<P> The proposal to create a national Catholic university in America reflected the rising size and influence of the nation's Catholic population and also an ambitious vision of the Church's role in American life during the 19th century . </P> <P> In 1882 Bishop John Lancaster Spalding went to Rome to obtain Pope Leo XIII's support for the University and persuaded family friend Mary Gwendoline Caldwell to pledge $300,000 to establish it . On March 7, 1889, the Pope issued the encyclical "Magni Nobis", granting the university its charter and establishing its mission as the instruction of Catholicism and human nature together at the graduate level . By developing new leaders and new knowledge, the University would strengthen and enrich Catholicism in the United States . Many of the founders of the CUA held a vision that included both a sense of the Church's special role in United States and also a conviction that scientific and humanistic research, informed by the Faith, would only strengthen the Church . They sought to develop an institution like a national university that would promote the Faith in a context of religious freedom, spiritual pluralism, and intellectual rigor . </P> <P> When the University first opened for classes in the fall of 1888, the curriculum consisted of lectures in mental and moral philosophy, English literature, the Sacred Scriptures, and the various branches of theology . At the end of the second term, lectures on canon law were added and the first students were graduated in 1889 . In 1904, an undergraduate program was added and it quickly established a reputation for excellence . </P> <P> The Catholics founded numerous colleges for women . The first was the College of Notre Dame of Maryland, which opened elementary and secondary schools in Baltimore in 1873 and a four - year college in 1895 . It added graduate programs in the 1980s that accepted men and is now Notre Dame of Maryland University . Another 42 women's colleges opened by 1925; by 1955, there were 116 Catholic colleges for women . Most--but not all most of them--went co-ed, merged or closed after 1970 . </P>

Who was a convert to catholicism who began catholic schools in us