The Catholic Church in the United States is part of the worldwide Catholic Church, the Christian Church in full communion with the Pope. With more than 77.7 million registered members, it is the largest single religious denomination in the United States, comprising 25 percent of the population. The United States has the fourth largest Catholic population in the world, after Brazil, Mexico, and the Philippines.
Catholicism arrived in what is now the United States during the earliest days of the European colonization of the Americas. The first Catholic missionaries were Spanish, having come with Christopher Columbus to the New World on his second voyage in 1493. Subsequently, Spanish missionaries established missions in what are now Florida, Georgia, Texas, New Mexico, California, and the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico. French colonization came later, in the early 18th century, with the French establishing missions in French Louisiana: St. Louis, New Orleans, Biloxi, Mobile, the Alabamas, Natchez, Yazoo, Natchitoches, Arkansas, Illinois, and Michigan.
The number of Catholics has grown during the country's history, at first slowly in the early 19th century through some immigration and through the acquisition of territories (formerly possessions of France, Spain, and Mexico) with predominately Catholic populations. In the mid-19th century, a rapid influx of immigrants from Europe (Irish, German, Polish and Italian) made Catholicism the largest religion in the United States. This increase of Catholics was met by widespread prejudice and hostility, often resulting in riots and the burning of churches. The nativist Know Nothing party was first founded in the early 19th century in an attempt to restrict Catholic immigration. This party believed that the United States was a Protestant nation and the influx of Catholics threatened its purity and mission, even its very existence.
Since the 1960s, the percentage of Americans who are Catholic has stayed roughly the same, at around 25%, due in large part to increases in the Hispanic population over the same period.
Read more about Catholic Church In The United States: Organization, Clergy, Lay Ministers and Employees, Demographics, Politics
Famous quotes containing the words united states, catholic church, catholic, church, united and/or states:
“In the United States there is more space where nobody is is than where anybody is.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)
“In fact what America expects of its citizens and what the Catholic Church expects of the faithful are sometimes so different that they lead to an enormous ker-KLUNK between democracy and theology.”
—Anna Quindlen (b. 1952)
“Through my fault, my most grievous fault.
[Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.]”
—Missal, The. The Ordinary of the Mass.
Missal is book of prayers and rites used to celebrate the Roman Catholic mass during the year.
“... no young colored person in the United States today can truthfully offer as an excuse for lack of ambition or aspiration that members of his race have accomplished so little, he is discouraged from attempting anything himself. For there is scarcely a field of human endeavor which colored people have been allowed to enter in which there is not at least one worthy representative.”
—Mary Church Terrell (1863–1954)
“Because of these convictions, I made a personal decision in the 1964 Presidential campaign to make education a fundamental issue and to put it high on the nation’s agenda. I proposed to act on my belief that regardless of a family’s financial condition, education should be available to every child in the United States—as much education as he could absorb.”
—Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908–1973)
“The corporate grip on opinion in the United States is one of the wonders of the Western World. No First World country has ever managed to eliminate so entirely from its media all objectivity—much less dissent.”
—Gore Vidal (b. 1925)