Biographical Sketches of Roman Catholic Clergy in Colonial America, the United States, and Canada: From the Beginnings to Mid-Twentieth Century (Soft Cover)

This book follows biographical sketches of Roman Catholic clergymen. This who is who of Roman Catholic clery beginning in the colonial period and ending in the 1950s.
The development and growth of the Roman Catholic Church in the United States and Canada anchor themselves to lengthy discussions of national and international political and ecclesiastical events—wars, post-war treaties, colonial settlements, European immigrations, violent clashes in city streets between native-born American Protestants and immigrant Roman Catholics, Papal decisions and decrees, plenary councils. Circumventing the specifics of those events, the details of which can easily be uncovered in a score of history books, one can simply allow numbers to serve, with expedience, as reasonable substitutes. The Roman Catholic communion, in the United States, by 1785, numbered twenty-four priests and approximately 25,000 members—the majority of those having settled in Maryland and Philadelphia.
In Canada, however, the discussion of the growth and development oc Catholicism cannot conveniently be reduced to numbers. French explorers of Canada in the sixteenth century, as wells as the earliest there, proved devout French Catholics, and their fellows continued to arrive over the next two centuries. Problems arose with the arrival of Catholics from England, Ireland, Germany, Italy, Ukraine, Poland, and even the Philippines—Catholics comprising the largest single religious group in that nation. Nonetheless, that fact alone did not lead to or even come close to national, cultural, or ecclesiastical unity.
Throughout those social and political rises and falls emerged a Catholic clergy far different in mind, spirit, and duty from their clerical ancestors and predecessors of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries. They no longer limited their functions to those of mere missionaries spun forth from the universities and seminaries of Europe upon the islands and lands of Spanish, French and British colonies. From 1900 to the present, the vast numbers of priests stood firmly as American and Canadian clergy, born within the borders of their native nations and educated in their native Catholic schools, universities, and seminaries. They shared (and still do) but a single quality with every one of their clerical ancestors and predecessors—their manhood (a controversial issue in itself). Thus, for the sake of biographical unity and clarity, the biographies of Catholic clergy from 1950 to the present must be gathered into their own separate volume, to voice their own roles in the successes and failures of contemporary Church and national histories.