"Stained Glass in Catholic Philadelphia tells the remarkable story of the thousands of stained-glass windows - made in America, England, France, and Germany - in the more than 400 churches, chapels, and institutions of the five-county Archdiocese of Philadelphia. Since 1997 more than 450 sites have been visited to document the archdiocese's windows by photographing them. This process resulted in the creation of a photo archive of over 50,000 images. Using this archive as a foundation, a team of scholars - from a variety of institutions and with specialties in medieval studies, architectural and social history, Christian iconography, decorative and liturgical arts, the craft, creative reuse, and historic preservation of stained glass - was assembled to study these windows. The result is this profusely illustrated book of original research that makes accessible a significant and highly visible, but neglected, aspect of our ecclesial, national, and regional cultural heritage."--BOOK JACKET. Book jacket.

From the perspective of historical sociology, Richard N. Juliani traces the role of religion in the lives and communities of Italian immigrants in Philadelphia from the 1850s to the early 1930s. By the end of the nineteenth century, Philadelphia had one of the largest Italian populations in the country. The Archdiocese of Philadelphia eventually established twenty-three parishes for the exclusive use of Italians. Juliani describes the role these parishes played in developing and anchoring an ethnic community and in shaping its members' new identity as Italian Americans during the years of mass migration from Italy to America. Priest, Parish, and People blends the history of Monsignor Antonio Isoleri--pastor from 1870 to 1926 of St. Mary Magdalen dePazzi, the first Italian parish founded in the country--with that of the Italian immigrant community in Philadelphia. Relying on parish and archdiocesan records, secular and church newspapers, archives of religious orders, and Father Isoleri's personal papers, Juliani chronicles the history of St. Mary Magdalen dePazzi as it grew from immigrant refuge to a large, stable, ethnic community that anchored "Little Italy" in South Philadelphia. In charting that growth, Juliani also examines conflicts between laity and clergy and between clergy and church hierarchy, as well as the remarkable fifty-six-year career of Isoleri as a spiritual and secular leader. Priest, Parish, and People provides both the details of parish history in Philadelphia and the larger context of Italian-American Catholic history.

A two volume set which provides researchers with more than 70,000 links to every conceivable genealogical resource on the Internet.

The archbishop of Philadelphia presents a hopeful treatise for Catholics on how to live the faith with confidence in today's post-Christian culture while evaluating the reasons behind declining Catholic numbers.

Acclaimed biographer John Loughery tells the story of John Hughes, son of Ireland, friend of William Seward and James Buchanan, founder of St. John’s College (now Fordham University), builder of Saint Patrick’s Cathedral on Fifth Avenue, pioneer of parochial-school education, and American diplomat. As archbishop of the Archdiocese of New York in the 1840 and 1850s and the most famous Roman Catholic in America, Hughes defended Catholic institutions in a time of nativist bigotry and church burnings and worked tirelessly to help Irish Catholic immigrants find acceptance in their new homeland. His galvanizing and protecting work and pugnacious style earned him the epithet Dagger John. When the interests of his church and ethnic community were at stake, Hughes acted with purpose and clarity. In Dagger John, Loughery reveals Hughes’s life as it unfolded amid turbulent times for the religious and ethnic minority he represented. Hughes the public figure comes to the fore, illuminated by Loughery’s retelling of his interactions with, and responses to, every major figure of his era, including his critics (Walt Whitman, James Gordon Bennett, and Horace Greeley) and his admirers (Henry Clay, Stephen Douglas, and Abraham Lincoln). Loughery peels back the layers of the public life of this complicated man, showing how he reveled in the controversies he provoked and believed he had lived to see many of his goals achieved until his dreams came crashing down during the Draft Riots of 1863 when violence set Manhattan ablaze. To know "Dagger" John Hughes is to understand the United States during a painful period of growth as the nation headed toward civil war. Dagger John’s successes and failures, his public relationships and private trials, and his legacy in the Irish Catholic community and beyond provide context and layers of detail for the larger history of a modern culture unfolding in his wake.

As human beings we are constantly engaging and disengaging in everything we do. We engage and disengage at work, in marriage, as parents, in our quest for health and well-being, in personal finances, environmentally, politically, and, of course, we engage or disengage spiritually. If you walk into any Catholic church next Sunday and look around, you will discover that some people are highly engaged, others are massively disengaged, and the majority are somewhere in between. Why? What is the difference between highly engaged Catholics and disengaged Catholics? Answering this question is essential to the future of the Catholic Church. If we truly want to engage Catholics and reinvigorate parish life, we must first discover what drives engagement among Catholics. Matthew Kelly explores this question in his groundbreaking new book, and the simplicity of what he discovers will amaze you. Four things make the difference between highly engaged Catholics and disengaged Catholics: the four signs of a Dynamic Catholic. Whether you are ready to let God take your spiritual life to the next level or want to help reinvigorate your parish, The Four Signs of a Dynamic Catholic promises to take you on a journey that will help you live out the genius of Catholicism in your everyday life.

When John Carroll became bishop of Baltimore in 1789, his diocese encompassed what was then the United States, from the Chesapeake to the Mississippi, from the Canadian border to the Gulf of Mexico. For almost a century and a half, the archbishop of Baltimore remained the virtual leader of his church in the new republic. In The Premier See, Thomas W. Spalding chronicles the growth, tensions, and politics of the archdiocese that helped shape the history of American Catholicism.