BOSTON, ARCHDIOCESE OF. - A city of the United States, on the Atlantic Ocean, about 375 km northeast of New York, with a large, well-sheltered harbor at the head of a bay. It is the principal maritime, commercial, and cultural center of the United States, and the capital of the State of Massachusetts (20,826 sq. km.), seat of important cultural institutions, among which the Athenaeum stands out, and of one of the largest libraries in the United States.
Erected as a diocese on 8 April 1808, as suffragan to Baltimore and then to New York in 1850, Boston became an archdiocese and metropolitan see on 12 February 1875. With an area of about 6,384 sq. km., it comprises the counties of Massachusetts, namely: Essex, Middlesex, Suffolk, Norfolk, and Plymouth, except Marion and Wareham. The ecclesiastical province of Boston has as its suffragans seven dioceses of New England, namely: Burlington (Vermont), Fall River (Massachusetts), Hartford (Connecticut), Manchester (New Hampshire), Portland (Maine), Providence (Rhode Island), and Springfield (Massachusetts), whose respective territories, together with the present territory, formed the original territory of the archdiocese from 1808 to 1843.
Catholicism was introduced into New England at the beginning of the 17th century by missionaries from Canada among the Indians of Maine and by Irish immigration into Massachusetts; but until the American Revolution, both Puritanism and the lack of priests hindered its spread. In fact, the first Catholic church in Boston appears only in 1788 in the local French colony. From then on, thanks especially to the large immigration of Irish, French Canadians, Italians, Poles, and Portuguese, the Catholic religion has expanded to the point that the archbishop, a cardinal since 1911, counts 1,232,089 Catholics out of 2,934,548 inhabitants (1945 census), one auxiliary bishop, 1,712 diocesan priests and 703 religious, 351 parishes of which 11 are Italian, because Boston is the diocese, after New York, that contains the most Italians.
The Church of Boston owes much to its first bishop, Abp. John Lefebvre de Cheverus, consecrated on 1 November 1810 and transferred to Montauban (France) in 1823 and then to the archbishopric of Bordeaux in 1826, where he died a cardinal on 19 July 1836. The second bishop, Bp. Benedict Joseph Fenwick (1825-46), is also worthy of special mention. A great organizer was also Cardinal J. O'Connell (1859-1944), who gave great impetus to Catholic schools. The archdiocese of Boston today has a Catholic university (Boston College) run by the Jesuits and several university colleges and high schools. The official organ of the archdiocese is the weekly periodical *The Pilot*, founded in 1836 by Fr. P. Donahue.