America's bishops built one university, and Yeats came to admire it
The Catholic University of America is the only college founded by the US Catholic bishops, chartered by a papal encyclical in 1889 and started with a heiress's $300,000 pledge. Its early Gaelic chair, matched at the time only by Harvard's, impressed W. B. Yeats enough to visit in 1904.
Bishops first raised the idea of a national Catholic university at a council in Baltimore in 1866 and chose the name in 1885. Bishop John Lancaster Spalding travelled to Rome in 1882 to win over Pope Leo XIII and persuaded a family friend, Mary Gwendoline Caldwell, to pledge $300,000. The pope approved the plan in 1887 and granted a charter with the encyclical Magni Nobis in 1889. President Grover Cleveland watched the cornerstone of Divinity Hall being laid in 1888, and the university opened on November 13, 1889, as a graduate centre teaching philosophy, literature, scripture and theology.
It grew fast. By 1900 it was one of 14 doctoral institutions that formed the Association of American Universities, and undergraduates arrived in 1904. After Rector Thomas Shahan championed Irish language and culture in an 1894 speech, the Ancient Order of Hibernians endowed a Gaelic chair, which drew Yeats to speak in McMahon Hall. The Knights of Columbus endowed a chair of American history, and more than 10,000 of them turned out in 1904 to hand over the cheque.
Its record on race is mixed. In a segregated Southern city it initially admitted black Catholic men, the only college in the District besides Howard to do so, with three black students from DC in 1895. It later stopped, resuming only in 1936 after protests led by Thomas Wyatt Turner and groups including the NAACP. Forty Black students were enrolled by 1939, but segregation persisted in parts of campus until the mid-1940s.
The campus sits beside Brookland, a Washington neighbourhood nicknamed Little Rome that holds 60 Catholic institutions, among them the great national basilica dedicated to the Immaculate Conception. It is one of two pontifical universities in the United States and the only one that is not primarily a seminary. Early this century its enrolment passed 6,000, drawn from every one of the 50 states and many other countries.
Source: Catholic University of America
