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.

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.

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.

"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.

Based on a vast array of archival holdings, including the secret archives of the Vatican, this colorful and fascinating story recounts Cardinal William Henry O'Connell's ambitious grasp for power and his arrogant misuse of the trappings of the office. Appointed in 1895 to a minor post in the Catholic church in Rome, Father William O’Connell of Boston built a Vatican power base that made him a bishop, archbishop, and cardinal. His arrogant exploitation of his position drew the wrath of U.S. bishops—who were twice unsuccessful in having him removed from office. Believing that his high position exempted him from the rules of morality, O'Connell was utterly unscrupulous. He discovered multiple ways to turn a profit from his position and by 1923 had amassed a fortune. O’Connell brought further scandal upon his position when he turned a blind eye to the secret marriages of two priests who lived with him, one of them his nephew. When the marriages were discovered, the cardinal brazenly defended his nephew at the expense of the other offender. Had the Cardinal not worn the scarlet that marked him as a prince of the church, he may have gone to the grave a disgraced clergyman. However, his rank, his ability to maintain appearances, and his potent Vatican allies saved him from such a fate. This story serves as a mirror against which to view current affairs in both the Catholic church and the United States.