Commonwealth Catholicism is the first comprehensive history of the Catholic Church in the State of Virginia. Distinguished historian Gerald P. Fogarty tells the story of Virginia's Catholics in the state's history, from the colonial period to the present. Using archival resources, Fogarty brings to life the events and characters that comprise the Church's colorful and often turbulent history. Catholics in Virginia, as in other parts of the South, were a tiny minority from the beginning and remained so for much of their history. They gathered into small, isolated communities, often without a resident priest. The Catholic population in Virginia was so small, in fact, that there was only one diocese until 1974. Catholics were often suspected of unpatriotic sympathies by their Protestant neighbors and tried to remain unnoticed, blending in, as far as possible, with the prevailing Protestant culture. Full religious tolerance for Virginia Catholics did not come until the Revolution. Reconstructing the available documentary evidence, Fogarty tells the story of these early communities in full detail. Fogarty also brings to life many of the prominent actors in the unfolding drama. Father Matthew O'Keefe, the pastor of the Norfolk region from 1852 until 1886--a period of intense Know Nothing activity--is one example. O'Keefe was asked by two men calling at the rectory door to minister to a dying man. Reaching the Elizabeth River on the edge of Portsmouth, Virginia, the two said that the dying man lay further on. O'Keefe "took a pair of revolvers from his coat, placed the men under citizen's arrest, and marched them into Portsmouth where he turned them over to the sheriff. They subsequently confessed that they had been hired to assassinate him." Commonwealth Catholicism, a considerable accomplishment from one of the most prominent historians of American Catholicism, will remain for many years the definitive study on the subject of Virginia's Catholic heritage.

Commonwealth Catholicism is the first comprehensive history of the Catholic Church in the State of Virginia. Distinguished historian Gerald P. Fogarty tells the story of Virginia's Catholics in the state's history, from the colonial period to the present. Using archival resources, Fogarty brings to life the events and characters that comprise the Church's colorful and often turbulent history. Catholics in Virginia, as in other parts of the South, were a tiny minority from the beginning and remained so for much of their history. They gathered into small, isolated communities, often without a resident priest. The Catholic population in Virginia was so small, in fact, that there was only one diocese until 1974. Catholics were often suspected of unpatriotic sympathies by their Protestant neighbors and tried to remain unnoticed, blending in, as far as possible, with the prevailing Protestant culture. Full religious tolerance for Virginia Catholics did not come until the Revolution. Reconstructing the available documentary evidence, Fogarty tells the story of these early communities in full detail. Fogarty also brings to life many of the prominent actors in the unfolding drama. Father Matthew O'Keefe, the pastor of the Norfolk region from 1852 until 1886--a period of intense Know Nothing activity--is one example. O'Keefe was asked by two men calling at the rectory door to minister to a dying man. Reaching the Elizabeth River on the edge of Portsmouth, Virginia, the two said that the dying man lay further on. O'Keefe "took a pair of revolvers from his coat, placed the men under citizen's arrest, and marched them into Portsmouth where he turned them over to the sheriff. They subsequently confessed that they had been hired to assassinate him." Commonwealth Catholicism, a considerable accomplishment from one of the most prominent historians of American Catholicism, will remain for many years the definitive study on the subject of Virginia's Catholic heritage.

Provides a concise yet comprehensive guide to understanding the complexity and diversity of the American Catholic experience.

The tumultuous climate of early modern England had a profound effect on its Catholic population's domestic life, social customs, literary inventions, and political arguments. Redrawing the Map of Early Modern English Catholicism explores the broad spectrum of the early modern English Catholic experience, presenting fresh and often startling assessments of the most problematic topics in post-Reformation English Catholicism. The contributors to this volume – all leading or rising scholars of early modern studies – conceptualize English Catholicism as a hazardous series of contested territories divided by shifting boundaries, requiring Catholics to navigate with vigilance and diplomacy their status as 'insiders' or 'outsiders.' This collection also presents new ways to understand the connections between reformist and Catholic inflections in the emerging canon of English poetry, despite the eventual marginalization of Catholic poets in English literary history. Redrawing the Map of Early Modern English Catholicism ably demonstrates the profoundly experimental as well as recuperative character of early modern English Catholicism.

The New York Times bestseller and definitive history of Christianity for our time—from the award-winning author of The Reformation and Silence A product of electrifying scholarship conveyed with commanding skill, Diarmaid MacCulloch's Christianity goes back to the origins of the Hebrew Bible and encompasses the globe. It captures the major turning points in Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox history and fills in often neglected accounts of conversion and confrontation in Africa, Latin America, and Asia. MacCulloch introduces us to monks and crusaders, heretics and reformers, popes and abolitionists, and discover Christianity's essential role in shaping human history and the intimate lives of men and women. And he uncovers the roots of the faith that galvanized America, charting the surprising beliefs of the founding fathers, the rise of the Evangelical movement and of Pentecostalism, and the recent crises within the Catholic Church. Bursting with original insights and a great pleasure to read, this monumental religious history will not soon be surpassed.

Instead, his legacy can be measured by the importance of his ideas in the context of late-sixteenth- and early-seventeenth-century England. Those ideas, and the machinations they inspired, were ultimately an integral part of the ongoing struggle between Catholicism and Protestantism in religion and between constitutionalism and absolutism in politics.

In this expansive study, Bryan Giemza recovers a neglected subculture and retrieves a missing chapter of Irish Catholic heritage by canvassing the literature of American Irish writers from the U.S. South. Giemza offers a defining new view of Irish American authors and their interrelationships within both transatlantic and ethnic regional contexts. From the first Irish American novel, published in Winchester, Virginia, in 1817, Giemza investigates a cast of nineteenth-century writers contending with the turbulence of their time—writers influenced by both American and Irish revolutions. Additionally, he considers dramatists and propagandists of the Civil War and Lost Cause memoirists who emerged in its wake. Some familiar names reemerge in an Irish context, including Joel Chandler Harris, Lafcadio Hearn, and Kate (O’Flaherty) Chopin. Giemza also examines the works of twentieth-century southern Irish writers, such as Margaret Mitchell, John Kennedy Toole, Flannery O’Connor, Pat Conroy, Anne Rice, Valerie Sayers, and Cormac McCarthy. For each author, Giemza traces the influences of Catholicism as it shaped both faith and ethnic identity, pointing to shared sensibilities and contradictions. Flannery O’Connor, for example, resisted identification as an Irish American, while Cormac McCarthy, described by some as “anti-Catholic,” continues a dialogue with the Church from which he distanced himself. Giemza draws on many never-before-seen documents, including authorized material from the correspondence of Cormac McCarthy, interviews from the Irish community of Flannery O’Connor’s native Savannah, Georgia, and Giemza’s own correspondence with writers such as Valerie Sayers and Anne Rice. This lively literary history prompts a new understanding of how the Irish in the region helped invent a regional mythos, an enduring literature, and a national image.