CARDINAL O'CONNELL OF BOSTON

1899 -- 1944 -- the life span of one of the outstanding Roman Catholic prelates in America- was a decisive period for America as a nation and a most important period in the development of Catholic influence in this country. Both as a citizen and an clesiastical leader Cardinal O'Connell's role in American life was influential. Cardinal O'Connell was born to typical Irish immigrant parents in Lowell, Massachusetts. Although in the course of his career, O'Connell traveled afar and held ecclesiastical posts in such widely separated and greatly differing places Rome, Tokyo, and Portland, Maine, he was so intimately associated with Boston in the more important years of his life that his biographer is quite right in calling the book Cardinal O'Connell of Boston. There he was a student and a priest, later Bis Coadjutor, Archbishop and Cardinal. He saw the Irish element in Boston grow in ze and influence from a despised minority group to a position where it was the ant element in the political life of that originally Puritan city. In that development, and in the growth of Catholic power in the country as a whole, Cardinal O' Connell played a prominent part. This biography tells the story of his life, step by step; recounts, his experience with individuals within and without of the church who helped him on his way up to a place of power in American Catholicism or through when he managed to establish his church more firmly in American life. Not a great but an interesting one. Primarily a Catholic market.