How US Catholics fought for their schools

WITH reference to Archbishop Diarmuid Martin’s recent remark about Catholic schools that “pluralism does not mean watering down identity” and recalling some of those great educators of earlier days — Nano Nagle, Catherine McAuley, Edmund Rice and Yorkshire woman Mary Ward — may I take you outside this island to see what has driven people in other lands.

I know about this from the inside as I was a curate in the middle of New York for four years.

Many in Ireland are not aware of this almost unbelievable fact and are astonished when they hear of it... Catholics in the US, when they saw they could get nowhere with the state school system, decided early on to set up their own and put a Catholic school in every parish from coast to coast across America.