Boston Catholics: A History of the Church and Its People by Thomas H. O'Connor

Abstract

Boston Catholics.-A History of and Its People. By Thomas H. O'Connor. (Boston: Northeastern University Press. 1998. Pp. xvi, 358. $28-95 .) Writing a history of the Catholic in Boston is a challenge for any historian; for Thomas H. O'Connor, professor emeritus of history in Boston College, it was obviously a pleasure. skill of the author is evident in the way he integrates the story of the and its people with developments in secular society on the local, national, and international levels. Preceded by a helpful introduction and followed by an insightful conclusion, the core of the work is composed of eight chapters, each of which provides an essay on secondary sources for further investigation. Illustrations are strategically placed throughout the book to make the text come alive. first chapter covers nearly two centuries from the founding of Boston in 1630 to the end of the episcopacy of the civil and friendlyjean Lefebvre de Cheverus, Boston's first Roman Catholic bishop (1808-1823). With the focus of the chapter set by its title, 'No Catholics Need Apply, the reader sees how Catholics moved from outcasts in Boston during colonial times to being tolerated by the first quarter of the nineteenth century. Under Boston's second bishop (1825-1846), the forthright and scholarly Benedict Joseph Fenwick, Catholics were still Strangers in the Land. Fenwick, who coped with bigotry and cared for a vast diocese which covered all of New England, was effective in having the city's school committee remove a textbook offensive to Catholics and in founding a diocesan newspaper to deal with attacks on their religion. If the burning of the Ursuline convent and boarding school in Charlestown in 1834 was Fenwick's greatest tragedy, the founding of the College of the Holy Cross in 1843 remains his greatest triumph. What stamped the tenure of the cultivated and intelligent John Bernard Fitzpatrick, the third bishop of Boston (1846-1866), were The Famine Years, when the city's Catholics, mostly Irish immigrants, came to adjust themselves to American society by facing the Know-Nothings and by coping with the American Civil War. Yet, by 1861, when Harvard bestowed on the Catholic bishop an honorary doctor-ate in divinity, they had become more acceptable and had switched their political allegiance from the Democratic to the Republican Party. Under the laconic and taciturn John J. Williams, the city's fourth bishop (1860-190 77), the Growth and Assimilation of the Irish, the backbone of the in Boston, was evident in the names of Andrew Carney, John Boyle O'Reilly, and others. However, with the arrival of other immigrants from Europe, Boston Catholics had A Changing Church which began to deal with the needs of French, German, Italian, Lithuanian, and Polish Catholics, among others. Such developments on the local and regional levels were reflective of challenges on the national level that split the nation's Catholic churchmen who responded as Americanists or as Romanists in a controversy which Williams had witnessed developing through the Second and Third Plenary Councils of Baltimore. Though his own diocese had become an archdiocese with a larger population, it was geographically smaller with more diverse problems, and Williams handled them in a style not unlike the laissez-faire approach of that era's corporate executives. With the authoritarian- and proud William Henry O'Connell succeeding .Archbishop Williams, Boston's Catholics had their fifth episcopal leader for an crA (1907-1944) when they reflected A Sense of Solidarity. Perhaps more than any of his predecessors, O'Connell's personality affected the character of Boston's Catholicism, especially after he became the city's first cardinal in 1911. …