John Ireland

Education

Ireland advocated state support and inspection of Catholic schools. After several parochial schools were in danger of closing, Ireland sold them to the respective city's board of education. The schools continued to operate with nuns and priests teaching, but no religious teaching was allowed. This plan, the Faribault–Stillwater plan, or Poughkeepsie plan, created enough controversy that Ireland was forced to travel to Rome to defend it to the papal authorities, which he succeeded in doing. He also supported the English only movement, which he sought to enforce within American Catholic churches and parochial schools. The continued use of heritage languages was not uncommon at the time because of the recent large influx of immigrants to the U.S. from European countries. Ireland influenced American society by actively demanding the immediate adoption of the English language by German-Americans and other recent immigrants. He is the author of The Church and Modern Society (1897).

According his biographers Fr. Vincent A. Yzermans and Franz Xaver Wetzel, there is a great historical importance to the well documented clashes between John Joseph Frederick Otto Zardetti while Bishop of St. Cloud, with Archbishop John Ireland and his supporters within the American hierarchy. These clashes were both over Zardetti's hostility to Archbishop Ireland's Modernist theology and Zardetti's belief that American patriotism was compatible with continued teaching and nurturing among immigrant families of the German language and other heritage languages like it. Zardetti later played a major role, as an official of the Roman Curia, in pushing for the Apostolic letter Testem Benevolentiae, which was signed by Pope Leo XIII on 22 January 1899. As a reward, Zardetti was promoted to assistant to the papal throne on 14 February 1899. In commenting on Zardetti's role in the letter, Fr. Yzermans has commented, "In this arena he might well have had seen his greatest impact on American Catholicism in the first half of the twentieth century in the United States."