His immediate successor was Benedict Joseph Fenwick, a Marylander, descended in direct line from one of the original English Catholic pilgrims who founded that colony under Lord Baltimore.  During his episcopate the diocese grew amazingly.  When he went to it, in 1826, although it comprised the whole of New England, it contained but two churches fit for divine service, and only two priests besides himself.  When he died, in 1846, he left behind him two bishoprics where there had been but one; while in that of Boston alone there were then fifty churches, served by as many priests.  Although conversions had not been rare, the increase was mainly due to immigration, which the great famine in Ireland was speedily to increase.  The efforts of Bishop Fenwick and those of his coadjutor and successor were, in the nature of things, conservative rather than aggressive.

Bishop Fitzpatrick, also, was American by birth and training.  A native of Boston, he was reared in its public grammar and Latin schools until the age of seventeen, when he began his studies for the priesthood, which he finished in France.  Both of these prelates continued the tradition of Cheverus so far as their own persons were concerned.  But while they easily won and retained the respect of their more intelligent Protestant fellow-citizens, the confidence they inspired as men was not ample enough to protect the Church over which they ruled when once it began to show signs of solid prosperity.  Cheverus was not wrong in counting with assurance upon American love for and understanding of true liberty, but he doubtless owed more than he thought at the time to the insignificance and scanty numbers of his flock.  There came a period, even in the career of his immediate successor, when liberty itself seemed but a feeble sapling which a strong wind of stupid bigotry might avail to root out and cast away; while the chronicle of Bishop Fitzpatrick’s episcopate contains the record of convents invaded under forms of law, and of both convents and churches sacked and burned by “Native American” mobs, who were secure of their immunity from punishment.  Such outrages, witnessed by the second and third Bishops of Boston, and the incessant conflict to which they were compelled with the bigotry which caused them and which protected their perpetrators, predisposed both them and their clergy to a distrustful attitude toward converts like Brownson and Hecker, in whom American traits of character were very conspicuous.  Dr. Brownson has recorded in The Convert, p. 374, the fact that his entrance into the Church was delayed for months by his fear of explaining to Bishop Fitzpatrick the precise road by which he had approached it.  He says: