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He felt as if he were living in a foreign country, and, of course, he was.

THE NEIGHBORHOOD

Many years after establishing his career in the energy industry, and residing for long periods in Washington, D.C., and New York City, Peter Borré had come to enjoy the life he and Mary Beth made in Boston.

Charlestown covers one square mile of a hilly peninsula cradled by the Mystic River on the north and the Charles on the southeastern side; the rivers converge at Boston Inner Harbor. The Borrés’ condo looked out on the steel bridge that links Boston’s North End to a neighborhood unusually rich in history.

In 1630, ten years after the first pilgrims reached Cape Cod, a brig carrying Puritans sailed out of England. John Winthrop, in a famous shipboard sermon, urged his followers to pull together in “patience, and liberty … [so] that we shall be as a city upon a hill.”17 Henry VIII’s break with Rome had launched a state church from which Winthrop’s followers soon split. They saw the pope as an anti-Christ and came to view Church of England liturgies as too much like the Mass.18 Winthrop’s people became separatists who spurned any official faith. Charlestown, briefly, was the capital of the infant colony, but Winthrop’s idealized city gave way to a Bible Commonwealth as people settled across the Charles along the larger landmass girded by water. Roads followed farms, and villages mushroomed into the townships of a New England society bound by the Puritan covenant. The Congregational churches they fostered would each govern its own affairs, each choose its own pastor and spare interiors shorn of stained-glass windows and icons.19

The Massachusetts Bay Colony hatched its own pressures for conformity that sparked hysteria and executions in the Salem witch trials. Mid-seventeenth-century Charlestown “was breaking out of such isolation, becoming a trading center for the region,” writes J. Anthony Lukas. “The less it resembled Winthrop’s model, the more seductive became the memory of that archetypal New England town, harmonious, consensual, cemented by a single faith and devotion to a common cause.”20 On April 18, 1775, Paul Revere galloped through Charlestown to warn of the British troops advancing on Lexington. In the ensuing battle—the first in the War for Independence—Charlestown and Roxbury, which lay across the river to the south, formed a dual front. Fifteen thousand colonists took arms against five thousand soldiers for the Crown. At Bunker Hill the colonists lost 138 troops to 226 British dead. Most of Charlestown went down in flames. Yet in 1810 Charlestown had nearly five thousand people and was the state’s third-largest town when the national navy opened a harbor shipyard. Builders began crafting vessels out of felled trees. In time, Charlestown became a neighborhood of Boston through annexation.

Compared with its seventeenth-century mission to California, the Catholic Church came late to Massachusetts. In the 1790s two French priests began proselytizing among pockets of Irish settlers and in the Indian villages of Maine, where earlier Canadian clerics had visited. Boston’s first Catholic Church was built in 1803, a parish of mostly Irish surnames; the construction funds drew Protestant support, notably a $100 donation from former president John Adams. He had sent a consul to Rome, establishing a relationship with the Holy See short of full diplomatic ties. Boston’s first bishop, a Frenchman, came in 1808.

A generation later, the bedraggled people who stepped off swollen ships from Ireland planted fear in the mind of Boston’s fading homogeneous society. Bunched into shanties, clapboard houses, and brick tenements on back streets, the Irish scraped along the margins. In the late summer of 1825, local hooligans rampaged through Irish warrens, shattering windows, smashing furniture, driving the Boston Advertiser to decry “disgraceful riots.” Charlestown drew its stability from the shipyard and Protestant artisans, merchants, and farmers. In October 1828