O\u27Toole, James M.

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Conversations on Jesuit Higher EducationVolume 45 Article 7April 2014Serving Immigrants: An Old but Still RelevantJesuit TraditionJames M. O'TooleFollow this and additional works at: http://epublications.marquette.edu/conversationsRecommended CitationO'Toole, James M. (2014) "Serving Immigrants: An Old but Still Relevant Jesuit Tradition," Conversations on Jesuit Higher Education:Vol. 45, Article 7.Available at: http://epublications.marquette.edu/conversations/vol45/iss1/714 Conversations“Aday college for the youth of thecity.” That was the goal JohnMcElroy, S.J., set for himselfwhen he arrived in Boston in1847 to become the pastor ofone of the largest and busiestparishes in New England.McElroy, who had emigratedfrom the Northern Irish province of Ulster as a young man,was one of the most prominent members of a new genera-tion of American Jesuits in the years following the restorationof the order in 1814. The Society had come to Maryland withthe earliest settlers in the 1630s, and two centuries later itspriests and scholastics staffed half a dozen schools around the country, a number that grew steadily thereafter. Jesuits inother cities had plans similar to his, and in 1863 McElroy’sdream was fulfilled with the establishment of BostonCollege. A year later the first students were admitted. As atso many of the other Jesuit colleges of the time, the fortunesof the school and the fortunes of recent immigrants to theUnited States were intimately connected.Famine in Ireland and political turmoil in Germany andelsewhere were sending previously unimaginable numbersof immigrants to American shores, and the change this rep-resented for the country was unprecedented. To some, it wasscary. Native-born Americans spoke of the newcomers as a“flood” or a “tidal wave,” hardly metaphors of welcome.Immigrants struggled for such basic necessities as food, shel-ter, and employment, but even as they did so they also want-ed something better for the next generation of their families.That was why most had come in the first place, and educa-tion would be the principal means for realizing their hopes. At first, however, some of the schools in the emergingAmerican Jesuit network remained out of reach. The Collegeof the Holy Cross, for example, only 40 miles from Boston,was already well established by the time McElroy arrived,succeeding in its mission of education. It was a residentialschool, however, whose students (many of them from theSouth) lived on campus; and its cost ($150 per year) mightjust as well have been a million dollars as far as most immi-grants were concerned. A common laborer of the timeearned a dollar a day if he was lucky, and thus immigrantfamilies needed access to what one bishop called “a thor-ough education, gratuitously or nearly so.” McElroy peggedhis tuition at only $30 per year – not entirely “gratuitous,”perhaps, but at least possible for students who would con-tinue to live at home with their parents.During its first academic year, about sixty studentsattended the new college, some for the whole year, some foronly a few weeks. Few students had any intention of stayingfor the complete academic program, a seven-year progres-sion of classwork defined by the Ratio Studiorum, originallypublished in 1599 and revised most recently in 1832. Itemphasized the Greek and Latin classics, but with some con-cessions to “practical” coursework such as in bookkeeping.Most students and their families wanted to acquire someeducation, but a little might have to go a long way. Studentscould take a bit of learning out into the professional work-force, helping to advance the family’s status and perhapsalso underwriting a few years of study by a younger broth-er. The full curriculum would not be in place until 1877,when the first degrees (just twelve of them that year) werefinally awarded. Though called a college, this was not high-er education as we have come to think of it. One of the stu-dents who enrolled on the very first day was only sevenyears old, and into the 1870s more than half the studentswere younger than fifteen. Even so, these immigrants andsons of immigrants put their education to its intended use.Among the early students were those who had beenborn abroad and come to the United States as children withServing Immigrants An Old but Still Relevant Jesuit TraditionBy James M. O’TooleJames M. O’Toole is a professor of history at BostonCollege; his particular area of research and writing hasbeen on Catholicism in the United States and populardevotional practices. 00621_conversations #26   12/13/13  5:37 PM  Page 141O'Toole: Serving Immigrants: An Old but Still Relevant Jesuit TraditionPublished by e-Publications@Marquette, 2014Conversations 15their parents. In the first class, for instance, there wasHerman Chelius, born in Germany, the son of a musicalfather; Herman would become a musician and teacher. FrankNorris, whose Irish father was a carpenter, became a widelytraveled salesman for a pharmaceutical company. Also fromIreland was Hugh Roe O’Donnell, later the pastor of severallarge parishes in and around Boston. The vast majority ofstudents, however, were the American-born sons of immi-grant parents, and many of these quickly proved that educa-tion was indeed the ticket to a better life. John Selinger’sAustrian-born father, for example, worked in a piano facto-ry, but young John (who later went by “Jean”) became anoted portrait artist The father of Edward McLaughlin, one ofthe first students actually to receive a diploma, was a daylaborer his entire life; young Edward became a lawyer, pres-ident of several local civic and charitable organizations, andthe clerk of the state’s House of Representatives. The fatherand older brothers of William O’Connell (class of 1881) allworked in the mills of the nearby industrial city of Lowell;Will became a priest, a bishop, and in 1911 just the thirdAmerican ever to be designated a cardinal. Many of theirclassmates had similar career paths, embodying the verykind of progress across the generations that immigrant fami-lies wanted. Some families had already taken halting steps inthat direction, and the Jesuit education of their sons helpedcement their newfound position. Four McAvoy brothersenrolled in the college’s first decade, for instance. Theirimmigrant father became a successful iron merchant, andtheir immigrant mother employed Irish domestic servants tohelp manage the household. The younger generation resis-ted the temptation to slip back down the economic ladder,and the four boys had careers, respectively, as a business-man, a newspaper reporter, a clerk, and a Jesuit.Often overlooked or forgotten today, in the earliest yearsthe largest percentage of actual immigrants at BostonCollege, as at other schools of the Society at the time, wasamong the Jesuits themselves. Even after restoration of theorder, the Society remained controversial in many places,and by the middle 1840s Jesuits were regularly beingexpelled from one European nation after another. JohnBapst, S.J., who would be president of the college in Bostonafter McElroy, was one such immigrant. He had been bornin the canton of Fribourg in Switzerland, and he wasordained in 1846, just in time to be thrown out of the coun-try with his fellow Jesuits for alleged political activity. Bapstlanded in America and was assigned first to minister to tribesof Native American Catholics in Maine. To do this, he (anative French speaker) faced the daunting prospect of hav-ing to learn English and Penobscot at the same time, thoughhe managed both with ease. He had come to grief in Maine,seized one day by an anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic mob, rid-den through town on a sharp rail, and finally covered withhot tar and feathers. (It was said, perhaps apocryphally, thathe celebrated mass the next day as usual.) His later time asa college rector and as head of the New York Jesuit provincewas calm by comparison. Other immigrant Jesuits had nothad to face his same harrowing circumstances, but the factthat so many of them were immigrants themselves gave thema deep understanding of and empathy with their students. Inmany classrooms around the country, there was an immi-grant on both sides of the desk.By the 20th century, at Boston College as at the otherAmerican Jesuit colleges, there were fewer immigrantsamong the students but still many immigrant sons. (Becausemost Catholic colleges were single-sex until the 1970s, thedaughters of immigrants who sought higher education foundit at the many Catholic women’s colleges that were main-tained by several orders of sisters.) Restrictive legislation inthe 1920s closed the nation’s doors to most new immigrants,apparently forever, and the actual experience of immigrationin many families grew increasingly remote; immigration wasnow more likely to be something one’s grandparents hadgone through, not something one knew at first hand. Still,until after World War II the overwhelming majority of stu-dents on most Jesuit campuses were the first members oftheir family to go to college, and education remained a path-way to advancement. In a sense, the colleges and the com-munities they served were getting exactly what they hadwanted all along: an educated lay population achieving this-worldly success even as it remained grounded in Catholicand Jesuit traditions.Changing laws in the 1960s and again in the 1980s openedthe gates of immigration once again, and the newcomers grewever more diverse. The earlier generations of migrants fromEurope were replaced now with strivers from Latin America,Asia, and Africa. As the recent discussions of more changes inthe law have demonstrated, these immigrants too often facesuspicion and hostility from the native-born; ironically, many ofthe latter are the descendants of earlier immigrants. The chal-lenge to Jesuit colleges in serving these new populations is noless urgent than it was a century and a half ago, and it is per-haps more complex. The colleges and universities of todayaspire to do many different things for many different kinds ofstudents; that is how we have come to define “success.” Thoseare worthy aspirations, but they must not cut us off from ourhistorical grounding. We do not know how many immigrantsand immigrant children, male and female, are enrolled atBoston College or the other Jesuit universities today; for per-haps obvious reasons, we do not collect that data. Moreover,the rising cost of higher education everywhere risks raising newbarriers to access, unintended but no less real. If immigrants ofthe 1860s could not afford tuition of $150 per year, how willtoday’s aspiring families afford costs that are many multiples ofthat? But the commitment of Jesuit higher education to serveimmigrants and their children must remain no less strong todaythan it was in the past. This tradition may be an old one, but itmust also be a current and future one. Concern for social jus-tice begins at home.  ■00621_conversations #26   12/13/13  5:37 PM  Page 152Conversations on Jesuit Higher Education, Vol. 45, Iss. 1 [2014], Art. 7http://epublications.marquette.edu/conversations/vol45/iss1/7

Serving Immigrants: An Old but Still Relevant Jesuit Tradition

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Serving Immigrants: An Old but Still Relevant Jesuit Tradition

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