University's Web site provides new ways to teach Catholic history

Published: 2007-07-06

WASHINGTON (CNS) -- 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 Catholic University of America in Washington set up the Web site -- libraries.cua.edu/achrcua/packets.html -- to give access to primary documents from its library archives that reveal Catholic thought and reaction to significant movements and eras in American history. The main Web site provides links to information on Catholics in relation to industrialization, a living wage, education, labor unions and race.

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