United Holy Church of America

"A cracking good story with a wonderful cast of rogues, ruffians and some remarkably holy and sensible people." --Los Angeles Times Book Review Before the potato famine ravaged Ireland in the 1840s, the Roman Catholic Church was barely a thread in the American cloth. Twenty years later, New York City was home to more Irish Catholics than Dublin. Today, the United States boasts some sixty million members of the Catholic Church, which has become one of this country's most influential cultural forces. In American Catholic: The Saints and Sinners Who Built America's Most Powerful Church, Charles R. Morris recounts the rich story of the rise of the Catholic Church in America, bringing to life the personalities that transformed an urban Irish subculture into a dominant presence nationwide. Here are the stories of rogues and ruffians, heroes and martyrs--from Dorothy Day, a convert from Greenwich Village Marxism who opened shelters for thousands, to Cardinal William O'Connell, who ran the Church in Boston from a Renaissance palazzo, complete with golf course. Morris also reveals the Church's continuing struggle to come to terms with secular, pluralist America and the theological, sexual, authority, and gender issues that keep tearing it apart. As comprehensive as it is provocative, American Catholic is a tour de force, a fascinating cultural history that will engage and inform both Catholics and non-Catholics alike. "The best one-volume history of the last hundred years of American Catholicism that it has ever been my pleasure to read. What's appealing in this remarkable book is its delicate sense of balance and its soundly grounded judgments.

Meet more than 100 saints, blesseds, and candidates who lived and worked in the United States, Canada, Mexico, and the Caribbean. Learn more about these "local" men, women - and children! - whose examples of holiness prove tat personal sanctity is possible right here, right now. The only collection of its kind, Saints of North America uses a month-by-month format based on the Church's liturgical calendar. Here, for each entry, is a fascinating biography; the places with which a person is associated; his or her particular ministry, spirituality, and accomplishments; and the location of a national shrine or headquarters established by those devoted to the saint. Take a moment to flip through only a few pages and you're bound to recognize some old "friends." Look a little closer, read a bit more, and you are sure to meet some new ones.