismMartin Meenagh, ‘Archbishop John Hughes and the New York Schools Controversy of 1840-43’, in American Nineteenth Century History, 5, 1 (Spring 2004), pp.34-65.
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Quotations
Saint Patrick’s Day Speech (1853): ‘[...] But the very misfortunes of a temporal kind that have fallen on Ireland have sent forth the children of that unhappy land to every clime and every latitude, and wherever they are found ... not only do they cherish fond memory for the apostle of their native land, but they propagate it, and make the infection as if it were contagious ...’ (Quoted in Lawrence Osborne, ‘Dreaming Shamrocks: The Use of Being Irish’, in The Village Voice, 3 June 2008; available online - accessed 29.03.2011.)
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