20th-century history of the Catholic Church in the United States greater frequency. 20th-century history of the Catholic Church in the United States The 20th-century history of the Catholic Church in the United States was characterized by a period of continuous growth for the Church in the United States, with Catholics progressively evolving from a small minority to a large minority. In 1900 the Catholic population was 10 million, under the control of 14 Archbishops, 77 bishops, and 12,000 priests . The community had built 10,000 churches, of which two-thirds had resident pastors. Catholic schools educated nearly 1,000,000 children and youth. Catholics were heavily concentrated in the industrial and mining centers
Catholic Church in the 20th century Pius XII, within weeks of his coronation, reverted the 250-year-old Vatican policy and permitted some things which had earlier been forbidden. The Church began to flourish again with twenty new arch-dioceses, seventy-nine dioceses and thirty-eight apostolic prefects, but only until 1949, when the Communist revolution took over the country. A major event of the Second Vatican Council, known as Vatican II, was the issuance by Pope Paul VI and Orthodox Patriarch Athenagoras of a joint expression of regret for many of the past actions that had led up to the Great Schism between the Western and Eastern churches, expressed as