Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Boston

Metropolitan Archdiocese of Boston Archidiœcesis Metropolitae Bostoniensis
Cathedral of the Holy Cross, Boston, 2007
Coat of arms
Location
Country	United States
Territory	Essex County, Middlesex County, Norfolk County, Suffolk County, and also Plymouth County except the towns of Marion, Mattapoisett, and Wareham[1]
Ecclesiastical province	Boston
Coordinates	42°12′47″N 71°02′29″W / 42.21306°N 71.04139°W / 42.21306; -71.04139
Statistics
Area	6,386 km2 (2,466 sq mi)[2]
Population - Total - Catholics	(as of 2021[2]) 4,420,879 1,989,396 (45%)
Parishes	266[2]
Information
Denomination	Catholic Church
Sui iuris church	Latin Church
Rite	Roman Rite
Established	April 8, 1808; 216 years ago (1808-04-08)
Cathedral	Cathedral of the Holy Cross
Patron saint	Saint Patrick
Secular priests	952 (600 diocesan; 352 religious)[2]
Current leadership
Pope	Francis
Metropolitan Archbishop	Richard Garth Henning
Auxiliary Bishops	Robert Francis Hennessey Mark William O'Connell Robert P. Reed Peter J. Uglietto Cristiano Borro Barbosa
Vicar General	Mark William O'Connell
Bishops emeritus	Seán Patrick O'Malley John Anthony Dooher Arthur Kennedy
Map
Website
bostoncatholic.org

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]

It was formed in 1808, branching off from the Diocese of Baltimore and growing rapidly during the 19th century. Starting in 2002 the archdiocese faced a sexual abuse scandal which touched off investigations of Catholic Church sexual abuse cases throughout the United States.

Richard G. Henning has served as archbishop since October 31, 2024.

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]

New England's first settlers were Congregationalists and, in Rhode Island, Baptists. Many of them left England because they were disappointed in the lack of reforms in the Church of England. These dissenters followed Martin Luther and John Calvin in rejecting the selling of indulgences, the celebration of a Latin Mass, the doctrine of transubstantiation, and papal authority.^[4]

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]

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.

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]

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]

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.

The Archdiocese of Boston is also metropolitan see for the Ecclesiastical province of Boston. This means that the archbishop of Boston is the metropolitan for the province. The suffragan dioceses in the province are the Diocese of Burlington, Diocese of Fall River, Diocese of Manchester, Diocese of Portland, Diocese of Springfield in Massachusetts, and the Diocese of Worcester.

The Archdiocese of Boston is divided into five pastoral regions, each headed by an episcopal vicar.

1. Jean-Louis Lefebvre de Cheverus (1808–1823) appointed Bishop of Montauban and later Archbishop of Bordeaux (elevated to Cardinal in 1836)
2. Benedict Joseph Fenwick (1825–1846)
3. John Bernard Fitzpatrick (1846–1866; coadjutor bishop 1843–1846)
4. John Joseph Williams (1866–1875; coadjutor bishop 1866); elevated to Archbishop

1. John Joseph Williams (1875–1907)
2. William Henry O'Connell (1907–1944)
3. Richard James Cushing (1944–1970)
4. Humberto Sousa Medeiros (1970–1983)
5. Bernard Francis Law (1984–2002), resigned; later appointed Archpriest of the Basilica di Santa Maria Maggiore
6. Seán Patrick O'Malley (2003–2024)^[a]
7. Richard Henning (2024–present)

• Robert Francis Hennessey (2006–present)
• Peter John Uglietto (2010–present)
• Mark William O'Connell (2016–present)
• Robert P. Reed (2016–present)
• Cristiano Borro Barbosa (2024–present)

• John Brady (1891–1910)
• Joseph Gaudentius Anderson (1909–1927)
• John Bertram Peterson (1927–1932), appointed Bishop of Manchester
• Francis Spellman (1932–1939), appointed Archbishop of New York (Cardinal in 1946)
• Richard J. Cushing (1939–1944), appointed Archbishop here (Cardinal in 1958)
• Louis Francis Kelleher (1945–1946)
• John Wright (1947–1950), appointed Bishop of Worcester, then Bishop of Pittsburgh, then Prefect of the Congregation for the Clergy (elevated to Cardinal in 1969)
• Thomas Francis Markham (1950–1952)
• Eric Francis MacKenzie (1950–1969)
• Jeremiah Francis Minihan (1954–1973)
• Thomas Joseph Riley (1959–1976)
• Daniel A. Cronin (1968–1970), appointed Bishop of Fall River and later Archbishop of Hartford
• Joseph Francis Maguire (1971–1976), appointed Coadjutor Bishop of Springfield in Massachusetts and subsequently succeeded to that see
• Lawrence Joseph Riley (1971–1990)
• Joseph John Ruocco (1974–1980)
• Thomas Vose Daily (1974–1984), appointed Bishop of Palm Beach and later Bishop of Brooklyn
• John Joseph Mulcahy (1974–1992)
• John Michael D'Arcy (1975–1985), appointed Bishop of Fort Wayne-South Bend
• Daniel Anthony Hart (1976–1995), appointed Bishop of Norwich
• Alfred C. Hughes (1981–1993), appointed Bishop of Baton Rouge and later Archbishop of New Orleans
• Robert J. Banks (1985–1990), appointed Bishop of Green Bay
• Roberto Octavio González Nieves (1988–1995), appointed Coadjutor Bishop of Corpus Christi and subsequently succeeded to that see, and later Archbishop of San Juan in Puerto Rico
• John R. McNamara (1992–1999)
• John P. Boles (1992–2006)
• John Brendan McCormack (1995–1998), appointed Bishop of Manchester
• William F. Murphy (1995–2001), appointed Bishop of Rockville Centre
• Francis Xavier Irwin (1996–2009)
• Emilio S. Allué (1996–2010)
• Richard Joseph Malone (2000–2004), appointed Bishop of Portland and later Bishop of Buffalo
• Richard Lennon (2001–2006), appointed Bishop of Cleveland
• Walter James Edyvean (2001–2014)
• John Anthony Dooher (2006–2018)
• Arthur L. Kennedy (2010–2017)
• Robert P. Deeley (2012–2013), appointed Bishop of Portland

• William Barber Tyler, appointed Bishop of Hartford in 1843
• Patrick Thomas O'Reilly, appointed Bishop of Springfield in Massachusetts in 1870
• James Augustine Healy, appointed Bishop of Portland in 1875
• Lawrence Stephen McMahon (priest here, 1860–1872), appointed Bishop of Hartford in 1879
• Matthew Harkins, appointed Bishop of Providence in 1887
• Edward Patrick Allen, appointed Bishop of Mobile in 1897
• Louis Sebastian Walsh, appointed Bishop of Portland in 1906
• John Joseph Nilan, appointed Bishop of Hartford in 1910
• James Anthony Walsh, elected Superior General of Maryknoll and consecrated Titular Bishop in 1933
• Edward Francis Ryan, appointed Bishop of Burlington in 1944
• John Joseph Glynn, appointed Auxiliary Bishop for the Military Services, USA in 1991
• Richard Joseph Malone, appointed Bishop of Portland in 2002 and later Bishop of Buffalo^[21] in 2012
• Christopher J. Coyne, appointed Auxiliary Bishop of Indianapolis in 2011 and later Bishop of Burlington and Coadjutor Archbishop of Hartford in 2023 and succeeded to Archbishop of Hartford in 2024
• Paul Fitzpatrick Russell,^[22] appointed Apostolic Nuncio to Turkey and Turkmenistan and Titular Archbishop in 2016

• Pope St. John XXIII National Seminary, Weston
• St. John's Seminary, Brighton
• Redemptoris Mater Archdiocesan Missionary Seminary, Brookline

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]

• Albert W. Low (1961–1972)^[26]
• Bartholomew Varden (1972–1975)^[26][27]
• Eugene F. Sullivan (1978–1984)^[28][29]
• Kathleen Carr (1990–2006)^[30]
• Mary Grassa O'Neill (2008–2014)^[31]
• Mary E. Moran (2013–2014)^[31]
• Kathleen Powers Mears (2014–2019)^[23][31]
• Thomas W. Carroll (2019–present)^[32]

• Boston College, Chestnut Hill
• Emmanuel College, Boston
• Merrimack College, North Andover
• Regis College, Weston

• Marian Court College, Swampscott

The archdiocese previously used a headquarters facility in Brighton but sold it to Boston College in 2004 for $107,400,000.^[33]

Steward Health Care System operates the former archdiocesan hospitals of Caritas Christi Health Care.

• Official website
  • Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Boston Official Site (rcab.org) at the Wayback Machine (archive index)
• Catholic Hierarchy Profile of the Archdiocese of Boston
• Boston Globe / Spotlight / Abuse in the Catholic Church
• Boston Catholic Insider (critical blog)
• Boston Catholic Schools