For more than two hundred years American Catholics have struggled to reconcile their national and religious values. In this incisive and accessible account, distinguished Catholic historian Jay P. Dolan explores the way American Catholicism has taken its distinctive shape and follows how Catholics have met the challenges they have faced as New World followers of an Old World religion.
Dolan argues that the ideals of democracy, and American culture in general, have deeply shaped Catholicism in the United States as far back as 1789, when the nation's first bishop was elected by the clergy...

German-Americans make up one of the largest ethnic groups in the United States, yet their very success at assimilating has also made them one of the least visible. What were their experiences? What cultural baggage did they bring with them, and how did it affect their lives in America? How did the German-speaking immigrants differ among themselves, and how did these differences influence their behavior and reactions? Contented among Strangers attempts to answer these questions by examining the central role German-speaking women played in preserving their ethnic and cultural identity in rural...

Catholicism has had a profound and lasting influence on the shape, the meaning, and the course of American history. Now, in the first book to reflect the new communal and social awakening which emerged from Vatican Council II, here is a vibrant and compelling history of the American Catholic experience--one that will surely become the standard volume for this decade, and decades to come.
Spanning nearly five hundred years, the narrative eloquently describes the Catholic experience from the arrival of Columbus and the other European explorers to the present day. It sheds fascinating new...

Within the American Catholic Church the Mexican American legacy is the longest, as is their struggle for full acceptance in the institutional church. In this volume three historians examine religious history, focusing on Mexican American faith communities. Originally published in 1994.

Spanning nearly 500 years, The American Catholic Experience describes the Catholic experience from the arrival of Columbus and the other European explorers to the present day. Jay P. Dolan discusses Catholicism as it spread across the New World, transforming - and being transformed by - the land and its people. The book traces the evolution of the urban ethnic communities by examining the vital contributions of the immigrant church to Catholicism. Finally, Dolan examines the controversy of the modern church and the extraordinary changes in the Catholic consciousness as it comes to grips with...

This text brings to non-Hispanic readers an overview of the history and the ongoing issues underlying the Euro-American Church's policies toward the fastest-growing segment of its membership.