Download Free The Organized Catholic Church In Boston From Its Beginnings To The End Of Bishop Cheverus Reign Book in PDF and EPUB Free Download. You can read online The Organized Catholic Church In Boston From Its Beginnings To The End Of Bishop Cheverus Reign and write the review.

In this engaging work, now available in paperback, Thomas H. O'Connor chronicles the activities, achievements, and failures of the Church's leaders and parishioners over the course of two centuries.
Strange as it may seem today, until 1780 it was illegal to practice Catholicism in Massachusetts, and even then scarcely tolerated, the first public Mass not being celebrated until eight years later. By 1808, so much progress had been made that Pope Pius VII created the Diocese of Boston, which then encompassed all of New England. The community continued to grow throughout the 19th century and by the early 20th century was a significant part of the Boston community. The Catholic community had come of age, from newcomers with customs often perceived as strange, to being ever present at public events and in local, state, and national politics. This book traces the evolution of the Catholic community and its relationship with the larger Boston community, from its very humble beginnings in the 18th century through the death of Card. Richard J. Cushing in 1970.
In this engaging work, Thomas H. O'Connor chronicles the activities, achievements, and failures of the Church's leaders and parishioners over the course of two centuries. Originally published by Northeastern University Press in 1998. With a new foreword by James M. O'Toole.
Donna Merwick rejects the usual assumption that Boston Catholicism is, definitively, Irish Catholicism. In her penetrating study of three distinct generations of Boston priests in the late nineteenth century, the author shows that Irish Catholicism met with steady opposition. Her account of the struggle of Boston clerics and intellectuals to relate their faith to their experiences in the changing city provides a new interpretation of Boston Catholic culture. In the 1840s Catholic influence in Boston was minimal and, therefore, accepted. The clergy, like other Bostonians, took pride in the city's history and colonial traditions. In measuring the impact of the massive Irish-Catholic immigration of the 1850s upon this first group of priests, the author traces in part the desperate efforts of Archbishop John J. Williams to maintain Boston's genteel traditions. The character of the clergy changed from the first generation, in which priests wrote novels and radical editorials, to a second generation, in which the influence of European Catholicism was strengthened. Immigrant priests and their Irish parishioners eventually outnumbered the Yankee Catholics, but they nevertheless failed to win genuine leadership in the diocese. A third group of priests, emerging in the 1890s under the leadership of Cardinal William O'Connell, displaced not only two generations of clergymen, but also two ways of life: one which sought to leave a legacy of admiration for the Boston Protestant heritage, and one which never understood Boston and tried to replace its cultural ways with something Irish, European, and Jansenistic. O'Connell, who had the Progressive's instinct for organization, imposed a kind of intellectual martial law on the clergy which discouraged, even punished, nonconformity. It is only at this point that it becomes reasonable to consider the traditional view that Boston Catholic thought is monolithic.