BOSTON, ARCIDIOCESI of. — City of the United States, on the Atlantic Ocean, approximately 375 km northeast of Nuova York, with a broad, well-sheltered harbor
at the head of a bay. It is the principal commercial and cultural maritime center of the United States, and the capital of the State of Massachussetts (20,826 sq. km.), seat of important cultural institutions, foremost among which is the Ateneo, and of one of the major libraries of the United States.
Erected as a diocese on 8 April 1808, as a suffragan of Baltimore and then of Nuova York in 1850, B. became an archdiocese and metropolitan see on 12 February 1875. With an area of approximately 6,584 sq. km., it comprises the counties of the state of Massachussetts, namely: Essex, Middlesex, Suffolk, Norfolk, and Plymouth, except Marion and Wareham. The ecclesiastical province of B. has as suffragans seven dioceses of New England, namely Burlington (Vermont), Fall River (Massachussetts), Hartford (Connecticut), Manchester (New-Hampshire), Portland (Maine), Providence (Rhode Island), and Springfield (Massachussetts), whose respective territories, together with that of the present archdiocese, formed the original territory of the archdiocese from 1808 to 1843.
Catholicism was introduced into New England at the beginning of the seventeenth century by missionaries from Canada among the Indians of Maine and through Irish immigration into Massachussetts; but until the American Revolution both Puritanism and the lack of priests prevented its spread. Indeed, the first Catholic church in B. appeared only in 1788 in the local French colony. From then on, thanks especially to the numerous immigration of Irish, French Canadians, Italians, Poles, and Portuguese, the Catholic religion continued to expand, so that the archbishopric, a cardinalitial see since 1911, has 1,232,089 Catholics out of 2,934,548 inhabitants (1945 census), one auxiliary bishop, 1,712 diocesan priests and 703 religious priests, and 351 parishes, 11 of them Italian, since B. is the diocese which, after Nuova York, contains the greatest number of Italians.
The church of B. owes much to its first bishop, Msgr. Giov. Lefebvre de Cheverus, consecrated on 1 November 1810 and transferred to Montauban (France) in 1825 and then to the archbishopric of Bordeaux in 1826, where he died a cardinal on 19 July 1836. The second bishop, Msgr. Benedetto Giuseppe Ferwick (1825–46), also deserves special mention. A great organizer was likewise Cardinal G. O'Connell (1859–1944), who gave a great impulse to Catholic schools. The archdiocese of B. now has one Catholic university (Boston College), directed by the Jesuits, and several university colleges and secondary schools. The official organ of the archdiocese is the weekly periodical The Pilot, founded in 1836 by Fr. P. Donahue.