American Catholic: The Saints and Sinners Who Built America's Most Powerful Church

A cracking good story with a wonderful cast of rogues, ruffians and some remarkably holy and sensible people. 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.