Catholic history

Andrea Slivka of Catholic News Service has written an article that should matter to anyone interested in issues of politics, and religion, especially if they have an interest in history.

In the 1920s, Oregon voters passed a referendum backed by the Ku Klux Klan that required schoolchildren to attend only public schools, forcing Catholic schools to close.

In a letter Archbishop Alexander Christie of Oregon City stated that the local bishops agreed unanimously to appeal the law to the U.S. Supreme Court.

"Surely the bishops of this country will not stand by inactive while the faith is being strangled in our innocent children," he wrote to Archbishop Edward Hanna of San Francisco, who was head of the National Catholic Welfare Conference, the forerunner to today's U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.

The letter is now part of the American Catholic History Classroom Web site, created to help Catholic high school and even university teachers incorporate Catholic history into a secular American history curriculum.

The link to the rest of this story is here. The link to the Catholic University website is here.