Philadelphia’s First Catholic Cathedral

  Old St. Mary’s traces its history to 1763, when a second church was needed for the growing number of Catholics in the city. Built on land originally bought to serve as a cemetery for Old St. Joseph’s, Old St. Mary’s was referred to as “Mission Number 1” as St.

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Archbishop John Carroll

With a high school named after him and a statue in the Centennial Fountain, Archbishop John Carroll has had a continued presence in the city of Philadelphia. As the first bishop of the United States, Carroll had a major impact on Catholicism in America, but who was John Carroll and

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A Brief History of the Growing Pains of the Church in Philadelphia

While the founding of Philadelphia as a diocese dates back to 1808 when it was separated from the Archdiocese of Baltimore, the history of the Catholic Church in Pennsylvania dates back another hundred years. The first Mass in Philadelphia was said in 1708 in a private home; however, the first

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Bishop Francis Kenrick and His Journals

As a volunteer at PAHRC this summer, I was tasked with labeling descriptions of letters from one of the journals of Bishop Francis Kenrick, who served as bishop of Philadelphia from 1830 until 1851. This particular journal, which Kenrick kept while in Philadelphia, has never been published or translated from

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