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Beyond Boston: Catholicism In The Northern New Borderlands In The Nineteenth Century, Molly Gallaher Boddy

Doctoral Dissertations

This study uncovers the religious and ethnic history of northern New England- Maine and Vermont- which has remained for too long on the periphery of scholars’ attention. In 1836, the Vermont Catholic missionary priest Jeremiah O’Callaghan warned members of the New England Catholic Church that “our own Catholicks (are) every where scattered in the woods,” writing not only of the hostile outside Protestant world faced by Catholics in Vermont during the nineteenth century, but also of the difficulty of ministering to such a geographically removed or “scattered” rural population. Still today, the story of these northern New England Catholics that …