College of the Holy Cross: New England's First Catholic College
Near Worcester, Massachusetts
On a hill above Worcester stands the College of the Holy Cross, the oldest Catholic college in all of New England. Founded in eighteen forty-three by Jesuit priests under Bishop Benedict Joseph Fenwick, Holy Cross opened with just six students and one clear ambition: to bring rigorous classical education to the Catholic families, most of them Irish immigrants, who were building the industrial cities of Massachusetts.
The college's first graduating class, in eighteen forty-nine, produced a valedictorian whose life story stands as one of the most remarkable in American history. James Augustine Healy was the son of an Irish planter in Georgia and a woman who had been enslaved, making Healy himself a formerly enslaved person under Georgia law. He graduated first in his class, went on to study theology in Europe, and was ordained as a Catholic priest. In eighteen seventy-five he was consecrated as Bishop of Portland, Maine, becoming the first African American Catholic bishop in the United States. He served in that role for more than two decades.
Holy Cross has continued to produce outsized figures. Bob Cousy, the ball-handling wizard who anchored the Boston Celtics dynasty of the nineteen fifties, played for the Crusaders and set the template for the modern point guard. Joseph Murray, a Holy Cross alumnus and surgeon, won the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in nineteen ninety for performing the first successful organ transplant. Clarence Thomas, the Supreme Court Justice, graduated from Holy Cross in nineteen seventy-one.
Women were admitted beginning in nineteen seventy-two. Today the college enrolls about three thousand students and remains deeply committed to its Jesuit intellectual tradition of educating the whole person.
