Inducted in 2011
Founder, Fordham Prep & University
First Archbishop of New York

Induction Video

It took a saint to find the priest in John Hughes.

John Joseph Hughes was born on the Feast of the Nativity of St. John the Baptist, Midsummer's Day, June 24, 1797, in Annalogan, County Tyrone, in the north of Ireland. John was the third of seven children of Patrick Hughes and Margaret McKenna Hughes, who earned their living by working the land. Michael, Patrick, Mary, Peter, Ellen and Margaret were John's brothers and sisters, two of whom, Peter and Ellen died in childhood. 

The early 19th century was a difficult time for Irish Catholics living under Protestant rule. For the Hughes family, the low point came when the family priest was barred by law from entering the cemetery where John’s sister was being interred. Within months, John’s parents decided to abandon Ireland and move their family to America. 

By 1817, a 20-year-old John Hughes was working as a gardener and stonemason at Mount St. Mary’s College in Emmitsburg, Maryland. John had been given an opportunity to study horticulture there while he worked at Mount St. Mary’s, but he had his eye on another goal: being in America now seemed like the portal to his lifelong dream of becoming a priest. He was stung, however, by his failure to gain admission to the local seminary where the rector could not overlook his lack of education. Luckily for Hughes, he often met a visitor to Mount St. Mary’s — Mother Elizabeth Bayley Seton, a widow and convert to Catholicism who had started her own religious order, the Sisters of Charity.

Mother Seton, who would later become the first native-born American to be canonized (and, interestingly enough, a Prep grandparent: her grandson, William Seton was a member of the Class of 1848), would be John’s advocate for admission to the seminary. With the help of her considerable influence, John Joseph Hughes was ordained in Philadelphia in 1826. 

From his first days as a priest, he gained notoriety as a figure who stood against bigotry in its many forms. He wrote and preached on the shamefulness of slavery (though it is true that later in his career, he would be careful to sidestep the political implications of a full-out endorsement of the Abolitionists). And he became a crusader against the persecution of newly arrived Irish immigrants, who sometimes found their new lives in America nearly as bad as they had been in Ireland, if in a different way. Nativism was a crushing burden to Catholics of the time, and Hughes feared that as they had been in their homeland, Catholics in America would forever be considered second-class citizens.

His response to the hydra-headed Nativist movement — which included Protestant ministers, intellectuals and religious fundamentalists — was fierce and very public. As described by historians, when a Protestant newspaper ran an editorial focused on “traitorous Popery,” Hughes responded with a letter to the editorial board in which he called the authors the “clerical scum of the country.”

In 1834, Nativists put the blame for a cholera outbreak in Philadelphia squarely on the Irish. Hughes, risking his own life, worked to the breaking point to nurse and console the sick and dying. In contrast, a large percentage of the most notables among the Protestant clergy had fled the city. Afterwards, Hughes wrote a letter to the Gazette, which included this stinging remark about the absentee ministers: “[They are] remarkable for their pastoral solicitude so long as the flock is healthy, the pastures pleasant, and the fleece lubricant, abandoning their post when disease begins to spread dissolution in the fold.”

The year 1835 was a watershed for Hughes, still serving in Pennsylvania at the time. A socially eminent Princeton graduate and Presbyterian minister from New York named John Breckenridge challenged him to a public debate. Hughes, knowing that he might not be able to hold his own against the better-educated Breckenridge in a live, oral debate, instead suggested that it be conducted in the respective church newspapers. There was no Catholic newspaper in Philadelphia at the time, so Hughes had to start one. Week after week for nine months, the two clergymen battled it out in print, and the newspapers grew thicker and thicker. This publicly aggressive side of Hughes, along with the dagger-like cross with which he preceded signature, gave rise to his nickname, "Dagger John." 

It is unlikely that either man won many converts among their readership, but the drama turned Hughes into a hero for the immigrant Irish population.

In 1838, when he was just 40 years old, John Hughes was appointed coadjutor-bishop of New York to administrate the diocese for an aging Bishop John Dubois — coincidentally the very priest who had rebuffed his initial attempts to enter the seminary in Maryland. Almost immediately, Bishop Hughes was caught in a battle with New York City over its schools, which were essentially sectarian Protestant institutions where students read books describing Irish immigrants as “drunken” and “depraved” and were given Protestant religious instruction. Among his allies in this push to end sectarianism in the public schools were the city’s Jews and Unitarians. His efforts would eventually lead to the passage in of the Maclay Bill, which forbade religious instruction in public schools. The city’s Catholic churches were threatened the night the bill passed, and old Bishop Dubois, who was still living in the same residence with Hughes, was rescued by the police when mobs tried to burn down the building.

Dubois passed away later that year, and Hughes succeeded him as the fourth bishop of the Diocese of New York.

Besides his battle against the New York City Public School Society, Hughes had also begun to establish a parallel Catholic school system, saying “We shall have to build the schoolhouse first and the church afterward.” Eventually, John Hughes would oversee the opening of scores of privately funded Catholic schools throughout the New York area.

Schoolchildren were not Hughes’ only educational priority, for he turned his sights on higher education as well, an enterprise which he acknowledged to be a “daring and dangerous undertaking.” In an age when anti-Catholic sentiment was rife, Dagger John’s daring in the face of danger was the very stuff of which Fordham Prep and Fordham University were together born.

Making the journey to Westchester, of which the Bronx was still then a part, Bishop Hughes purchased Rose Hill Manor in the farming village of Fordham in 1839. In 1840, he established the first institution on the site: St. Joseph’s Seminary. A year later in 1841, on the Feast of the Nativity of St. John the Baptist, Midsummer’s Day, June 24th — Hughes’ 44th birthday — St. Joseph’s Seminary would share the land with Hughes' second Rose Hill endeavor: St. John’s College. The College would soon be organized into levels, or divisions. First Division would become Fordham University and Second Division would become what is today Fordham Prep.

Hughes would have a hand in Fordham’s Jesuit tradition as well. A few years later, his persistence would convince a band of Jesuits from a struggling college in Kentucky to take over operation of his new school.

John Hughes lived a remarkable life. After founding St. John’s he also played a part in founding Manhattan College, Manhattanville College and the College of Mount St. Vincent. In July of 1850, when the Diocese of New York was elevated to an archdiocese, John Hughes became the first archbishop of New York. He would lay the cornerstone for St. Patrick’s Cathedral in 1858, one of the architects of which was none other than William Rodrigue, the architect of the University Church, the Prep’s first art teacher, and Hughes’ brother-in-law, the husband of his sister Margaret.

In 1861, at the personal request of President Lincoln, Hughes traveled to France to help win support for the Union cause in Europe.

Some scholars credit Hughes with saving the Irish in America, his herculean efforts on their behalf pulling the community up from extreme poverty and the violence, illiteracy and despair that it bred. Many credit him as being one of the great builders of the Church in America. All agree that he was a man of forceful personality and indomitable spirit. For Fordham, he was all of these — and more — but he is first and foremost our Founder.

After months of illness, His Excellency, the Most Reverend Archbishop John J. Hughes died on January 3, 1864. At the time of his death, he was being cared for by his two sisters, Margaret Hughes Rodrigue and Mother Mary Angelica Hughes, SC, mother general of the Sisters of Charity of New York. An estimated 100,000 people gatherered around the cathedral during his funeral. Initially interred at Old St. Patrick’s, his body was eventually moved to rest under the main altar at St. Patrick’s on Fifth Avenue.

In the words of his biographer, John Rose Greene Hassard, Class of 1855:

We cannot help but admire a man who never falters before an antagonist, and never hesitates when he has once started on a course of action.