The Brighton section of Boston, where the acreage is, began its history as a Catholic stronghold in 1880, when Archbishop John J. Williams acquired land there for a new seminary, St. John’s, which opened four years later. Boston College, then in the city’s South End, moved to land across Commonwealth Avenue from the seminary property in 1913. And Archbishop William H. O’Connell, who later became the city’s first cardinal, moved the archdiocesan offices to a site between the seminary and the college there in the 1920s, building himself the grand home with money bequeathed from the fortune of B. F. Keith, a vaudeville theater magnate.

“Cardinal O’Connell was always eager to make statements about Catholic success in front of the Boston Brahmins — the Yankees — statements about Catholics having arrived after a long period of being the immigrants, the poor, the looked-down-on,” said James M. O’Toole, a Boston College history professor. “His big phrase, when he became archbishop, was ‘the Puritan has passed; the Catholic remains,’ and he was making a visible statement by building a big house in more leafy surroundings.”

Cardinal O’Connell also built himself a stone mausoleum, and said in his will that he desired to be interred there after he died in 1944. But Boston College — his alma mater — did not want the responsibility of taking care of his remains. In 2011, the mausoleum was quietly dismantled and the cardinal’s body relocated to a nearby seminary courtyard. Some observers saw irony in the move: A century earlier, when Cardinal O’Connell first took over management of the seminary, he ousted the Sulpician priests who were running it at the time, and demanded they exhume and take with them the remains of their own deceased colleagues.

The house had its own colorful history. When Cardinal Bernard F. Law lived there, there was a silver tray kept in the foyer, and his red biretta was placed atop the tray, or removed from it, to signal whether or not he was in the building. A group of nuns lived in the building to take care of the cardinal and the house; there was also a chapel, from which daily Mass was broadcast, and a conference room in which the table featured a plaque saying that John Paul II sat there, and the walls featured portraits of all of the diocese’s past bishops. In the basement was a swimming pool, long boarded over.

During the height of Cardinal Law’s power, the house was the site of an annual garden party, to raise money for Catholic Charities, that was considered a must for the city’s power brokers, most of whom were Catholic. But as the sexual abuse crisis exploded in 2002, the house became the backdrop for protests, and in December of that year, at Creagh Library on the archdiocesan campus, Cardinal Law announced his resignation.

“Originally that land was a seminary, and a seminary is to be a seedbed of priests,” said the Rev. William P. Leahy, the president of Boston College. “In some ways, it still is a seedbed, but it’s lay men and women, priests and students. It’s still a great incubator for the future of the church.”