Monsignor John Tracy Ellis (1905-1992)

Born in Seneca, Illinois, John Tracy Ellis attended St. Viator College before receiving a doctorate from Catholic University at age 25. After teaching history for a few years, he entered the seminary and was ordained a priest in 1938. In 1941, he became editor of the Catholic Historical Review, the premier journal in the field. At first his specialty was Medieval history, but in 1941 the university rector, Bishop Joseph Corrigan, asked him to take over a course in American Catholic history. Ellis said that he didn’t know anything about the subject. “Well, you can learn, can’t you?” was Corrigan’s reply. After a brief period of studying at Harvard, Father Ellis returned to Catholic, where he taught the history of American Catholicism for the better part of the next six decades. He wrote several books, but the work for which he is best remembered is an essay he wrote titled “American Catholics and the Intellectual Life.” In it her argued that while Catholics had made great gains in the socio-economic realm, their contributions to the country’s intellectual life were less impressive. He attributed this to what he called a “frequently self-imposed ghetto mentality which prevents them from mingling with their non-Catholic colleagues.” The essay had a tremendous impact and led many American Catholics to reassess their engagement with the intellectual life. Except for an extended foray at the University of San Francisco, he spent his life at Catholic University, where he died on this day in 1992. Known as the “Dean of American Catholic historians,” his legacy lives on in the scholarly legacy he left behind.