Download e-book for iPad: Communion of Immigrants: A History of Catholics in America by James T. Fisher

Catholicism has grown from a suppressed and persecuted outsiders' faith within the American colonies to develop into the nation's unmarried greatest denomination. James Fisher surveys greater than 4 centuries of Catholics' involvement in American background, beginning his narrative with one of many first Spanish expeditions to Florida, in 1528. He follows the transformation of Catholicism into one in every of America's so much culturally and ethnically various religions, together with the English Catholics' early cost in Maryland, the Spanish missions to the local americans, the Irish and German terrible who got here looking for paintings and farmland, the proliferation of Polish and Italian groups, and the starting to be inflow of Catholics from Latin the US. The e-book discusses Catholic involvement in politics and clash, from New York's Tammany corridor to the Vietnam battle and abortion. Fisher highlights the serious position of ladies in American Catholicism--from St. Elizabeth Seton and Dorothy Day to mom Cabrini, the 1st American citizen to be canonized a saint--and describes the effect of well-liked American Catholics similar to Cardinal John J. O'Connor, Thirties radio character Father Charles Coughlin, President John F. Kennedy, pacifists Daniel and Philip Berrigan, activist Cesar Chavez, and writer Flannery O'Connor. For this new version, Fisher has introduced the tale modern, together with the most recent struggles in the American church leadership.