American Catholic Experience: a history from colonial times to the present by
The history of Catholicism in America focuses on the people belonging to America's largest religious denomination, from colonial times, through the immigration movements, to the contemporary Church.
The American Catholic Parish : a history from 1850 to the present by 
American Catholics: a history of the Roman Catholic community in the United States by
Written by one of the foremost historians of American Catholicism, this book presents a comprehensive history of the Roman Catholic Church in America from colonial times to the present. Hennesey examines, in particular, minority Catholics and developments in the western part of the UnitedStates, a region often overlooked in religious histories.
Faithful Passages: American Catholicism in literary culture, 1844-1931 by
Roman Catholic writers in colonial America played only a minority role in debates about religion, politics, morality, national identity, and literary culture. However, the commercial print revolution of the nineteenth century, combined with the arrival of many European Catholic immigrants, provided a vibrant evangelical nexus in which Roman Catholic print discourse would thrive among a tightly knit circle of American writers and readers. James Emmett Ryan's pathbreaking study follows the careers of important nineteenth-century religionists including Orestes Brownson, Isaac Hecker, Anna Hanson Dorsey, and Cardinal James Gibbons, tracing the distinctive literature that they created during the years that non-Catholic writers like Herman Melville and Emily Dickinson were producing iconic works of American literature. Faithful Passages also reveals new dimensions in American religious literary culture by moving beyond the antebellum period to consider how the first important cohort of Catholic writers shaped their message for subsequent generations of readers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Perhaps most strikingly, Ryan shows that by the early twentieth century, Roman Catholic themes and traditions in American literature would be advanced in complex ways by mainstream, non-Catholic modernist writers like Kate Chopin and Willa Cather. Catholic literary culture in the United States took shape in a myriad of ways and at the hands of diverse participants. The process by which Roman Catholic ideas, themes, and moralities were shared and adapted by writers with highly differentiated beliefs, Ryan contends, illuminates a surprising fluidity of religious commitment and expression in early U.S. literary culture.
A History of the Churches in the United States and Canada by
The religious histories of both the USA and Canada contain many dramatic themes. This study of the way the churches faced the movement of peoples into and across a vast continent tells much about their present size and characteristics in both Canada and the United States.
The Imperial Church: Catholic founding fathers and United States empire by
The Imperial Church connects Catholic history and the history of US empire by demonstrating that the religious dimensions of American imperial rhetoric have been as cross-confessional as the imperial nation itself.
Loyal Protestants and Dangerous Papists: Maryland and the politics of religion in the English Atlantic, 1630-1690 by
Loyal Protestants and Dangerous Papists analyzes the vibrant and often violent political culture of seventeenth-century America, exploring the relationship between early American and early modern British politics through a detailed study of colonial Maryland. Seventeenth-century Maryland was repeatedly wracked by disputes over the legitimacy of the colony's Catholic proprietorship. The proprietors' strange policy of religious liberty was part of the controversy, but colonists also voiced fears of proprietary conspiracies with Native Americans and claimed the colony's ruling circle aimed to crush their liberties as English subjects. Conflicts like these became wrapped up in disputes less obviously political, such as disagreements over how to manage the tobacco trade, without which Maryland's economy would falter. Antoinette Sutto argues that the best way to understand this strange mix of religious, economic, and political controversies is to view it with regard to the disputes over the role of the English church, the power of the state, and the ideal relationship between the two--disputes that tore apart the English-speaking world twice over in the 1600s. Sutto contends that the turbulent political history of early Maryland makes most sense when seen in an imperial as well as an American context. Such an understanding of political culture and conflict in this colony offers a window not only into the processes of seventeenth-century American politics but also into the construction of the early modern state. Examining the dramatic rise and fall of Maryland's Catholic proprietorship through this lens, Loyal Protestants and Dangerous Papists offers a unique glimpse into the ambiguities and possibilities of the early English colonial world.
Papist Devils: Catholics in British America, 1574-1783 by
This is a brief highly readable history of the Catholic experience in British America, which shaped the development of the colonies and the nascent republic in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Historian Robert Emmett Curran begins his account with the English reformation, which helps us to understand the Catholic exodus from England, Ireland, and Scotland that took place over the nearly two centuries that constitute the colonial period. The deeply rooted English understanding of Catholics as enemies of the political and religious values at the heart of British tradition, ironically acted as a catalyst for the emergence of a Catholic republican movement that was a critical factor in the decision of a strong majority of American Catholics in 1775 to support the cause for independence
Shaping American Catholicism: Maryland and New York, 1805-1915 by
Distinguished historian Robert Emmett Curran presents an informed and balanced study of the American Catholic Church's experience in its two most important regions in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries
Archbishop Lamy: In His Own Words by
Noted scholar, student of New Mexican culture, and teacher Father Tom Steele has tracked down all the existing manuscript sermons of Jean Baptiste Lamy (1814-88), the first bishop of Santa Fe and the model for the title character of Willa Cather's novel Death Comes for the Archbishop. Lamy has been the subject of devotion, rumor, and attack for over a hundred years. In this new book Steele selects important and characteristic sermons and uses them to decipher the real Lamy, public and private. This book builds on previous scholarly work about Lamy, including Paul Horgan's Lamy of Santa Fe, and presents new information and insight based on Lamy's own writings. A fully searchable CD-ROM (for both PC and MAC) of Lamy's complete sermons in English and Spanish is also available.
Catholic Borderlands : mapping Catholicism onto American empire, 1905-1935 by
In 1905 Rev. Francis Clement Kelley founded the Catholic Church Extension Society of the United States of America. Drawing attention to the common link of religion, Kelley proclaimed the Extension Society’s duty to be that of preventing American Protestant missionaries, public school teachers, and others from separating people from their natural faith, Catholicism. Though domestic evangelization was its founding purpose, the Extension Society eventually expanded beyond the national border into Mexico in an attempt to solidify a hemispheric Catholic identity. nbsp; Exploring international, racial, and religious implications, Anne M. Martínez’s Catholic Borderlands examines Kelley’s life and actions, including events at the beginning of the twentieth century that prompted four exiled Mexican archbishops to seek refuge with the Archdiocese of Chicago and befriend Kelley. This relationship inspired Kelley to solidify a commitment to expanding Catholicism in Mexico, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines in response to the national plan of Protestantization, which was indiscreetly being labeled as “Americanization.” Kelley’s cause intensified as the violence of the Mexican Revolution and the Cristero Rebellion reverberated across national borders. Kelley’s work with the U.S. Catholic Church to intervene in Mexico helped transfer cultural ownership of Mexico from Spain to the United States, thus signaling that Catholics were considered not foreigners but heirs to the land of their Catholic forefathers. nbsp;
Catholic Revivalism: the American experience, 1830-1900 by
This work shows that revivalism, traditionally viewed as a Protestant phenomenon, was also a central feature of Catholic life and activity in the 19th century. It suggests that the religion of revivalism not only found a home among Catholics, but was a major force in forming their piety.
Católicos: resistance and affirmation in Chicano Catholic history by 
Demons, Saints and Patriots : Catholic visions of Native America through the Indian Sentinel, 1902-1962 by 
Fathers on the Frontier by
In the late eighteenth century, French émigré priests fled the religious turmoil of the French Revolution and found themselves leading a new wave of Roman Catholic missionaries in the United States. Fathers on the Frontier explores the diverse ways these missionary priests guided the development of the early American church in Maryland, Kentucky, Louisiana, and other pockets of Catholic settlement throughout much of the trans-Appalachian West. Over the course of their evangelistic endeavor, this relatively small group of priests introduced Gallican, ultramontane, and missionary principles to a nascent institutional church prior to the immigration of millions of European Catholics in the nineteenth century. As author Michael Pasquier shows, this transformation of American Catholicism did not come easily. Several generations of French priests struggled to reconcile their romantic expectations of missionary life with their actual experiences as servants of a foreign church scattered throughout a frontier region with limited access to friends and family members still in France. As they became more accustomed to the lifeways of the American South and West, French missionaries expressed anxiety about apparent discrepancies between how they were taught to practice the priesthood in French seminaries and what the Holy See expected them to achieve as representatives of a universal missionary church. At no point did French missionaries engage more directly in distinctively American affairs than in the religious debates surrounding slavery, secession, and civil war. These issues, Pasquier argues, compelled even the most politically aloof missionaries to step out of the shadow of Rome and stake their church on the side of the Confederacy. In so doing, they set in motion a strain of Catholicism more amenable to Southern concepts of social conservatism, paternalism, and white supremacy, and strikingly different from the liberal, progressive strain that historians have usually highlighted. Focusing on the collective thoughts, feelings, and actions of priests who found themselves caught between the formal canonical standards of the church and the informal experiences of missionaries in American culture, Fathers on the Frontier illuminates the historical intersection of American, French, and Roman interests in the United States.
Frontiers of Faith: bringing Catholicism to the West in the Early Republic by
American religious histories have often focused on the poisoned relations between Catholics and Protestants during the colonial period or on the virulent anti-Catholicism and nativism of the mid- to late nineteenth century. Between these periods, however, lies an important era of close, peaceable, and significant interaction between these discordant factions. Frontiers of Faith: Bringing Catholicism to the West in the Early Republic examines how Catholics in the early nineteenth-century Ohio Valley expanded their church and strengthened their connections to Rome alongside the rapid development of the Protestant Second Great Awakening. In competition with clergy of evangelical Protestant denominations, priests and bishops aggressively established congregations, constructed church buildings, ministered to the faithful, and sought converts. Catholic clergy also displayed the distinctive features of Catholicism that would inspire Catholics and, hopefully, impress others. The clerics' optimism grew from the opportunities presented by the western frontier and the presence of non-Catholic neighbors. The fruit of these efforts was a European church translated to the American West. In spite of the relative harmony with Protestants and pressures to Americanize, Catholics relied on standard techniques of establishing the authority, institutions, and activities of their faith. By the time Protestant denominations began to resent the Catholic presence in the 1830s, they also had reason to resent Catholic successes -- and the many manifestations of that success -- in conveying the faith to others. Using extensive correspondence, reports, diaries, court documents, apologetical works, and other records of the Catholic clergy, John R. Dichtl shows how Catholic leadership successfully pursued strategies of growth in frontier regions while continually weighing major decisions against what it perceived to be Protestant opinion. Frontiers of Faith helps restore Catholicism to the story of religious development in the early republic and emphasizes the importance of clerical and lay efforts to make sacred the landscape of the New West.
Journey to the Sun: Junípero Serra's dream and the founding of California by
The fascinating narrative of the remarkable life of Junpero Serra, the intrepid priest who led Spain and the Catholic Church into California in the 1700s and became a key figure in the making of the American West. The fascinating narrative of the remarkable life of Junpero Serra, the intrepid priest who led Spain and the Catholic Church into California in the 1700s and became a key figure in the making of the American West In the year 1749, at the age of thirty-six, Junpero Serra left his position as a highly regarded priest in Spain for the turbulent and dangerous New World, knowing he would never return. The Spanish Crown and the Catholic Church both sought expansion in Mexico--the former in search of gold, the latter seeking souls--as well as entry into the mysterious land to the north called "California." Serra's mission: to spread Christianity in this unknown world by building churches wherever possible and by converting the native peoples to the Word of God. It was an undertaking that seemed impossible, given the vast distances, the challenges of the unforgiving landscape, and the danger posed by resistant native tribes. Such a journey would require bottomless physical stamina, indomitable psychic strength, and, above all, the deepest faith. Serra, a diminutive man with a stout heart, possessed all of these attributes, as well as an innate humility that allowed him to see the humanity in native people whom the West viewed as savages. By his death at age seventy-one, Serra had traveled more than 14,000 miles on land and sea through the New World--much of that distance on a chronically infected and painful foot--baptized and confirmed 6,000 Indians, and founded nine of California's twenty-one missions, with his followers establishing the rest. The names of these missions ring through the history of California-- San Diego, San Jose, San Juan Capistrano, Santa Clara, and San Francisco--and served as the epicenters of the arrival of Western civilization, where millions more would follow, creating the California we know today. An impoverished son, an inspired priest, and a potent political force, Serra was a complex man who stood at the historic crossroads between Native Americans, the often brutal Spanish soldiers, and the dictates of the Catholic Church, which still practiced punishment by flogging. In this uncertain, violent atmosphere, Serra sought to protect the indigenous peoples from abuse and to bring them the rituals and spiritual comfort of the Church even as the microbes carried by Europeans threatened their existence. Beginning with Serra's boyhood on the isolated island of Mallorca, venturing into the final days of the Spanish Inquisition, revealing the thriving grandeur of Mexico City, and finally journeying up the untouched California coast, Gregory Orfalea's magisterial biography is a rich epic that cuts new ground in our understanding of the origins of the United States. Combining biography, European history, knowledge of Catholic doctrine, and anthropology, Journey to the Sun brings original research and perspective to America's creation story. Orfalea's poetic and incisive recounting of Serra's life shows how one man changed the future of California and in so doing affected the future of our nation.
Junípero Serra: California's founding father by
Winner of the Historical Society of Southern California's 2015 Neuerburg Award for the best book on Pre-Gold Rush California Finalist for the Southern California Independent Bookseller Association's Best Nonfiction Book of2014 A Zocalo Public Square Best Nonfiction Book of 2013 A portrait of the priest and colonialist who is one of the most important figures in California's history In the 1770s, just as Britain's American subjects were freeing themselves from the burdens of colonial rule, Spaniards moved up the California coast to build frontier outposts of empire and church. At the head of this effort was Junípero Serra, an ambitious Franciscan who hoped to convert California Indians to Catholicism and turn them into European-style farmers. For his efforts, he has been beatified by the Catholic Church and widely celebrated as the man who laid the foundation for modern California. But his legacy is divisive. The missions Serra founded would devastate California's Native American population, and much more than his counterparts in colonial America, he remains a contentious and contested figure to this day. Steven W. Hackel's groundbreaking biography,Junípero Serra: California's Founding Father, is the first to remove Serra from the realm of polemic and place him within the currents of history. Born into a poor family on the Spanish island of Mallorca, Serra joined the Franciscan order and rose to prominence as a priest and professor through his feats of devotion and powers of intellect. But he could imagine no greater service to God than converting Indians, and in 1749 he set off for the new world. In Mexico, Serra first worked as a missionary to Indians and as an uncompromisingagent of the Inquisition. He then became an itinerant preacher, gaining a reputation as a mesmerizing orator who could inspire, enthrall, and terrify his audiences at will. With a potent blend of Franciscan piety and worldly cunning, he outmaneuvered Spanish royal officials, rival religious orders, and avaricious settlers to establish himself as a peerless frontier administrator. In the culminating years of his life, he extended Spanish dominion north, founding and promoting missions in present-day San Diego, Los Angeles, Monterey, and San Francisco. But even Serra could not overcome the forces massing against him. California's military leaders rarely shared his zeal, Indians often opposed his efforts, and ultimately the missions proved to be cauldrons of disease and discontent. Serra, in his hope to save souls, unwittingly helped bring about the massive decline of California's indigenous population. On the three-hundredth anniversary of Junípero Serra's birth, Hackel's complex, authoritative biography tells the full story of a man whose life and legacies continue to be both celebrated and denounced. Based on exhaustive research and a vivid narrative, this is an essential portrait of America's least understood founder.
Lamy of Santa Fe by
Originally published in 1975, this Pulitzer Prize for History-winning biography chronicles the life of Archbishop Jean Baptiste Lamy (1814-1888), New Mexico’s first resident bishop and the most influential, reform-minded Catholic official in the region during the late 1800s. Lamy’s accomplishments, including the endowing of hospitals, orphanages, and English-language schools and colleges, formed the foundation of modern-day Santa Fe and often brought him into conflict with corrupt local priests. His life story, also the subject of Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop, describes a pivotal period in the American Southwest, as Spanish and Mexican rule gave way to much greater influence from the U.S. and Europe. Historian and consummate stylist Paul Horgan has given us a chronicle filled with hardy, often extraordinary adventure, and sustained by Lamy’s magnificent strength of character.
The Missionary Movement in American Catholic History by
This is the first general history of American Catholic mission treating not only its institutions but its human and religious aspects as well. It shows how the church in the United States not only sent thousands of men and women overseas but also evangelized internally, and incorporated millions of immigrants. Angelyn Dries offers a thoroughly researched and nuanced view of this history, and its profound influence on the emergence of a distinctive American Catholic identity. The Missionary Movement in American Catholic History opens with Iberian and French mission efforts on the continent prior to 1776, moves to the situation within the English colonies and the fledgling United States, and then on to mission beyond U.S. borders from 1820. Dries continually places the movement in context, discussing such issues as Nativism, the frontier experience of whites, the fate of Amerindians, the trans-Atlantic slave trade, and the growth of African-American Catholicism. From 1898 to 1980 Dries considers the experiences of the two World Wars, the rapid decolonizations of Africa and Asia, and the U.S.'s increasingly anti-Communist political stance. With the advent of Vatican II, Dries shows, American Catholics entered more deeply into conscious dialogue with their Protestant brothers and sisters, as well as with Jews. By 1980 this "public" dialogue included non-believers and followers of the world religions in a broadening ecumenism. Dries concludes with issues facing the missionary movement beyond 1980, including formation and gender issues, the understanding and practice of mission in the future, and the unfinished agenda of the U.S. Bishops' pastoral, "To the Ends of the Earth." TheMissionary Movement in American Catholic History is a remarkably comprehensive work, must-reading for missioners and church historians.
Native Americans, Christianity, and the Reshaping of the American Religious Landscape by
In this interdisciplinary collection of essays, Joel W. Martin and Mark A. Nicholas gather emerging and leading voices in the study of Native American religion to reconsider the complex and often misunderstood history of Native peoples' engagement with Christianity and with Euro-American missionaries. Surveying mission encounters from contact through the mid-nineteenth century, the volume alters and enriches our understanding of both American Christianity and indigenous religion. The essays here explore a variety of postcontact identities, including indigenous Christians, "mission friendly" non-Christians, and ex-Christians, thereby exploring the shifting world of Native-white cultural and religious exchange. Rather than questioning the authenticity of Native Christian experiences, these scholars reveal how indigenous peoples negotiated change with regard to missions, missionaries, and Christianity. This collection challenges the pervasive stereotype of Native Americans as culturally static and ill-equipped to navigate the roiling currents associated with colonialism and missionization. The contributors are Emma Anderson, Joanna Brooks, Steven W. Hackel, Tracy Neal Leavelle, Daniel Mandell, Joel W. Martin, Michael D. McNally, Mark A. Nicholas, Michelene Pesantubbee, David J. Silverman, Laura M. Stevens, Rachel Wheeler, Douglas L. Winiarski, and Hilary E. Wyss.
Saving the Heartland by
This text looks at mid-20th century Catholic missionaries bringing their faith to the heartland and their adaptation of liturgical traditions to rural conditions. Rural Catholics took agriculture seriously and this work looks at their beliefs in the context of work and family.
Catholic Immigrants in America by
Spanning the years 1500 to the end of the 20th century, Immigration and American Religion is a unique exploration of the evolution, character, and dynamics of religion in America. From the original influx of Protestants to subsequent waves of Catholics, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, Jains, Sikhs, and devotees of Santeria and Voudou, Jenna Weissman Joselit describes the struggle to establish traditions in the New World, oftentimes in the face of considerable hostility and prejudice. The impact of intolerance, the U.S. government's various policies on immigration, and the effects of two World Wars all play a significant part in this fascinating narrative. Drawing on the voices and experiences of immigrants, Immigration and American Religion documents the extraordinary diversity that has, for four centuries, made the United States one of the world's most dynamic societies.
Communion of Immigrants: a history of Catholics in America by
Catholicism has grown from a suppressed and persecuted outsiders' religion in the American colonies to become the nation's single largest denomination. James Fisher surveys more than four centuries of Catholics' involvement in American history, starting his narrative with one of the first Spanish expeditions to Florida, in 1528. He follows the transformation of Catholicism into one of America's most culturally and ethnically diverse religions, including the English Catholics' early settlement in Maryland, the Spanish missions to the Native Americans, the Irish and German poor who came in search of work and farmland, the proliferation of Polish and Italian communities, and the growing influx of Catholics from Latin America. The book discusses Catholic involvement in politics and conflict, from New York's Tammany Hall to the Vietnam War and abortion. Fisher highlights the critical role of women in American Catholicism--from St. Elizabeth Seton and Dorothy Day to Mother Cabrini, the first American citizen to be canonized a saint--and describes the influence of prominent American Catholics such as Cardinal John J. O'Connor, 1930s radio personality Father Charles Coughlin, President John F. Kennedy, pacifists Daniel and Philip Berrigan, activist Cesar Chavez, and author Flannery O'Connor. For this new edition, Fisher has brought the story up to date, including the latest struggles within the American church leadership.
The Franciscans and Italian Immigration in America by 
Immigrants and Their Church by
"The story of the Catholic church in America is often found in its ethnic parishes. U.S. Catholicism absorbed a virtually unique cosmopolitan sweep of American people over its 200 years of official history"--Jacket.
Immigration and Religion in America by
Religion has played a crucial role in American immigration history as an institutional resource for migrants' social adaptation, as a map of meaning for interpreting immigration experiences, and as a continuous force for expanding the national ideal of pluralism. To explain these processes the editors of this volume brought together the perspectives of leading scholars of migration and religion. The resulting essays present salient patterns in American immigrants' religious lives, past and present. In comparing the religious experiences of Mexicans and Italians, Japanese and Koreans, Eastern European Jews and Arab Muslims, and African Americans and Haitians, the book clarifies how such processes as incorporation into existing religions, introduction of new faiths, conversion, and diversification have contributed to America's extraordinary religious diversity and add a comprehensive religious dimension to our understanding of America as a nation of immigrants.
Papist Devils: Catholics in British America, 1574-1783 by
This is a brief highly readable history of the Catholic experience in British America, which shaped the development of the colonies and the nascent republic in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Historian Robert Emmett Curran begins his account with the English reformation, which helps us to understand the Catholic exodus from England, Ireland, and Scotland that took place over the nearly two centuries that constitute the colonial period. The deeply rooted English understanding of Catholics as enemies of the political and religious values at the heart of British tradition, ironically acted as a catalyst for the emergence of a Catholic republican movement that was a critical factor in the decision of a strong majority of American Catholics in 1775 to support the cause for independence
Parade of Faiths: immigration and American religion by
Since the seventeenth century, millions of people from every continent have settled in America. Seeking a better life for themselves and their children, they braved deprivations, studied an unfamiliar language, adapted to a different way of life, and battled prejudices and hostility. Most of them held on to their faith as well, re-establishing churches and meeting-houses, synagogues and mosques, temples and cathedrals, and electing priests, rabbis, imams, and other spiritual leaders from among their number. Immigration irreversibly altered the face of the new republic, and it still moulds the political and spiritual fabric of the nation even to this day. Joselit surveys the history of immigration--which is actually the history of this country--and its effect on both political and religious issues through the centuries. The book explores the immigrant experience through case studies representative of all major newcomers' groups. The vividly rendered stories of courage and perseverance will alternately inspire and horrify.
Who Are My Sisters and Brothers? by