These dissenters followed Martin Luther and John Calvin in rejecting the selling of indulgences, the celebration of a Latin Mass, the doctrine of transubstantiation, and papal authority.

Massachusetts made it a crime, with a potential life sentence, for a Catholic priest to reside in the colony.

[4] The political necessity of gaining Catholic support for the American Revolutionary War drove a change in popular attitudes in the colonies.

The Constitution of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, written by John Adams and ratified in 1780, established religious freedom in the new state.

In 1788, the Abbé de la Poterie, a former French naval chaplain serving in Boston, celebrated the city's first public mass in a converted Huguenot chapel at 24 School Street in Boston, which he named Holy Cross Church.

Two refugees from the French Revolution ministering to Boston's Catholic population at the turn of the century, Reverends Francis Anthony Matignon and John Cheverus, raised the funds to build a larger building, the Church of the Holy Cross.

The new diocese consisted of the states of Connecticut, Massachusetts (including present-day Maine), New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont.

In the 1920s, Cardinal William O'Connell moved the chancery from offices near Holy Cross Cathedral in the South End to 127 Lake Street in the Brighton neighborhood of Boston.

[11] At the beginning of the 21st century the archdiocese was shaken by accusations of sexual abuse by clergy that culminated in the resignation of its archbishop, Cardinal Bernard Francis Law, on December 13, 2002.

This included alleged abuse at Saint John's Seminary and Arlington Catholic High School.