Toil and Transcendence

By the end of the Civil War, barely four million Catholics lived on American soil. A century later, more than 43 million Americans were Catholic, making the Church a dominant force in American culture and politics.

The twentieth century was a springtime for the American Church, which witnessed the dramatic expansion of American dioceses, with towering new churches erected even blocks apart. Catholic schools were swiftly built to accommodate the influx of Catholic schoolchildren, and convents...