True shepherd of God's people, Archbishop "Dagger John" Hughes, Pray for us !
In 1844, not long after the anti-Catholic mobs burned churches, convents and Catholic Irish homes in Boston & Philadelphia, there was trouble in New York as well. "Are you afraid?" the city's mayor taunted Archbishop John Hughes. "Yes," was the answer. "Not for my churches but for yours. If a single Catholic church is burned here, New York will be turned into another Moscow." Then he surrounded his parish churches with armed Irishmen. Not a single Catholic church or convent was burned in New York.- Russell Shaw, Catholics in America: Religious Identity and Cultural Assimilation from John Carroll to Flannery O'Connor, Ignatius Press, 2016, p. 32 Archbishop John Joseph Hughes † (1797-1864), Pray for us !