The article deals with the positioning of the Catholic Church in American society
from the founding of the Apostolic Prefecture of Baltimore in 1784 to the First World War. The
paper begins with a quote from Rudolph Veccoli, the longtime director of the Immigration
History Research Center at the University of Minnesota, who wrote that the history of the
Catholic Church in the United States is actually the history of the Catholic Church's relationship to immigrant communities. The authors also note that the contribution of the Slovenian higher clergy to the development of the structures of the Catholic Church in the USA was
significant, especially in the area of Michigan's Upper Peninsula and Northern Minnesota,
Iron Range. The contribution describes some of the important issues, i.e. the establishment
of the institutions of the Catholic Church after the American Revolution and its placement
in American society until the First World War; the attitude of the Catholic hierarchy in the
USA and the role of the Roman Curia towards the Americanization of immigrants and/or the
preservation of their ethnic identities; the development of Catholic education and the attitude
of the Catholic Church in the USA towards the institutions of public education; the movement
to Americanize the Catholic Church; its attitude to the issue of slavery and its attitude to the
African-American community after the abolition of slavery, as well as the question of the
attitude of the Catholic Church to the treatment of the Native Americans by the USA till the
end of the 1st World War.
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