Holy Cross, College of the, is a four-year liberal arts college in Worcester, Massachusetts, and the oldest Roman Catholic college in New England. Benedict J. Fenwick, the Roman Catholic bishop of Boston, founded it as a men’s college in 1843. Holy Cross began to admit women in 1972. The college is administered by the Society of Jesus, a religious order also called the Jesuits, and many of its faculty members are Jesuits. Well-known Holy Cross graduates include basketball star Bob Cousy, Nobel Prize-winning surgeon Joseph E. Murray, former United States Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare Joseph A. Califano, Jr., Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas, and James A. Healy, the first African American to become a Roman Catholic bishop.
The college’s website at https://www.holycross.edu/ offers additional information.
