The lives of the saints who helped build the Catholic Church in the United States--Frances Cabrini, Isaac Jogues, John Neumann, Elizabeth Ann Seton, and Damien de Veuster, among others--are marked by strength, courage, determination, and sanctity. But as this thoughtful and engaging book points out, these saints also could be foolhardy, obstinate, stubborn, and dismissive. In other words, they were a lot like everyone, with a mixture of different qualities and characteristics. What makes the stories of the thirteen men and women in Fearless so compelling is that a distinctly American way of holiness begins to emerge from their lives and their work. These were people who walked the streets of New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, New Orleans, and Denver. They traveled along California' s coast and into the Southwest, penetrated the heartland of Indiana and Missouri, and reached out into the territorial islands of the United States. Captivating illustrations for each saint highlight the depth of their souls, and give readers an idea of the strong characteristics exemplified by these men and women. Fearless will bring the reader through the history of the Catholic Church in America in an intimate and personal way, with the stories of the saints and blessed who helped Christianity become part of this country' s fabric. These men and women did not set out to be saints, only to live out the Gospel as they best knew how. They followed their hearts and God' s will to build a better place for the people of the New World.

English-born Francis Asbury was one of the most important religious leaders in American history. Asbury single-handedly guided the creation of the American Methodist church, which became the largest Protestant denomination in nineteenth-century America, and laid the foundation of the Holiness and Pentecostal movements that flourish today. John Wigger has written the definitive biography of Asbury and, by extension, a revealing interpretation of the early years of the Methodist movement in America. Asbury emerges here as not merely an influential religious leader, but a fascinating character, who lived an extraordinary life. His cultural sensitivity was matched only by his ability to organize. His life of prayer and voluntary poverty were legendary, as was his generosity to the poor. He had a remarkable ability to connect with ordinary people, and he met with thousands of them as he crisscrossed the nation, riding more than one hundred and thirty thousand miles between his arrival in America in 1771 and his death in 1816. Indeed Wigger notes that Asbury was more recognized face-to-face than any other American of his day, including Thomas Jefferson and George Washington.

After careful research and extensive interiviews, the authors have prepared this compelling and controversial portrait of the Mormon's organizational structure and economic empire-and the men who control both. Index.

"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." --Andrew Greeley

Spanish American civilization developed over several generations as Iberian-born settlers and their "New World" descendants adapted Old World institutions, beliefs, and literary forms to diverse American social contexts. Like their European forebears, criollos—descendants of Spanish immigrants who called the New World home—preserved the memory of persons of extraordinary Roman Catholic piety in a centuries-old literary form known as the saint's Life. These criollo religious biographies reflect not only traditional Roman Catholic values but also such New World concerns as immigration, racial mixing, and English piracy. Ronald Morgan examines the collective function of the saint's Life from 1600 to the end of the colonial period, arguing that this literary form served not only to prove the protagonist’s sanctity and move the faithful to veneration but also to reinforce sentiments of group pride and solidarity. When criollos praised americano saints, he explains, they also called attention to their own virtues and achievements. Morgan analyzes the printed hagiographies of five New World holy persons: Blessed Sebastián de Aparicio (Mexico), St. Rosa de Lima (Peru), St. Mariana de Jesús (Ecuador), Catarina de San Juan (Mexico), and St. Felipe de Jesús (Mexico). Through close readings of these texts, he explores the significance of holy persons as cultural and political symbols. By highlighting this convergence of religious and sociopolitical discourse, Morgan sheds important light on the growth of Spanish American self-consciousness and criollo identity formation. By focusing on the biographical process itself, Morgan demonstrates the importance of reading each hagiographic text for its idiosyncrasies rather than its conventional features. His work offers new insight into the Latin American cult of saints, inviting scholars to look beyond the isolated lives of individuals to the cultural and social milieus in which their sanctity originated and their public reputations took shape.

Based on eight years of hands-on experience and more than 300 interviews, Street Saints is both a book of motivational stories about unsung heroes and a sociological study of the "faith factor," documenting faith-based programs that are treating social maladies in America. This book takes readers on a tour of communities and institutions in America where faith-based initiatives are making a difference. It offers inspiration, role models, and guidelines for people who would like to give back to their own communities.

Fundamental to the rapid growth of the Church in America are these exceptionally inspired men and women, not yet canonized, who lived heroic virtue and thereby changed the face of our country. Author Michael O'Neill unveils twenty-four of America's greatest "blesseds" and "venerables," whose causes for canonization are already underway. You'll meet young Europeans who gave up secure lives for the wilderness of America - knowing they would never see their families again. You'll meet the husband and wife who, despite being slaves, showed remarkable charity to their so-called owners. You'll explore the miraculously productive life of Knights of Columbus founder Fr. Michael McGivney, who died at the age of thirty-eight, as well as the twenty-three-year-old explorer priest who covered two hundred thousand square miles, heard confessions for up to fourteen hours at a stretch, ate prairie rats when necessary - and founded thirty parishes. You'll also enjoy the remarkable stories of: Bishop Fulton J. Sheen, America's first TV evangelist, Pierre Toussaint, once a slave, then an entrepreneur devoted to the poor, Henriette DeLille, the remarkable "Saint of New Orleans", Fr. Augustus Tolton, the nation's first black priest, himself a former slave, Cornelia Connelly, whose children were stolen from her because of her conversion, Fr. Patrick Peyton, "the Rosary Priest," of Hollywood Book jacket.