The Metropolitan Archdiocese of Boston (Latin: Archidiœcesis Metropolitae Bostoniensis) is a Latin Church ecclesiastical territory, or archdiocese, of the Catholic Church in eastern Massachusetts in the United States. Its mother church is the Cathedral of the Holy Cross in Boston. The archdiocese is the fourth largest in the United States.[3]
The Archdiocese of Boston encompasses Essex County, Middlesex County, Norfolk County, and Suffolk County in Massachusetts. It includes most of Plymouth County except for the towns of Marion, Mattapoisett, and Wareham.
As of 2018, the archdiocese had 284 parishes with 617 diocesan priests and 275 permanent deacons. In 2018, the archdiocese estimated that more than 1.9 million Catholics lived within its territory.[2]
As these dissenters set up colonies in New England, they enacted legal restrictions on Catholics, including bans on Catholic worship. Massachusetts made it a crime, with a potential life sentence, for a Catholic priest to reside in the colony.[4]
The political necessity of gaining Catholic support for the American Revolutionary War drove a change in popular attitudes in the colonies. The Constitution of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, written by John Adams and ratified in 1780, established religious freedom in the new state.[4] With the Massachusetts constitution being the first state constitution in the United States, its framework of government became a model for the constitutions of other states and, eventually, for the federal constitution.
In 1788, the Abbé de la Poterie, a former French naval chaplain serving in Boston, celebrated the city's first public mass in a converted Huguenot chapel at 24 School Street in Boston, which he named Holy Cross Church. Two refugees from the French Revolution ministering to Boston's Catholic population at the turn of the century, Reverends Francis Anthony Matignon and John Cheverus, raised the funds to build a larger building, the Church of the Holy Cross. These buildings no longer exist, but they were the foundation of the Catholic Church in Massachusetts.[5]
Formation
Bishop Cheverus
Pope Pius VII erected the Diocese of Boston on April 8, 1808, taking all of New England from the Diocese of Baltimore. The new diocese consisted of the states of Connecticut, Massachusetts (including present-day Maine), New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont.[6] The pope named Cheverus as the first bishop of Boston.[7]
The exponential growth of the Catholic Church in New England through the nineteenth century led the Vatican to create new dioceses out of the Diocese of Boston and later the Archdiocese of Boston.
Dioceses created out of the Diocese and the Archdiocese of Boston
Date of diocese
Diocese name
Territory taken from Diocese and Archdiocese of Boston
In the 1920s, Cardinal William O'Connell moved the chancery from offices near Holy Cross Cathedral in the South End to 127 Lake Street in the Brighton neighborhood of Boston.[9] "Lake Street" was a metonym for the bishop and the office of the archdiocese.[9]
In June 2004, the archdiocese sold the archbishop's residence and the chancery and surrounding lands in Brighton to Boston College, in part to defray costs associated with numerous cases of sexual abuse by clergy of the archdiocese.[10] The archdiocesan offices of the archdiocese moved to Braintree. The archdiocesan seminary, Saint John's Seminary, remains on the property in Brighton.[11]
At the beginning of the 21st century the archdiocese was shaken by accusations of sexual abuse by clergy that culminated in the resignation of its archbishop, Cardinal Bernard Francis Law, on December 13, 2002. In September 2003, the archdiocese settled over 500 abuse-related claims for $85 million.[12] Victims received an average of $92,000 each and the perpetrators included 140 priests and two others.[13]
Additional sex abuse allegations within the Archdiocese of Boston surfaced in later years as well. This included alleged abuse at Saint John's Seminary and Arlington Catholic High School.[14][15][16]
The Archdiocese of Boston lobbies against laws intended to help survivors of abuse, such as a proposed 2023 law to remove the statute of limitations on child sexual abuse lawsuits.[17] From 2011 and 2019 the Catholic church in Massachusetts spent over half a million dollars lobbying against such laws.[18]
Coat of arms
The coat of arms of the archdiocese, shown in the information box to the right at the top of this article, has a blue shield with a gold cross and a gold "trimount" over a silver and blue "Barry-wavy" at the base of the shield. The "trimount" of three coupreaux represents the City of Boston, the original name of which was Trimountaine in reference to the three hills on which the city's original settlement stood. The cross, fleurettée, honors the Cathedral of the Holy Cross while also serving as a reminder that the first bishop of Boston and other early ecclesiastics were natives of France. The "Barry-wavy" is a symbol of the sea, alluding to Boston's role as a major seaport whose first non-indigenous settlers came from across the sea.[19]
Communications media
The diocesan newspaper The Pilot has been published in Boston since 1829.
The archdiocese's Catholic Television Center, founded in 1955, produces programs and operates the cable television network CatholicTV. From 1964 to 1966, it owned and operated a broadcast television station under the call letters WIHS-TV.
As of 2018, the archdiocese had 112 schools with approximately 34,000 students in pre-kindergarten through high school.[23][24]
In 1993 the archdiocese had 53,569 students in 195 archdiocesan parochial schools. Boston had the largest number of parochial schools: 48 schools with a combined total of about 16,000 students.[25]
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