ABSTRACT
James McMaster has no equal in his influence on the religious and theological development of American Catholicism. One of McMaster’s fiercest battles was on the school question. It is startling to see how problems of public vs. private schools, and the problem of financial support of separate Catholic schools were very much in the news in the latter nineteenth-century United States. McMaster writing in New York wanted to build the Catholic schools in the eastern seaboard. In some respects the Instruction of 1875 was the first clear American ruling on the obligation to send Catholic children to Catholic schools. In that sense McMaster and his aide, Miss Ella B. Edes, did obtain an answer to their plea, but the official silence in the United States about the Instruction and the failure to make practical applications of its rule rendered the decree nugatory at the time of its appearance.
