This is an I-Heart podcast.

Guaranteed Human.

And we continue with our American stories. And as you know, we love telling immigrant stories.

And today we bring you an epic one about a man who would help some of the most persecuted immigrants of his time, pursuing their own American dream.

Here's our own Joey Cortez with the story.

Richard McCann is the author of the book, John Hughes, Lion, of American Catholicism.

Imagine a young man arriving from a foreign country to the United States in the year of

1890. It's November. It's the beginning of wintertime. It's cold. He's just

come from his native county Tyrone in Ireland, a young man in a new country, a strange country,

but in his heart and in his soul with a burning desire to find a life for himself in a place that

obviously he wasn't able to find in his own country.

Because he was born a Catholic and Protestant English-controlled Ireland,

John Hughes famously noted that for the first five days of his life,

he enjoyed social and civil equality with the most favored subjects in the British Empire.

But that ended on the day of his baptism.

Here's Bill Duggan on the backstory of Catholic persecution in Ireland.

Most of England, Ireland, and Scotland was Catholic.

And when Henry VIII wanted to divorce his wife and marry Anne Boleyn,

he did not get a dispensation from Rome,

and thereby he founded the Church of England. And so from then on, the Catholic religion itself

was persecuted, and it was heavily persecuted. Most of Scotland converted to the Protestant religion,

the Church of England, of course, the English, England converted to the Church of England, to the Protestant religion, the Church of England.

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