ABSTRACT
The historiography of American Catholicism has traditionally been directed at confirming Catholic beliefs and commitments to the Church’s institutional structure. The argument generally offered is that the flock, threatened by a Protestant environment and by attacks on Catholics, sought consolation in the Church and forged structures essentially compatible with loyal Americanism. Carl Kaestle and Michael B. Katz have cautioned that to think of a system of common schools before the mid-nineteenth century is to miss the informal, transient nature of schooling. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the household, church, and to a lesser extent the school, blended in what Lawrence Cremin calls configurations of education, served as the primary agencies of learning. In the years between 1870 and 1910 the Church hierarchy in America moved inexorably toward making separate schools an essential, indeed, the essential obligation of the Catholics.
