Fordham University - Maroon Yearbook (New York, NY)

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The first Rose Hill Manor House, built in 1692 and according to tradition staff headquarters for a time for Washington anil the Continental Army; demolished in 1896. Unfortunately the Jesuits except as individuals were unable to resume work al ter the war, and there was no other teaching order established in the new country. In 1773 the Society of Jesus had been suppressed by Clement XIV, and its reconstitution was not completely approved until Pius VII s Hull of 1814. In die meantime Jesuits continued to function in Russia and Prussia, where the Papal brief was never published. The Maryland Jesuits were aggregated to the Russian province in 1803, and Robert Molyneux was appointed Superior of the Society of Jesus in the United States. From then on the energies of the Order in Maryland were partly liberated. At this time Catholicism began to grow. In April 1 Hub the See ol Baltimore, occupied by the distinguished American patriot and former Jesuit, John Carroll, was raised to an archbishopric and the suffragan bishoprics of Boston, New York, Philadelphia and Bardstown, Kentucky, were created. New York, which numbered two hundred Catholics in 1785, grew to four hundred in 1787. one thousand in 1790, thirteen hundred in 1800 and fourteen thousand in 1808. Irish immigration accounted for most of the total; French refugees from Santo Domingo and some Germans made up the rest. For all these people there teas one church, St. Peter's, one parish school, one graveyard and several priests. The newly appointed Bishop, Luke Concanen, O.P., postponed his arrival for so long (he never did arrive) that Archbishop Carroll was forced to use his authority to appoint a Vicar General. His choice was an extremely able, energetic, and learned Jesuit of the Maryland Mission, Anthony Kohl-man, later a president of Georgetown and head of the American province. Father Kohlman no sooner assumed the administration of the infant diocese than he established a school for the Catholics of the city and the adjoining territory. In December 1808, assisted by four scholastics, he opened the New York Literary Institution for seventeen pupils in a rented house opposite the unfinished Cathedral on Mulberry Street. By July 1809 l e S(h°°l had moved to larger quarters on Broadway to care for thirty-five Catholic and Protestant boys, among whom were the two sons of former Governor Livingston and of Governor Tompkins. By 1813 20

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University Chapel, built in 1844-45'- enlarged m i )29- 19

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there were over seventy-four boarding students alone attending the school then located on the present site of the Cathedral. So rapid was the growth of the New York Literary Institution that Father Kohlman prophesied a place for it among the foremost colleges in the country. The prominence of the school was due to Jesuit teachers like Father Fenwick, later Bishop of Boston, Father James Wallace, a celebrated mathematician who later won first place in an international competition, Messrs. William White, Adam Marshall, James Redmond, and three others. Fathers Macon and Winters and Mr. Paul Kohlman, who arrived in 812. As the school grew. Father Fenwick, who was in charge, required additional instructors. Since Father Kohlman insisted upon an exclusively Jesuit faculty and since there were then only fifty Jesuits in the United States, the Literary Institution could expand only at the expense of Georgetown. And Georgetown, which was founded in 1791 by Archbishop Carroll, was for various reasons regarded as the most important seat of Catholic education in America. Despite Father Kohlman’s insistent arguments that New York was the coining metropolis of America, that the Catholic population was and would continue to be much more numerous there than in the South, that New York was a more logical center for future Jesuit activity than Georgetown (which he felt should become a novitiate), both Archbishop Carroll and Father John Grassi, the superior of the Maryland mission, decided for the older school. The New York Literary Institution was closed in 1813 “to help build up what could be made safe and certain, the college at Georgetown.” The college building was loaned to the Trap-pists who used it as an orphanage from 1813 to 1815. The property itself was finally sold at a loss in February 1821. Father Kohlman and his associates returned to Maryland. The New York Literary Institution had failed because of its too rapid success. 9 Catholic New York was thus left without any institution of higher education. Bishop Dubois, the third ordinary, sent students to his old college of Mt. St. Mary’s, Maryland, but he was very anxious to set up a college in New York. In 1832 he had secured funds from the Pope to build a seminary at Nyack, but, before the two professors and five students could begin their work, the' building burned to the ground. Shortly afterwards he procured a tract in Brooklyn and transferred some of the stones from Nyack for building purposes. But this effort was abandoned when a dispute over the title to the property developed. In 1838 Bishop Hughes removed the burden from the shoulders of the ill and aging Dubois. Convinced that a seminary should be as far removed as possible from the distractions and temptations of city life, Bishop Hughes purchased a beautiful but inaccessible estate at Lafargeville, New York, and opened the combination college and seminary of St. Vincent de Paul in September 1838. The new college failed to attract more than eight students and the project was abandoned. Defeat merely stimulated Bishop Hughes to renewed effort. On a second visit to Europe in 1840 he tried to assemble a faculty. This attempt also failed. Upon his return, he applied to Mt. St. Mary’s and secured Fathers McCloskey, Harley and Conroy as professors. The Rose Hill estate at Fordham was purchased and all preliminary work was completed by the spring of 1841. The seminary was officially moved from Lafargeville to Fordham. On June 24, 1841, on the feast of St. John the Baptist, St. John's College, Fordham with the allied seminary under the patronage of St. Joseph was opened with 1 he Reverend John McCloskey, later Cardinal Archbishop of New York, as first President. 3 The new college and seminary prospered immediately. Within two years, more than fifty students were attending classes; new buildings were raised, new courses introduced. The faculty was, for its time, an excellent one. In addition to the scholarly Father McCloskey, there were such men as Reverend Ambrose Manahan, Reverend John Conroy, afterwards Bishop of Albany, Reverend John Harley, the second President, Reverend James Roosevelt Bayley, the third president and subsequently Archbishop of Baltimore, and others who became leaders of the Catholic Church in America. The student body was no less noteworthy. Men who were to become bishops like Sylvester Rose-crans, vicar-generals like William Keegan of Brooklyn,