Description
The Sacramento metropolitan area has nearly two million people and is one of the most culturally diverse communities in the country. In its origins and growth, the city is a microcosm of urban development in the American West. An “instant city” created by the California Gold Rush, Sacramento survived after the gold was exhausted by reinventing itself several times. The Catholic Church, present in Sacramento from the beginnings of the town, has had an important influence on Sacramento’s life and development, just as the city’s distinct social, cultural, and economic conditions have affected the character of Catholic life. Sacramento and the Catholic Church examines the interplay between the city of Sacramento and the Catholic Church since the 1850s, illustrating the sometimes hidden ways religious communities help to form and sustain urban communities. Avella uses Sacramento as a case study of the role of religious denominations in the development of the American West. In Sacramento, as in other western urban areas, churches brought civility and various cultural amenities, and they helped to create an atmosphere of stability so important to creating a viable urban community. At the same time, churches often had to shape themselves to the secularizing tendencies of western cities while trying to remain faithful to their core values and practices. In Sacramento, the Catholic Church has always been one of the city’s most visible and active denominations. Besides the numerous institutions that the Church sponsored, it brought together a wide spectrum of the city’s diverse ethnic populations and offered them several routes to assimilation. Catholic Sacramentans have always played an active role in government and in the city’s economy, and Catholic institutions provided a matrix for the creation of new communities as the city spread into neighboring suburbs. At the same time, the Church was forced to adapt itself to the needs and demands of its various ethnic constituents, particularly the flood of Spanish-speaking newcomers in the late twentieth century. Occasionally, it had to confront the secular government when city policies conflicted with Church principles, as in the conflict over the Church’s care of Sacramento’s hordes of homeless and hungry people. Steven M. Avella’s close study of secular and church archives, newspapers, and other sources reveals that churches and their congregations played a significant role in determining both the physical shape of Sacramento and the tone and quality of life there. Sacramento and the Catholic Church is a major contribution to our understanding of the development of western cities and the role of religion and religious institutions in that development.

Reviews
“In this gracefully written, pioneering work in western urban/religious history, Steven M. Avella interweaves the parallel stories of the Roman Catholic Church and the city of Sacramento. Avella’s approach is genuinely pathbreaking, and it will serve as a model for similar accounts of other western cities.”
--Ferenc M. Szasz, author of Religion in the West

“In this heroically researched, vividly written study, Steven Avella makes an important contribution to the history of California, the Far West, and American urbanism.”
--Kevin Starr, professor of history at the University of Southern California; author of Americans and the California Dream, 1850-1915.

"Rarely does a Sacramento-centered work come along that is so timely and well-documented. It is a must read for all students of Sacramento history." - Sacramento County Historical Society's Golden Nuggets Newsletter

"...this is a substantive and valuable contribution to Catholic studies, urban history, and the historiography of the American West." - American Catholic Studies

"This crisply written, engaging book shows how Sacramento and the Catholic Church shaped each other and offers a model for writing about religion's influence in western cities." - American Historical Review

"This book is very readable and accessible to laypeople and scholars alike, and is highly recommended for academic libraries, as well as urban parish libraries, especially in the Western United States." - Catholic Library World

"He is absolutely convincing in his argument that religious bodies helped shape the course of urban development....scholars of the American West will benefit from his delineation of religion's ability to transform a city, day by day, block by block, for better and for ill." - Western Historical Quarterly

"Sacramento and the Catholic Church is a pleasure to look at and to read. . . . Scholars of Sacramento, California, the west and the American Catholic history will want this book." - Catholic Southwest