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 2004 the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Boston announced plans to close more than eighty churches. Distraught parishioners occupied several of these buildings in opposition to the decrees. Seitz tells the stories of these resisting Catholics in their own words, illuminating how they were drawn to reconsider the past and its meanings.

Kane explores the role of religious identity in Boston in the years 1900-1920, arguing that Catholicism was a central integrating force among different class and ethnic groups. She traces the effect of changing class status on religious identity and solidarity, and she delineates the social and cultural meaning of Catholicism in a city where Yankee Protestant nativism persisted even as its hegemony was in decline.

"The Faithful Departed" traces the rise and fall of the Catholic Church in Boston, showing how the Massachusetts experience set a pattern that echoed throughout the United States as religious institutions lost influence in the face of rising secularization.

Across the country, white ethnics have fled cities for suburbs. But many have stayed in their old neighborhoods. When the busing crisis erupted in Boston in the 1970s, Catholics were in the forefront of resistance. Jews, 70,000 of whom had lived in Roxbury and Dorchester in the early 1950s, were invisible during the crisis. They were silent because they departed the city more quickly and more thoroughly than Boston's Catholics. Only scattered Jews remained in Dorchester and Roxbury by the mid-1970s. In telling the story of why the Jews left and the Catholics stayed, Gerald Gamm places neighborhood institutions--churches, synagogues, community centers, schools--at its center. He challenges the long-held assumption that bankers and real estate agents were responsible for the rapid Jewish exodus. Rather, according to Gamm, basic institutional rules explain the strength of Catholic attachments to neighborhood and the weakness of Jewish attachments. Because they are rooted, territorially defined, and hierarchical, parishes have frustrated the urban exodus of Catholic families. And because their survival was predicated on their portability and autonomy, Jewish institutions exacerbated the Jewish exodus. Gamm shows that the dramatic transformation of urban neighborhoods began not in the 1950s or 1960s, but in the 1920s. Not since Anthony Lukas's Common Ground has there been a book that so brilliantly explores not just Boston's dilemma but the roots of the American urban crisis.