Chapter 3: From the Eliot School Rebellion to Campion Hall at Boston College: Solidarity, Public Interest, and School Vouchers—A Test Case for the Catholic Imagination

On a hot August evening in 1834, Lyman Beecher, president of Lane Seminary in Cincinnati, Ohio and patriarch of America’s most revered evangelical clan (father of Harriet Beecher Stowe and Henry Ward Beecher), delivered the last of three anti-Catholic sermons in the city of Boston. Like other sermons delivered that day in evangelical pulpits in Boston, this one declared “the principles of this corrupt church are adverse to our free institutions, from the content and hostility which they feel towards all Protestants.” Beecher reminded the sweltering congregation that if Catholics had their way, they would “subvert our free institutions and bring into disgrace all ideas of an effective government.”