BOSTON, Archdiocese of. - City of the United States, on the Atlantic Ocean, about 375 km northeast of New York, with a wide, 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), the seat of important cultural institutes, foremost among which is the University, and of one of the largest libraries in the United States.

Erected as a diocese on 8 April 1808, as a suffragan of Baltimore and then of New York in 1850, B. became an archdiocese and metropolitan see on 12 February 1875. With an area of about 6,584 sq km it comprises the counties of the State of Massachusetts, namely: Essex, Middlesex, Suffolk, Norfolk and Plymouth, except Marion and Wareham. The ecclesiastical province of B. 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 one formed the original territory of the archdiocese from 1808-1843.

Catholicism was introduced into New England at the beginning of the 17th century by the missionaries of Canada among the Indians of Maine and with Irish immigration into Massachusetts; but until the American Revolution both Puritanism and the lack of priests hindered its spread. Indeed the first Catholic church of B. appears 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 has continued to expand so that the archbishopric, a cardinalitial see from 1911 onward, counts 1,232,089 Catholics out of 2,934,548 inhabitants (1945 census), an auxiliary bishop, 1,712 diocesan priests and 703 regulars, 351 parishes of which 11 are Italian, because B. is the diocese immediately after New York that contains the most Italians.

The church of B. owes much to its first bishop, Msgr. John 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. Benedict Joseph Fenwick (1825-46), is also worthy of special mention. A great organizer too was Cardinal G. O'Connell (1859-1944), who gave a great impulse to Catholic schools. The archdiocese of B. today counts a 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.

Bibliography9 works

BIBL.: J. G. Shea, History of the Catholic Church in the United States, III, New York 1890, pp. 107-59; IV, ibid. 1892, pp. 508-17; T. F. Meehan, s. v. in The Cath. Enc., II, pp. 703-707; XVII (Supplement), p. 123; R. H. Lord, The Catholic Church in Massachusetts, V, New York 1930; D. C. Schearer, Pontificia Americana, a Documentary History of the Catholic Church in the United States, 1784-1884, Washington 1933, pp. 98-100 and 300 ff.; R. H. Lord, The Organizer of the Church in New England: Bishop Benedict Fenwick (1782-1846), in The Catholic Historical Review, 22 (1936-37), pp. 172-84; H. Hynes, s. v. in DHG, IX, coll. 1396-98; The Official Catholic Directory, 1947, part 2, pp. 29-45.

Corrado Morin

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Boston, Archdiocese of

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