At the pre-parade brunch at the Harvard Club, Fordham’s president, Tania Tetlow, paid homage to the University’s Irish founder, Archbishop John Hughes, and the generations of Irishmen and women who helped build the U.S., brick by brick.

“It is hard to imagine what this country would be without the Irish—every stone that we laid and every canal that we dug. But not just that—because we have brought our adopted home an intellectual brightness, an obsession with poetry and drama, the ability to laugh at what should make you weep. Without us, this country would be missing a certain sense of joyfulness,” President Tetlow said. “And without us, there would be no Fordham University—because it was founded for us.”

Today, as we celebrate Fordham’s auspicious founding, we reflect on the story of an Irish immigrant who sought to elevate his people—and all immigrants—with the promise of higher education. Below is a 2016 homily delivered by Monsignor Thomas J. Shelley, Ph.D., GSAS ’66, professor emeritus of theology at Fordham.

Founding Father: Archbishop John Hughes

Lady Chapel, St. Patrick’s Cathedral, June 24, 2016

219 years ago today, on June 24, 1797, St. John’s Day, Fordham’s founding father, John Joseph Hughes, was born in the little village of Annalogan in County Tyrone, Ireland.   “They told me when I was a boy,” he said, “that for the first five days I was on a social and civil equality with the most favored subject of the British Empire.  These five days would be the interval between my birth and my baptism.”  Once John Hughes was baptized a Catholic, however, like every Catholic in eighteenth-century Ireland, he immediately became a second-class citizen in the land of his birth.

John Hughes also preserved another vivid childhood memory.  When his younger sister died, after the funeral Mass, the parish priest led the funeral procession to the local cemetery, which was the property of the Protestant Church of Ireland.  Catholic priests were forbidden by law from entering these cemeteries.  And so, outside the gate of the cemetery, the parish priest bent down, scooped up a clump of earth in his hands, blessed it, and handed it to Hughes’s father to sprinkle it over his daughter’s coffin as it was lowered into the grave.  Childhood memories of this kind are not easily erased, and John Hughes never forgot this example of the prejudice suffered by Catholics in his native land.

John Hughes spent the first twenty years of his life in Ireland as the son of a poor Ulster farmer where he experienced not only prejudice but also the grinding poverty that prevented him from obtaining more than a rudimentary education.  When he emigrated to America in 1817, he worked in the only occupations for which he was qualified, as a laborer in the construction trades and in quarries.   When he applied for admission to a seminary to study for the priesthood, he had to spend his first year in remedial studies in order to qualify for the entrance requirements.

Exposure to prejudice and poverty was not limited to John Hughes.  It was the common experience of Irish Catholics both in their homeland and in America.  However, the difference was that America was the land of opportunity for immigrants, if they had the education to take advantage of these opportunities.   This was one of the primary motives that led Bishop Hughes to establish St. John’s College at Fordham in 1841.  He considered education the indispensable means for the members of his immigrant flock to break loose from the cycle of poverty that ensnared them and that prevented them from participating in what today we would call the American dream.  John Hughes’s first biographer, John Hassard, a graduate of St. John’s College, Fordham, in 1855, and Hughes’s former secretary who knew him well, said, “The subject that of all others that [Hughes] had nearest his heart was education.”

A public official who saw what Hughes was doing and came to admire him greatly was William Seward, the politically astute governor of New York State. Later, as secretary of state during the Civil War, Seward became the indispensable man in Lincoln’s cabinet.  Governor Seward told Hughes, “You have begun a great work in the elevation of the rejected immigrant, a work auspicious to the destiny of that class and still more beneficial to our common country.”  Incidentally Hughes never made a distinction between Catholic and non-Catholic immigrants.  He framed the issue this way, that foreign-born American citizens should enjoy the same legal rights as native-born American citizens.

Bishop Hughes became the effective leader of New York Catholics in June 1839.  Only two months later he made his first major decision when he purchased 106 acres at Rose Hill for a college, which confirms the statement of John Hassard that “the subject of all others that [Hughes] had nearest his heart was education.”  The price of the real estate was $30,000 ($29,750) and Hughes needed an additional $10,000 to renovate the two buildings on the property.  “I had not, when I purchased the site of this new college, St. John’s, Fordham,” Bishop Hughes said, “so much as a penny wherewith to commence the payment for it.”  He immediately launched a fund-raising campaign among New York’s impoverished Catholics.  After nine months the campaign netted a paltry $10,000.  Hughes then went to Europe on a ten-month begging trip, and generous Catholics in France and Austria contributed the money that he needed to start St. John’s College at Fordham.

John Hughes’s new college opened its doors 175 years ago today, on St. John’s Day, June 24, 1841, with a grand total of six students.  The faculty was larger than the student body.  For the next five years Hughes struggled to maintain his college as a diocesan institution with a faculty of New York diocesan priests, but it was a losing battle. There were four presidents in five years.  One president became a cardinal, another became an archbishop, but neither of them was a professional educator.

Then there was a third diocesan priest as president, the ineffable and eminently forgettable Ambrose Manahan, a scatterbrain cleric whom Hughes dismissed for incompetence.  When Hughes gave him his walking papers, he sent him this priceless letter, “I advise you to resign . . . in the almost extinguished hope that, on a new scene where your future character will be determined by your future conduct, you may disappoint the melancholy anticipations that the past is too well calculated to inspire.”  Fordham’s founding father may not have had much formal education, but he certainly possessed the innate Irish gift of eloquence.

Fordham’s fourth and most capable diocesan president was a young cleric named Father John Harley, but he died at the age of twenty-nine, a not uncommon occurrence at that time because of the rigors of seminary education.  Hughes had no one among his own diocesan clergy to replace Harley, and so in 1845 he turned to the Society of Jesus, an international order of scholars with a reputation as professional educators, to take charge of his fledgling college. The Jesuits in turn were happy to establish a foothold in the largest city in the United States.

Although St. John’s College remained a diocesan college for only five years, we rightly honor Archbishop John Hughes today as our founding father.  It was he who purchased the property at Rose Hill, raised the funds to pay for it, recruited the original faculty and administration, obtained the state charter and left to the Jesuits a flourishing little college whose ownership they were happy to obtain.  It was no mean accomplishment even for a man of the stature of John Joseph Hughes.

I do not think that the influence of John Hughes on Fordham University is limited to the past.  In many respects he remains an inspiration for us today.  For example, you are all familiar with the statue of Archbishop Hughes outside Cunniffe House on the Rose Hill campus.  That statue was the gift of the alumni on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of St. John’s College, Fordham, in 1891. Many of the alumni would have known Hughes when they were students.   Hughes had only been dead for 27 years.

The alumni wanted these words of John Hughes to be engraved on the pedestal of the statue: “I have always preached that every denomination, Jews, Christians, Catholics, Protestants—of every shade and sex—were all entitled to entire freedom of conscience, without let or hindrance from any sect or number of sects, no matter how small their number or how unpopular the doctrine that they profess.”

Unfortunately those words of John Hughes were not engraved on the pedestal of his statue perhaps, perhaps—and here I am only guessing—because the theologically conservative Jesuit Fathers at Fordham considered John Hughes’s words to be too bold and radical.  They certainly would have set off alarm bells in the Vatican.  However, in 1965, the Second Vatican Council effectively if posthumously endorsed those words of Archbishop Hughes in its Declaration on Religious Liberty and in Nostra Aetate, the council’s document on the relationship between the Catholic Church and the Jewish people.  Isn’t it inspiring to know that, at least in this all-important area of freedom of conscience, our founding father anticipated the work of the Second Vatican Council by a whole century?

John Hughes was no Mother Theresa.  He will never be canonized because, among his many other qualities, he was a tough and feisty street fighter who gave no quarter and asked no quarter in an often hostile environment.  In 1844 a Nativist mob unleashed several days of rioting and violence on the Catholic community in Philadelphia. They then threatened to do the same thing in New York City.  Bishop Hughes told the Nativist mayor of New York City, James Harper, that, if any harm came to his churches, he would turn the city into “a second Moscow,” a reference to the destruction of Moscow by the Russians in 1812 when Napoleon attacked the city.

That does not sound like Mother Theresa.  To be honest, it is also far removed from the spirit of the Sermon on the Mount.  But it worked and may be justified on the grounds that it preserved peace and law and order.  The Nativist leaders backed down and disbanded their mob and spared New York City from the violence that only days earlier had engulfed the city of Philadelphia.

Many historians have criticized Archbishop Hughes for his bellicose style of leadership, but at least one distinguished historian of American Catholicism, Monsignor John Tracy Ellis, offered a more nuanced appraisal of John Hughes’s leadership. Ellis said that “there were times when [Hughes’s’] very aggressiveness was about the only approach that would serve the end that he was seeking, viz., justice for his people.”  An integral element in his quest to obtain justice for his people and to give them economic and social equality in American society was to give them access to higher education.  That is why he went to such great pains to establish the university whose 175^th anniversary we celebrate today.

It is difficult to envision anyone else in the Catholic community in nineteenth-century New York City who could have accomplished what Archbishop John Hughes did for “the elevation of the rejected immigrant” (to quote again Governor William Seward).  A key element in Archbishop Hughes’s plan to elevate the rejected immigrant was to give them the opportunity for a college education.  We all owe him a great debt of gratitude for establishing St. John’s College at Rose Hill, the future Fordham University.  It is a debt that we gladly acknowledge today and will continue to acknowledge and repeat in many different ways over the course of the next twelve months.

Thomas J. Shelley

The 17th annual Fordham Founder’s Dinner, held March 19, raised a total of $2.2 million for the Fordham Founder’s Undergraduate Scholarship Fund and Faith & Hope | The Campaign for Financial Aid. So far, $131 million has been raised toward the campaign’s $175 million goal.

Speaking on behalf of her fellow Founder’s Scholars, Fordham College at Rose Hill senior Genie Hughes, a biology and theology major, thanked the donors for helping the scholars overcome financial barriers to education, and for being “bothered into action.”

“It’s easy enough for a bio student to view life as a series of signal transduction pathways and neuronal networks that allow us to function,” she said. “But life—the thing we spend every day living—is made up of so much more than that.”

Founder’s Scholar Marla Louissaint, currently performing in the national tour of Beautiful: The Carole King Musical, took the stage and sang a moving rendition of “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow” for the attendees.

A World of Infinite Possibilities

In thanking the donors for their generosity, Joseph M. McShane, S.J., president of Fordham, said their financial support—indeed all forms of scholarship support—“opens up a world of near-infinite possibilities.”

Those possibilities are reflected in the lives of the donors themselves, “with their talents, their vision, their discerning wisdom, and their passionate integrity.” In particular, he called out the evening’s three Founder’s Awards honorees: John R. Costantino, Esq., GABELLI ’67, LAW ’70, PAR; Barbara Costantino, PAR; and William J. Loschert, GABELLI ’61.

“They have lived their lives in ways that bring lustre to the University,” said Father McShane. “It also means that, having reflected deeply on the transforming impact that a Fordham education had on them, they have come to the realization that like all of us, they were the beneficiaries of a legacy they didn’t create.”

Legacy Builders

Bob Daleo, GABELLI ’72, chairman of the Board of Trustees and the event’s co-chair, said the Costantinos had a “shared love” of the University, and were generous in their support for the new Law School building, Fordham athletics, WFUV, and two scholarships—the Costantino Family Endowed Scholarship Fund, and the Edelman Postgraduate Fellowship in Neuroscience.

In accepting the Founder’s award, Fordham Trustee Emeritus John Costantino paid homage to his parents; his father, an orphan who emigrated to America from Sicily when he was just 14 years old, had little chance for a formal education.

“The proudest day of my parents’ lives was the day they attended my graduation at Fordham Law School,” he said. Although his father passed away just two months after the graduation ceremony, Costantino’s mother always felt that his father had “gotten his wish” to see him become a lawyer.

Barbara Costantino said she was honored to share the stage with her husband of 48 years, whom she’d known when he was a student in 1963 at Fordham’s business school. Back then, she said, she’d read and typed his college and law school papers—free of charge.

“I have often felt that I probably should have gotten an honorary Fordham degree [for that],” she said jokingly, and to applause.

Trustee Fellow William J. Loschert, who has hosted more than 1,000 Fordham students at his home in London and is a steadfast supporter of Fordham faculty, scholarships, and building projects, captured the evening with the shortest acceptance speech—at approximately 30 seconds. He thanked Father McShane, Gabelli School of Business Dean Donna Rapaccioli, the Fordham faculty, and “most importantly the students.”

“Enjoy the rest of the evening, have another glass of wine, and God bless,” he said.

Although Loschert proved to be a man of few words, Father McShane called him “an extraordinary presence for Fordham in London … He has been a fatherly figure.” 

Into the Future

In his speech, Father McShane described Fordham’s founder, Archbishop “Dagger John” Hughes as “a fundraiser who was not afraid to knock on any door.”

“He was, thank God, incapable of dreaming small dreams,” Father McShane said. “Therefore, with zeal and urgency, he took on New York and American culture with what some thought was an unholy impatience.”

“Now I may be prejudiced, but the greatest of all his realized dreams was Fordham,” said Father McShane. “The dream was bold, its dividends have been rich—but the costs associated with ensuring the continuation of that legacy were, and are, high.”

He called the evening’s honorees “worthy successors” to the legacy of Dagger John. Just as Archbishop Hughes gave hope to the recent Irish immigrants, the Fordham Founder’s awardees have given the promise of an education to the scholars.

“You’re, for them, patron saints,” he said. “You are men and women, who, not knowing our students’ names, have harbored great hopes for them.”
View a slideshow
[doptg id=”107″]

Watch Founder’s Scholar Marla Louissaint Perform ‘Will You Still Love Me’

The Richard A. Cook Gold Medal Award, which was presented to Fordham President Joseph M. McShane, S.J., at a ceremony at the University Club, has been granted every year since 1930, except for five years during World War II.

Previous winners have included civil servants like E. Virgil Conway and Ray Kelly, mayors Fiorello LaGuardia and Rudy Giuliani; entertainers such as Oscar Hammerstein and Tony Randall; corporate stalwarts such as the Rockefellers; and icons such as Carnegie Hall and the Museum of the City of New York.

Paul and Diane Guenther, who served as the association’s 2017 Gold Medal Award Dinner Chairs, introduced Father McShane. Paul Guenther, FCRH ‘62, a former head of the Fordham Board of Trustees, noted that since Father McShane became president in 2003, Fordham has transitioned from a well-respected, regional Catholic school to a prominent national university. Applications have more than tripled since then, average SAT scores have risen 100 points, and in 2014, Father McShane oversaw the completion of a $500 million capital campaign.

Last year, the University had its best fundraising year in its history, raising $75.9 million. Just as impressive, Fordham students have performed more than a million community service hours annually.

“He is not just the University’s president; he is Fordham’s pastor and its most capable ambassador in living memory,” Guenther said.

In accepting the award, Father McShane called himself merely the latest curator of the University.

“Institutions have a weight that we as individuals cannot hope to match, and indeed the best leaders in our 175-year history have put Fordham first and their own ambitions a distant second.”

It is true, he said, that Fordham has given much to the city, particularly through the achievements of its immigrant population, which included Fordham founder Archbishop John Hughes. But Fordham has received much as well, from the “intellectual, cultural, financial, and spiritual ferment of New York.”

“Our individual institutions are stronger because they are so intimately intertwined with one-another’s history and day-to-day lives. Those institutions that have crossed the 100-year mark carry this wisdom with them into the current day. Fordham is proud of its history and its connection to New York City, and grateful to accept the honor the 100 Year Association bestows upon it tonight,” he said.

Clint W. Blume III, president of the 100 Year Association, encouraged attendees to visit the list of awardees, which he said reflects the bedrock of the cities’ civic culture.

“Fordham fits well with and enhances the standing of this list, not only because of its distinguished faculty, that has educated generations of leaders for 175 years, but also because of its focus on community service, and an ethical society as informed by its Jesuit tradition,” he said.

“Most of all, because it embraces New York, making its home a dynamic resource for its students.”

“I was told that my great-grandfather cobbled the shoes of the Jesuits there,” says Quinn, who earned a master’s degree in Irish history at Fordham in 1975.

Four years later, he left academia to become a speechwriter for New York governors—first for Hugh Carey until 1982, and then for Mario Cuomo. Quinn was a key contributor to several of Cuomo’s most memorable speeches, including his July 1984 keynote address at the Democratic National Convention—widely regarded as one of the most powerful of the past four decades.

Quinn left the governor’s office in 1985 to become the chief speechwriter for Time Warner—a transition he made while working on Banished Children of Eve: A Novel of Civil War New York, which won a 1995 American Book Award.

He followed that with a collection of essays, Looking for Jimmy: A Search for Irish America (2007), and a series of historical novels—Hour of the Cat (2005), The Man Who Never Returned (2010), and Dry Bones (2013)—all featuring private detective Fintan Dunne.

Quinn and his wife, Kathleen, have two adult children, both of whom are Fordham graduates. He recently met with FORDHAM magazine to discuss his family history, his writing, and more.

How much did you know about your ancestors when you were growing up? Did your parents talk much about them?
No. I mean, I heard anecdotes and I always knew I was Irish—our Catholicism was our Irishness. But I think my parents’ generation felt, “We’re moving into America. That is the past. There’s no need to have it beyond St. Patrick’s Day.” You’re very proud of being Irish, but the particulars of it were not of interest. I think in my parents’ case, and their parents’, they pushed their children ahead, you know, and made sure that they went to college. I only knew one grandparent, and they never talked about Ireland. Never. And I think they loved cities—you know, the whole Irish farming experience hadn’t been too great.

Your great-grandfather Michael Manning, how much do you know about what brought him to America?
It was the famine that would have brought him. He would have been one of the 2 million Irish who left in 10 years.

When did you really delve into that history and learn more about what the immigrant experience must’ve been like for him?
Well, that’s how I wound up writing a novel. I was studying for a Ph.D. in Irish history with Maurice O’Connell at Fordham. Then I left the academic world to go into politics, and I used to go to the state library to research speeches. I found this housing report for 1855 that was like a description of Dickensian London. I recognized that this is where my great-grandparents lived, and I had never heard anything about it. So then I began to look into that, the conditions in New York in the 1840s and ’50s. It had an infant mortality rate like the third world. It didn’t have a sewer system. So I realized, in a sense, why they didn’t tell us all this growing up. What was the use in knowing that?

Do you think there is a tendency to romanticize the immigrant experience generations later, and do you see a danger in that?
Oh, yeah, it’s a human tendency. It becomes part of a sentimental path rather than a reliving of the brutal reality that so many people go through.

And I think the danger is that you can lose sympathy with people in poverty and difficult circumstances now, thinking, “We were more noble the way we did it.” You forget the people who didn’t survive, who were victims of a lack of opportunity, poverty. We tidy it up. I always say America loves immigrants, but they have to be here two or three generations before anybody loves them.

People lose sight of the kind of labels and stereotypes that have been attached to new immigrant groups. The Irish, their disease was cholera. People thought they carried it with them. It came from tainted water, but people didn’t want to live around the Irish because they thought it was their disease, and they were judged to be mentally inferior to Anglo-Saxons. It’s like IQ tests, when they were first used at Ellis Island: They felt that Italians and Jews would bring down the national IQ. So you just see these things, and I don’t know how you cure it.

I think if you’re Irish and if you understand your history, if it doesn’t leave you with sympathy for the underdog, I don’t know what would.

You’ve written—both in Banished Children of Eve and in Looking for Jimmy—about the pivotal role Archbishop John Hughes, Fordham’s founder, played in galvanizing “the Irish-American process of reorganization” in the mid-19th century. How would you sum up his contributions?
I always say he was as much an Irish chieftain as a Catholic churchman. He’s the stem of the whole flower, the central figure, or however you want to describe it. He was here when a million Irish came out of Ireland from the famine, essentially skill-less, impoverished, and he was the mainspring of their reorganization. I always say that the Irish experience in America was about reorganizing. They were a mob when they came here. They had no financial resources. They had no education. They had no skills.

The engines of reorganization were the Catholic Church, the Democratic Party (which called itself the “Organization”), and the labor movement. The thing was to know the community was there, and it held together. Things cohered.

How did you go from grad school at Fordham to political speechwriting?
I wrote an article for America magazine in 1979 called “An American Irish St. Patrick’s Day.” I submitted it because, I didn’t know it at the time, but I was fascinated by this Irish-American experience that seemed to me to be going away without having been examined. We never looked at ourselves. Now we were moving to the suburbs. We were losing that thing I was talking about; the coherent thing was falling apart. But where was the record of it? Supposedly the Irish are great writers, but I couldn’t find any novels about the Irish-American experience. One, Elizabeth Cullinan, she wrote a beautiful novel, House of Gold, about the Bronx parish that I grew up in. But I remember everybody was horrified that she wrote it. She was putting out the family laundry. My mother was like, “How could she do that?”

So I wrote the article about this, and a Fordham alumnus read it and gave it to [New York Governor] Hugh Carey, who knew my father and was looking for a speechwriter. Out of the blue, they asked me to write the Fordham Law School commencement speech for him. I’d never written a speech. But I was looking for a job, and I didn’t want to be underemployed, so I wrote the speech. They really liked it and eventually offered me a job. I said I’ll do it for a year and then go back to academics. That was almost 40 years ago.

What did you learn from your experience in Albany?
To work in politics behind the scenes, you learn so much about the dynamics of human interrelationships, how much is based on personal relationships. Merit and hard work are no match for it. You know what was the great motto of the Albany machine? Honesty is no substitute for experience.

At what point did an academic career recede in your rearview mirror?
It receded when I got my second raise. I was making about twice what I’d been making. And then I got married. My wife is from the Bronx. We knew each other 14 years before we got married. That’s what’s known in the west of Ireland as a “whirlwind courtship.” She had moved to Albany for graduate school. She was a rehabilitation counselor. We reunited and got married. Finishing the doctorate would have been taking a big step backward. And some part of me always wanted to be a writer. It was an ambition.

Tell me about the genesis of Banished Children of Eve. I understand you initially thought you were going to write a history of the Irish in New York. Is that right?
I was an ex-academic. I still have a big interest in history. I used to send away for remaindered books. As I began to think about the experience of the famine Irish coming into New York, I realized there was really no central history written of it, this big event. I got one book on the Draft Riots, The Armies of the Streets [by Adrian Cook]. This historian did what no historian had done before. He went down and got the records from the morgue. They used to say a thousand people died in the riots. He could identify a hundred and something people. One of the names was Peter Quinn. My Quinn ancestors weren’t here yet. They didn’t come until 1870, but I was like, “Whoa, who is he?”

The personalization of history struck me. There were no diaries, no records. Nobody wrote. There’s not a scrap of paper in my family of anybody’s experience. So I wanted to write a history, but I began to realize the voices I wanted were not recorded. Then I found out that this songwriter, Stephen Foster, was in New York at the time of the Draft Riots. I went down—I think he committed suicide in the New England Hotel on the Bowery, and I stood in front of it. Every novelist is part psychotic; we hear voices. And standing there, I kind of felt I knew who he was. I had never written fiction, not a lick of it. But I said the only way I reach those voices is in novels.

How conscious were you of the fact that as a novelist you were drawing from your work experiences—for example, from the time you worked as a court officer in the Bronx?
At some points I was, absolutely. Dealing with a city, I felt like it was in extremis [as it was during the Civil War]. Being in the South Bronx in the ’70s in a uniform and sitting in a courtroom with 150 people and saying, “Well, you know, these people look poor and strange to me. And this is what my ancestors looked like to the people who were wearing the uniforms at that time.”

I figured it wasn’t just an Irish story I was telling at that point because once you stepped off those boats, you’re no longer Irish. You’re still Irish, but you’re becoming something else. And part of that experience is you have to interact with people you never had to interact with before. You might hate them. But you have to live with them, and some part of you is going to rub off on each other. That dynamic hasn’t changed.

Since 2005, you’ve published a trilogy of historical-mystery novels featuring the Irish-American detective Fintan Dunne. Do you see those books as part of a continuum that began with Banished Children of Eve?
Yes, Fintan Dunne is a descendant of Jimmy Dunne [in Banished Children of Eve], but I don’t know how. He’s a cousin somehow. The idea was that they would be three books that would stand alone, but in a way tell the history of New York from the First World War to the Cold War. And the thread would be this Irish-Catholic guy, Fintan Dunne.

I love Raymond Chandler. I always felt his character Philip Marlowe, he’s really Irish American with his hard-edged blend of cynicism and idealism, and he belongs in New York. So that was the inspiration for Fintan Dunne. I knew people that lived in that New York, and the thing about New York is, you never have to look for a story to tell. It’s right there in front of you.

How do you go about conducting research for your novels? When do you know enough’s enough?
I love doing research. Every writer wants excuses not to write, and research is the best excuse to have because you’re still working on the book. What I would try to do is immerse myself to the point where I would feel that I have some sense of that world. Then I would start to write, and if I had to look for other pieces, I would.

When I was researching Banished Children, my wife and daughter were away for the summer at Shelter Island. I would go out on weekends, but every night after work, I’d go to the newspaper division of the New York Public Library. I read all of the newspapers from the Civil War. I remember sitting there, and the air conditioner wasn’t working. It was August. I said, well, now I’ll read all of Harper’s Weekly. Then I realized I can either write this or research it for the rest of my life because the research is quicksand; it’s so interesting.

Did it get harder to stop researching for the Fintan Dunne books because it’s just so much easier to find things these days?
Oh, yeah, it’s unbelievable. I used to keep a list at my desk. I’d write down things to look up. Then at lunch hour—I was working at the Time-Life building—I’d run to the library. Now you just go online. It’s so much easier but not as much fun. It was so much more like detective work before. You were like Fintan Dunne. You were a gumshoe tracking stuff down.

What does it mean to you to be an American of Irish ancestry born in New York? What kind of cultural inheritance do those three things imply?
My father once said to me that the legacy of being Irish is having a sense of humor and rooting for the underdog. And if you’re going to live in New York City, those are two necessary things!

And I think the great thing about being Irish and Catholic in New York is you don’t have to be. Everybody can choose what they want to be. It’s not an identity imposed on you. Tomorrow, I could be an American Buddhist. To me, that makes it so much more valuable, you know, that freedom to be what you want to be that New York confers, I think, as much or more than any place in the world. I can be this. Then I can admit other people’s rights to their choices.

You’ve talked about storytelling as a noble occupation, something that unites us all. Would you elaborate on that?
You grow up, and you think there are serious jobs—accountant, lawyer, business CEO—and then you realize, the most important thing human beings have, the thing that makes us human, are stories. The first thing we did after we sat around campfires was to tell each other stories. It is essentially what it is to be human.

In every human society, one of the most important persons has been the storyteller, the seanachie in Irish. Before the Bible was written, it was spoken. Every religion is organized around a story. Every nation is organized around a story. Every family has its own myth.

Now I think there are bad stories. There are stories that are written or told badly, and then there are stories that are bad, like eugenics. That was a bad story. It was essentially a story that was used against other people to commit mass murder. Stories are very powerful.

One of the things I learned in writing speeches was that a good speech is a good story. And [Ronald] Reagan, one of his powers as president was, he had a story. He had the story of the frontiersman and the lone pioneer. One of the reasons why Cuomo is remembered is he had a story too—family, mom and pop. That’s what people listen to.

Do you ever itch to be back where you were—
To be young with hair? Sure, everybody does.

I mean, as a political speechwriter, having the opportunity to help tell a story in that way?
No. I’m really glad I did it. It was a defining experience. It helped me be a writer in ways I can’t describe. But I would never, ever want to do it again. For five minutes, I wouldn’t want to do it again. And I do think you have to be young to do it. It’s physically taxing. And it’s an exercise in anonymity.

Next month, you’ll be participating in a Fordham conference on “The Future of the Catholic Literary Imagination.” How would you define that term, and do you think of yourself as a Catholic writer?
When I’m writing, I never think about being Catholic. It’s just who I am. I’m not advancing any dogmas.

I have an essay in Looking for Jimmy where I said there are three elements to the Catholic imagination: sin, grace, and mercy. I wrote that years ago, and Pope Francis, the word he uses all the time now is mercy. We don’t want justice. We want justice for other people. We want mercy for ourselves. In politics, there’s not much mercy. It’s always been an in-demand commodity in the world, and it always will be, because it’s such a leap. Mercy is not deserved. It’s freely given, and there’s no rationale for it.

Interview conducted, edited, and condensed by Ryan Stellabotte.

Watch Peter Quinn’s New York, a five-minute video in which Quinn talks about his noir-tinged Fintan Dunne series and the city as muse. “For me,” he begins, “New York City isn’t so much a setting as it is a character. It destroys some people, elevates others. But one thing New York won’t do is leave you alone. It’s always changing.”

Representing the students were Devin O’Mara, Pedro Acosta, Mavi Bengzon, Azka Ali, Charmaine Pisani, and Qing Li. (Photos by Dana Maxson)

Members of the University community gathered at St. Patrick’s Cathedral—the final resting place of that founder, Archbishop John Hughes, the first Catholic archbishop of New York—for a Mass that formally launched Fordham’s 175^th anniversary year, or Dodransbicentennial.

With the founding of Fordham, first known as St. John’s College, “the great story of Catholic higher education in the Northeast began,” said Joseph M. McShane, SJ, president of Fordham, who celebrated the Mass. “The cathedral is one of the other gifts that John Hughes gave to the church, the city, and the country, and it is fitting therefore that we gather here, near his tomb, to celebrate what he did for us.”

The anniversary year will feature special events, exhibits, and programs that highlight Fordham’s history and impact. Also celebrated will be the 100^th anniversary of three Fordham graduate schools—the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, the Graduate School of Education, and the Graduate School of Social Service—and the 170^th anniversary of Fordham becoming a Jesuit institution of higher learning.

“In this year, as we celebrate our storied past, we will also focus on the promise of our next 175 years,” said Maura Mast, PhD, dean of Fordham College at Rose Hill, in remarks following the service. “Our story is the story of generations of students, educators, and alumni who believed in the power of a Fordham education to transform lives, and who gave heart and voice to our guiding principle, wisdom and learning in the service of others.”

Fordham’s Origin

The Fordham story began with Archbishop Hughes’ dream of helping immigrants and Irish Catholics who faced poverty and prejudice in both Ireland and America, as Msgr. Thomas J. Shelley, GSAS ’66, explained in his homily at the Mass.

“He considered education the indispensable means for the members of his immigrant flock to break loose from the cycle of poverty that ensnared them, and to take part in what today we would call the American dream,” said Msgr. Shelley, professor emeritus of theology and author of Fordham, A History of the Jesuit University of New York: 1841-2003 (Fordham University Press, 2016).

He described Archbishop Hughes’ “begging” in New York and Europe to pay for the college’s original 106 acres and for the building renovations that were needed. The struggles continued after the college opened its doors on June 24, 1841, at Rose Hill Manor, in what was then Westchester County. The diocesan clergy members running the college were repeatedly called away, and the college had four presidents in five years before the Society of Jesus took over in 1846.

Archbishop Hughes also had to face down the prejudices of his time. In 1844, he showed his “tough and feisty” side when he told the nativist mayor of New York City that he would turn the city into “a second Moscow”—destroyed by Russians during Napoleon’s 1812 invasion—if a nativist mob attacked the city’s Catholic community (as it had recently attacked Philadelphia’s). The nativists backed down.

After the homily, Father McShane noted that Archbishop Hughes distributed muskets to area Catholic churches and schools for protection. Two sat in the Fordham president’s office for many years until one president gave them to a friend, he said.

Honoring Archbishop Hughes’ Message

Msgr. Shelley also cited Archbishop Hughes’ words: “‘I have always preached that every denomination, Jews, Christians, Catholics, Protestants—of every shade and sex—were all entitled to entire freedom of conscience’” without hindrance. The words, Msgr. Shelley said, were effectively endorsed by the Second Vatican Council in the following century.

“I do not think that the influence of John Hughes on Fordham University is limited to the past,” he said.

After the service, Father McShane spoke of “all that we have to live up to.”

“We have to live up to the fact that [Archbishop Hughes] left us an institution that from the very start was precarious—founded on faith, sustained by love, aimed at transmitting wisdom and learning so that people would serve others and do the world a world of good; that is to say, set the world on fire and transform other hearts.”

Fordham University Board of Trustees Chairman Bob Daleo, GABELLI ’72, noted the progression of Fordham from “six students and two buildings” to the University it is today, with three campuses, an academic center in London, about 15,000 students, and academic partnerships worldwide.

“Today we do honor the achievements of the past, but we truly celebrate the opportunities of Fordham’s future,” he said. “In doing so, we rededicate ourselves to sustaining Fordham not simply as an institution but as a way of life.”

Visit our 175^th timeline. 

As a Bronx native, Monsignor Thomas J. Shelley, PhD, GSAS ’66, never needed an introduction to the Jesuit University of New York. “Every Catholic growing up in the Bronx was aware of Fordham and had a good impression of the University,” he says. But even after spending 16 years teaching at the University and publishing several books on the history of the Catholic community in New York City, he discovered much more while writing Fordham, A History of the Jesuit University of New York: 1841–2003 (Fordham University Press).

Monsignor Shelley, professor emeritus of theology at Fordham, began working on the book in 2008, shortly after completing The Bicentennial History of the Archdiocese of New York. That’s when his cousin Joseph M. McShane, SJ, president of Fordham, invited him to write a history of the University up until 2003, when Joseph A. O’Hare, SJ, GSAS ’68, retired as president.

This month, Fordham will begin a yearlong celebration of its dodransbicentennial, or 175th anniversary—and Monsignor Shelley’s history of the University has arrived just in time.

Could you tell us a little about the book? How did you tackle covering almost 175 years of history?
The Jesuits made my work easy because they carefully preserved so much of Fordham’s history in their archives, both here in New York City and also in Rome. Prior to 1907, Fordham (which was still called St. John’s College at the time) is the story of a small liberal arts college in the rural Bronx. After 1907, with the establishment of the first graduate schools (and the transition from college to university), the plot thickens. Each of the graduate schools has its own distinct identity and history, so the story becomes more complicated.

Did you make any surprising discoveries about Fordham or its historical figures in your research?
Yes, I did, and they were some of the most rewarding aspects of my research. For example, it is well known that Father Joseph Keating, SJ, was the University’s treasurer for 38 years, a period that spanned two world wars and the Great Depression. I did not know, however, that in 1912 Father Keating protested vigorously to the Jesuit father general in Rome when the general objected to the appointment of Fordham’s first Jewish dean, Jacob Diner, MD. Father Keating won the battle, and Dean Diner remained a much-admired dean for 20 years.

Another surprise for me was how significant the philosopher Dietrich von Hildebrand was before he joined the Fordham faculty as a refugee from Nazi Germany. In Europe Hildebrand was an outspoken opponent of the Nazis and was an influential figure in reshaping Catholic thinking on the relationship of the Catholic Church to the Jewish people, an effort that bore fruit years later at the Second Vatican Council in the groundbreaking document, Nostra Aetate.

As a result of my research, I also came to the conclusion that one of the most underappreciated presidents of Fordham was Father Robert I. Gannon, SJ, who was president from 1936 to 1949. Father Gannon secured Fordham’s reinstatement in the prestigious Association of American Universities after his predecessor had lost it in 1935, upgraded academic standards, appointed the first woman graduate dean, and guided Fordham through the lean years of World War II and the challenges of rapid expansion in the postwar era. He was the first president of Fordham to become a prominent civic figure in New York City.

In the preface to the book, you describe how, in 1941, Father Gannon claimed that only two kinds of universities would survive in the United States—those that are “very rich” and those that are “indispensable.” Do you think that he was correct? Is Fordham “indispensable?”
I do not think that any American educator in 1941 could have foreseen the dramatic expansion that would take place in American higher education in the postwar world. With regard to Fordham, I think that one can make a convincing claim that in the past 75 years Fordham has established itself as an indispensable anchor in the network of Catholic and Jesuit universities in the United States. One of the main reasons that Archbishop John Hughes started Fordham was to provide an education for immigrants, and that is still a major part of the University’s mission. Throughout its history, Fordham has played an integral role in Catholic higher education in New York City. And it’s also one of the largest and academically strongest of the Catholic colleges and universities in the country.

What do you foresee for the next 175 years of Fordham’s history?
My mentor, the highly respected church historian Monsignor John Tracy Ellis, often said that he thought that historians were notoriously poor prophets and that they should always confine their comments to the past, not the future. I am of the same opinion.

Interview conducted, edited, and condensed by Alexandra Loizzo-Desai.

As the year comes to a close, here are a few of our favorites, in no particular order.

Patrick Verel

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Fordham University (@fordhamuniversity)

 I have no idea why I thought it’d be fun to make Edwards’ Parade look like Hoth. I guess I was thinking about Stars Wars even back in February.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Fordham University (@fordhamuniversity)

Crocuses are far and away my favorite flower, because they show up way before anything else is hardy enough to make a go of it.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Fordham University (@fordhamuniversity)

I just love this kids’ attitude. She’s got future Ram written all over her.

Rachel Roman

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Fordham University (@fordhamuniversity)

Okay, technically NOT a picture, but the drone footage was awesome.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Fordham University (@fordhamuniversity)

Everything about this photo is beautiful. The fog, the snow, even the bare tree branches. And I usually hate bare tree branches, because they look sad =(

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Fordham University (@fordhamuniversity)

Because who doesn’t love a Pope doll in a Fordham jacket. Can I get one of these for my desk?

Tom Stoelker

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Fordham University (@fordhamuniversity)

I love this shot from Mission and Ministry’s John Gownley. At 1600 likes it was one of the most popular posts of the year and reminded us that Keating isn’t Rose Hill’s only iconic tower.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Fordham University (@fordhamuniversity)

This shot by Patick Verel is a stunner of Duane Library. We’ve all seen the light stream like this and it never fails to impress.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Fordham University (@fordhamuniversity)

Love, love, love the pizza nuns shot! Joanna Mercuri tells us that the nuns were singing while waiting in line to see the pope at Madison Square Garden, but when they finally paused for a bite to eat Joanna captured a moment of community both large and small.

Chris Gosier

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Fordham University (@fordhamuniversity)

Somehow, the Ram seems to be standing a little taller for his usual backdrop being blotted out by a snowstorm.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Fordham University (@fordhamuniversity)

I like this cool angle; you can almost see the flowers pushing upward because of the odd angle with the statue of Dagger John.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Fordham University (@fordhamuniversity)

Love this shot of Cunniffe House. The photographer seems to have caught it at just the right time of day.

Joanna Mercuri

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Fordham University (@fordhamuniversity)

Because can we ever get enough of fall beauty shots?

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Fordham University (@fordhamuniversity)

Fordham students abroad at our London Centre campus.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Fordham University (@fordhamuniversity)

Our new home in Martino Hall gives us some pretty awesome views of the Lincoln Center campus.

Gina Vergel

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Fordham University (@fordhamuniversity)

Father Joseph M. McShane, S.J., our president, is a tremendous speaker – in public or in casual conversation. Joanna Mercuri caught him during Move-in Day 2015 and it was great.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Fordham University (@fordhamuniversity)

This beautiful shot of the candle-lighting ceremony on Edwards Parade during orientation/Move-In weekend garnered more than 800 likes, and shows the sense of community welcome new students receive.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Fordham University (@fordhamuniversity)

A beautiful shot of a commute so many in the Fordham family know so well.

While artist Martha Clippinger, FCRH ’05, was on a Fulbright grant in Oaxaca, Mexico, during the summer of 2014, two fellow Fordham alumni came to visit her—her father, Charlie Clippinger, FCRH ’70, and her uncle, Scott Clippinger, GABELLI ’65.

Martha introduced her family to several of the local artists she had met while studying the use of color in local Zapotec craft traditions in and around Oaxaca.

Scott was particularly impressed by Jacobo and María Ánegles’ workshop, which specializes in brightly painted wooden animal sculptures called alebrijes. After returning home, he asked his niece to commission a piece from the workshop, and let her choose the animal.

Soon afterward, Scott received his traditional Zapotec Fordham ram, pictured above.

“It’s a striking piece of art to remember the experience, and an appropriate choice of memento of a visit by a Fordham group,” says Scott.

In fact, the Clippingers’ connection to their alma mater predates even the Fordham Ram, which became the University’s official mascot in 1893. At a graduation ceremony on the Rose Hill campus in 1852, when Fordham was still St. John’s College, the Clippingers’ ancestor John McQuade received his diploma from Fordham’s founder, Archbishop John Hughes.

It’s clear why Martha, whose middle name is McQuade, chose a ram for her uncle’s alebrije. The artist’s choice of maroon as a primary color for the piece was simply fate.

The hawks, nicknamed Hawkeye and Rose, had three eyasses, or nestling hawks, last year and have three more this year. The fledglings are believed to have hatched in May and can be seen from time to time near the left side of the Collins Hall pediment. The location is only a hawk’s swoop away from the Archbishop Hughes statue, where the adult hawks can often be spotted.

The red-tailed hawk is a large bird of prey. It breeds almost throughout North America from western Alaska and northern Canada to as far south as Panama. Throughout their range in Canada, Mexico and the United States, the hawks are protected under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918.

The birds have been a mainstay in New York and other cities, and were made famous in the book, Red-Tails in Love: A Wildlife Drama in Central Park (Pantheon Books, 1998), which chronicled the story of Pale Male and his mate, Lola. The documentary about the hawks,Pale Male, by filmmaker Frederic Lilien and narrated by Academy Award-winning actor Joanne Woodward aired on the public television program, Nature. Lilien was on the Rose Hill campus in May to shoot footage of the hawks for another documentary he is producing about the birds.

Over the years, the hawks have nested everywhere from the American Museum of Natural History to the Unisphere in Queens. In 2004, there was a public uproar over a Fifth Avenue co-op building’s decision to destroy Pale Male and Lola’s nest, which had grown to a size of eight feet and 400 pounds.

Fordham is an ideal location for the hawks, said Richard Fleisher, Ph.D., a professor of political science and avid nature photographer who has tracked the hawks’ stay at Fordham. There are plenty of squirrels and pigeons for the hawks to prey on, he said, while having no predators to worry about. Hawkeye and Rose first built their nest, Fleisher said, in 2005 on an old oak tree at the Rose Hill campus and successfully fledged two offspring. The following year, the hawks moved into the Collins Hall location and produced three hatchlings. This year, two of hatchlings have already fledged, Fleisher said, and the third should be ready to leave the nest soon. Fleischer has several photos of the red-tailed hawks on hisFordham website.