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Steeples topped by crosses still dominate neighbourhood skylines in many American cities, silent markers of local worlds rarely examined by historians. In this study, John McGreevy chronicles the world of Catholic parishes - and connects their place in urban history to the course of American race relations in the 20th century. In portraits of parish life in Boston, Chicago, New York, Philadelphia and other cities, McGreevy examines the contacts and conflicts between Euro-American Catholics and their African-American neighbours. He demonstrates how the territorial nature of the parish - more bound by geography than Protestant or Jewish congregations - kept Catholics in their neighbourhoods, and how this commitment to place complicated efforts to integrate urban neighbourhoods. He also shows how the church responded to the growing number of African-American parishioners by condemning racism, and how this teaching was received in communities rocked by racial strife. Taking the story through the Second Vatican Council and the civil rights movement of the 1960s, McGreevy demonstrates how debates about community and racial justice reshaped the character of American Catholicism. Tracing the transformation of a church, its people, and the nation over the course of nearly a century, this work illuminates the impact of religious culture on the course of modern American history.