John Tracy Ellis


John Tracy Ellis was a Catholic Church historian, born and raised in Seneca, Illinois, USA.
Ellis was ordained a priest and received a doctorate in history from Catholic University in Washington, where he worked with Msgr. Peter Guilday to collect the central documents of the American Catholic heritage. He spent most of his career as a faculty member of the Catholic University, but he taught at the University of San Francisco between 1963 and 1976. He was a long serving executive secretary of the American Catholic Historical Association and editor of the Catholic Historical Review. Ellis is best known for his 1952 argument that American Catholic scholars have failed to measure up to European Catholic standards of scholarship and intellectual leadership.

Career

He wrote widely on church history, including a major biography of James Cardinal Gibbons. He attracted widespread attention in Catholic circles for his essay deploring an anti-intellectual "ghetto mentality" among American Catholics.
In his book American Catholicism, first published in 1956, he wrote that a "universal anti-Catholic bias was brought to Jamestown in 1607 and vigorously cultivated in all the thirteen colonies from Massachusetts to Georgia."

Legacy

Several of Msgr. Ellis's students at Catholic University went on to make contributions to church history, including: Fr. Patrick H. Ahern, Fr. William Au, Fr. Colman J. Barry, OSB, Fr. Henry J. Browne, Sr. Margaret Carthy, OSU, Fr. Joseph P. Chinnici, OFM, Cardinal Archbishop Timothy Dolan, Sr. Alphonsine Frawley, Fr. James Hennesey, SJ, Archbishop Oscar Hugh Lipscomb, Anabelle Melville, Fr. Peter J. Rahill, Fr. David Sweeney, OFM, Fr. Thomas J. Shelley, and Msgr. Francis J. Weber.
He was named by Pope Pius XII, monsignor, an honorific priestly status, in 1955. He is interred in Mt. Calvary Cemetery on the north side of Seneca.

Published works