Michael Joseph Curley (October 12, 1879 – May 16, 1947) was an Irish-born American Catholic prelate who served as the first Archbishop of Washington from 1939 to 1947.

As Bishop of St. Augustine, he fought anti-Catholic efforts by the State of Florida and the Jesuits to claim what he felt was his rightful authority.

As Archbishop of Baltimore and later Washington, he denounced the oppression of Catholic clergy in Mexico and Spain and of Jews in Germany.

However, after speaking with Bishop John Moore during a school visit, Curley decided instead to go to the Diocese of St. Augustine in the United States after he finished his education.

[4] On March 19, 1904, Curley was ordained to the priesthood for the Diocese of Saint Augustine by Cardinal Pietro Respighi in the Basilica of St. John Lateran in Rome.

At that time, the diocese had white nuns teaching in four schools for African-Americans in St. Augustine, Fernandina, Jacksonville, and Ybor City.

[7] In a 1915 letter to the parishes in the diocese, Curley wrote:We Catholics of the United States are victims of organized vilification and the government itself [through the mails] takes a hand by the distribution of lewd and lascivious anti-Catholic filth.

It is high time for the sixteen million Catholics of the United States to assert their rights and claim that protection which their citizenship and demonstrated loyalty should guarantee them.”[7]On April 24, 1916, Florida Governor Park Trammell ordered the arrest of three Sisters of St. Joseph for violating the law.

Curley vigorously attacked the sisters' arrests, portraying them as a state-sponsored campaign against Catholic schools in Florida.

[7][6] Curley attracted national attention in 1917 by battling a bill in the Florida Legislature mandating state inspections of convents.

[1] In 1919, Curley appealed to Bishop Giovanni Bonzano, apostolic delegate to the United States, to end an agreement between the diocese and the Society of Jesus.

In 1889, Bishop John Moore had asked the Jesuits to build Catholic missions and churches in Southwest Florida from Tampa Bay to Key West.

[11] He made these remarks in 1925: The men backing the so-called Catholic Foundation Plan are waging a secret hypocritical warfare against the best interests of the Church in America.

In fact, they pose as friends of the Church when they tell her to throw her millions of children into an atmosphere of destructive secularism in order that they may be educated.

[11]In 1931, Pope Pius XI appointed Curley as an assistant to the papal throne; he was later named a member of the College of Patriarchs and Bishops.

[12] Combative by nature, Curley exemplified the militancy of many American bishops and archbishops during the 1920s and 1930s: In 1934, an article in The Baltimore Sun compared the ruthlessness of Adolf Hitler to the Catholic theologian Ignatius of Loyola.

[2][15] In March 1941, Curley sued Loyola College in Baltimore and its president, Reverend Edward Bunn, over a bequest in a will.

His opponents in the Catholic hierarchy persuaded the apostolic delegate to the United States, Bishop Amleto Giovanni Cicognani, to reprimand him.