Well, it is high time to give Boston a reputation for other than a centre of ancestor-worship or a paradise of faddists. -- Mayor John Fitzgerald, on the founding of Boston High School of Commerce, May 15, 1909.
Three millions of Catholics occupy the limits where then one hundred lived. and the needs have grown with the number and altered with the conditions. To train the docile mind and heart of a few scattered immigrants was a task infinitely more easy than to preserve the purity of the Faith in the denizens of crowded cities, menaced by the contagion of a thousand sophistries, and to keep untainted souls beckoned on all sides to a thousand seductions. Poverty and the humiliations of a cold welcome have their hard features. But the pride of life and the corruption of luxury are infinitely more to be feared. -- Cardinal William O'Connell, In the Beginning
They are men who by their private lives of dishonor and their public lives of dishonesty bring shame upon the church -- cowardly traitors who betray Catholic interests. They are selfish men who cannot leave personal considerations out of any calculation. They are always finding fault with the church; with her visible head, with their bishops and their pastors. -- Rev. David Toomey, Boston Globe, May 9, 1910.
The 1908 Catholic Centenary
The unevenness of Catholic social and economic integration was apparent in the varying degrees of Catholic involvement in urban life. I have chosen five components of civic life in Boston to display the spectrum of Catholic participation: the celebration of the archdiocesan centennial in 1908; Catholic involvement in the "Boston, 1915" movement; Catholic speakers and topics in the Ford Hall Forum; and Catholic relations with two secular immigrant aid societies. a sixth element, the Catholic Common Cause Society, fully approved by the Church, serves as an example of the Church's ideal lay association.
In October 1808, Boston became a Roman Catholic diocese. in October 1908, Catholics inaugurated their second century with a Mass in Holy Cross Cathedral, celebrated by the papal apostolic delegate to America. After the solemn liturgy, the Catholic fraternal and devotional organizations held a massive meeting in Symphony Hall, including the afcs, the Knights of Columbus . . .
