During the morning of Monday, March 14, 1859, an educator at the Eliot School in the North End of Boston beat a 10-year-old boy with a stick.
In an age of corporal punishment, such discipline was not unusual. But the reason was.
Thomas Whall, a Catholic who had been born in Ireland, had refused to recite the Protestant King James Version of the Ten Commandments after being told not to do so by a priest and by his father.
But the school said he had to. And Thomas wouldn’t.
So an assistant to the principal, McLaurin Cooke, got out a three-foot-long rattan stick, three-eighths of an inch thick, and started whipping Thomas’ hands with it, over the course of a half-hour.
“The blows were not given in quick succession, but with deliberation,” a judge who heard the case later wrote.
Thomas Whall is one of many Catholics in the history of America who suffered for their religion and resisted what they considered attacks on it, helping carve out a place for Catholics in American society and expanding Americans’ conception of religious freedom.
Just as the routes of the recent and forthcoming National Eucharistic Processions (2024, 2025 and 2026) highlight people
