20th-century history of the Catholic Church in the United States 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 of the
Russian Greek Catholic Church served by priests ordained in other Eastern Catholic Churches, former Orthodox priests, and Roman Catholic priests with bi-ritual faculties. In Russia, it is purported that after the gradual development of the East-West Schism, a tiny group of Russian families maintained themselves as "Old Catholics" (Rus: старокатолики (starokatoliki)), a name which should not be confused with the Döllingerite Old Catholic church of Europe and the United States, which formally split with the Roman Catholic Church in the wake of the reforms of the First Vatican Council. The status of this group of Russian "Old Catholics", families and groups of individuals to