ABSTRACT
The twentieth century seemed to portend the fulfillment of American Catholic educational dreams. The Catholic Church had a magnificent educational past, declared the Reverend William Turner, scholar, religious journalist, professor and librarian at Catholic University, and future bishop of Buffalo, but it had long been distorted by anti-Catholic historians. John Gilmary Shea was the outstanding Catholic historian of the nineteenth century. For a while he contemplated becoming a Jesuit priest but gave up this ambition to devote his life to American Catholic history. Triumphalism was an important but not the only theme of American Catholic historiography. An equally significant dimension was the compatibility of Catholicism with Americanism. Catholic leaders obviously feared the religious contamination of their immigrant flocks. As America became religiously heterogeneous, educational difficulties surfaced in the nineteenth century. The Protestant response was to eliminate sectarianism from the schools and substitute a diluted common Christianity.
