Quotes from John T. McGreevy

After commending the district's ability to produce "leaders in civic, social and political life," McGarry attributed the disturbances to "professional agitators and saboteurs bent upon creating and furthering racial and religious incidents.

The same issues illuminate the transformation of American Catholicism. This study emphasizes the period between World War I and the early 1970s, when the Catholic system of parishes and schools first expanded into every section of the northern cities, and then, within the last quarter century, began a retreat from what now seemed institutional hubris.

The researcher also discovered that as soon as a parishioner married a non-Pole (even if the spouse was Catholic) the rule was that "he must move out to a non-Polish Catholic parish.

The story is alternately hopeful and discouraging. Parish boundaries in the urban North served to foster communities of the sort admired by contemporary intellectuals at one historical moment, but proved unable to separate "community" from racial mythology at another. Parochial institutions strengthened individuals while occasionally becoming rallying points for bigotry. The extant literature on religion and race sidesteps this complexity.

Indeed, recent writing suggests that episcopal attempts to quash national parishes, schools, and societies only strengthened national identities by creating a sense of shared victimization.

Catholic intellectuals in both Europe and the United States used a strategy similar to that of international socialists, promoting a universalist ideology as a mechanism for disentangling race, nation, and state.

All but invisible to the outside world, the debate over the direction of the Federated Colored Catholics remains instructive. Most important, it marks the first significant break in the racialism undergirding so much of American Catholicism in the first part of the twentieth century. Both Thomas Turner and John LaFarge opposed discrimination. The debate was how to end it.