Chicago's Catholics

...Unlike Lutheranism and the denominational crises that affected it, the Catholic church rested on the intense faith and socio-psychological needs of the immigrants, the wise and flexible leadership of the bishops, and the persecution of the host society...

...History will not judge us too harshly if our collective response to their special needs at least comes close to matching, both in wisdom and compassion, the imperfect but, on balance, constructive response of our forebears to the needs of the original group of ethnic immigrants whom they were called upon to serve during the period covered by Shanabruch in his timely study...

...GEORGE G. HIGGINS is adjunct lecturer in theology at The Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C...

...Not the least of these problems are those generated by the arrival here in recent years of a whole new generation of immigrants...

...In other words, I suspect that a similar study of any one of several other multi-ethnic dioceses would tell pretty much the same story-the story of how the Catholic church "survived the storm of immigrant nationalism" and helped its impoverished ethnic constituents to achieve a satisfactory degree of ecclesial and civic unity while preserving in varying degrees their own ethnic heritage...

...It would be chauvinistic, however, to evaluate Shanabruch's study exclusively in home-town Chicago terms...

...REVIEWERS MARTIN GREEN teaches in the English department at Tufts University...

...An indispensable reference work, it will undoubtedly have the field all to itself for the indefinite future...

...As a native of Chicago, I, for one, feel beholden to Shanabruch for having made a first down payment on this long ovedue debt to one particular group of these pragmatic leaders namely, the archbishops and bishops who presided over the Archdiocese of Chicago at a time when ethnic immigrants made up the majority of the Catholic population...

...ronald christ is the editor of Review, published by the Center for Inter-American Relations in New York...

...david kolb is chairman of the philosophy department at Bates College in Maine and currently writing a book on modern consciousness and criticisms stemming from Hegel and Heidegger...

...MSGR...

...George G. Higgins LAST YEAR Harvard University Press, as though officially to authenticate the contemporary ethnic revival, published a monumental thousand-page Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups...

...For my own part, however, I am pleased that he chose to end his story on such an upbeat note...

...The fact that their host society was more unsympathetic to both their religious faith and their ethnic culture than Brownson, Hecker, et al, seemed to realize makes their story all the more remarkable...

...They already number in the millions, and millions more can be expected to arrive, legally or otherwise, in the years that lie immediately ahead...

...At the time of the church's origin in Chicago," Shanabruch concludes, "it might have been unreasonable to expect that one institution could withstand the centripetal force generated by more than twenty distinct nationalities...

...It describes in detail the origins, history, and present situation of every ethnic group from'' Acadians to Zoroastrians,'' and contains in addition a series of scholarly thematic essays that illustrate the key facets of ethnicity...

...Persecution" may be too strong a word in this context, but at the very least it must be said that Brownson and Hecker and even some of the more perceptive Americanizers of a later generation probably exaggerated the readiness of the then dominant non-Catholic elite to respond benignly either to Catholicism as such or to its ethnic immigrant constituents...

...Brownson and the Americanizers were sympathetic to the view of Brownson's friend and fellow-convert, Isaac Hecker, founder of the Paulist Fathers, "that Americans," again in Gleason's words, "were a deeply religious people who would respond eagerly to Catholicism if it were presented to them in a congenial manner.'' The present reviewer, by temperament, training, and family tradition has always instinctively, perhaps even uncritically, sided with this point of view, but Shanabruch's book (along with other recent studies in the field of American church history) has persuaded him that with all due respect to the Americanizers, the time has come to recognize the contribution of a number of less famous and less articulate churchmen who, as Shanabruch reminds us, had to deal pragmatically, year in and year out, with almost insurmountable pastoral problems and consequently did not enjoy the luxury of debating in theoretical terms the "ideological aspects of Americanization...

...The Polish National Catholic Church, established in 1895, was the only schismatic break and it made but limited progress...

...We owe these unheralded leaders a deep debt of gratitude...

...Shanabruch's study of how Chicago's Catholics, under the flexible leadership of these long-forgotten churchmen, responded pragmatically to the problem which Brownson discussed theoretically may come as something of a surprise to contemporary Chicago Catholics if only because most of us, unfortunately, know less about the history of our own archdiocese than we know about the history of the church in partibus - or, in any event, less than we know about the history of the church in Baltimore and other Sees which have been studies in greater detail by professional scholars than ours has been thus far...

...One of the best of these essays, "American Identity and Americanization," deals at the theoretical level with the same problem that Charles Shanabruch has researched historically in his case study of how the enthnically variegated CAtholics of one archdiocese in the United States, during the period 1833-1924, became Americanized - more reluctantly and more painfully in some cases than in others - while holding onto their religious faith and the best of their ethnic values and traditions...

...Yet its bishops and archbishops, without benefit of successful models, brought unity out of potential chaos...

...At the end of the nineteenth century, Cardinal Gibbons, Archbishop Ireland, Archbishop Keane, and the other so-called "Americanizers" in the Catholic community were still making the same point with equal insistence but perhaps with greater sensitivity to the real or alleged grievances and to the legitimate hopes and aspirations of the ethnic immigrants - including the Irish who, to put it very mildly, never managed to endear themselves to the contentious and somewhat overbearing Dr...

...It is safe to assume, in conclusion, that some of Shanabruch's more critical readers will fault him for allegedly being too laudatory and too uncritical of Chicago's Catholics and their ecclesiastical leaders...

...BARBARA GRIZZUTI HARRISON, the author of Visions of Glory: A History and a Memory of Jehovah's Witnesses (Simon and Schuster) and Off-Center, a collection of essays, has just completed a novel...

...By hindsight, it is all to easy for today's more upwardly mobile, more affluent, and more highly educated Catholics to second-guess their immigrant forebears, but Shanabruch's book suggests, to me at least, that judging the performance of a largely immigrant church in the nineteenth and early twentieth century by today's quite different and more sophisticated standards serves no discernible purpose except to distract us from or, worse still, to help us rationalize our own mistakes and limitations in meeting the pastoral and socio-economic problems which we are faced with at the present time...

...The author of the Harvard essay on Americanization, Philip Gleason, Professor of History at Notre Dame University, recalls for the record that Orestes Brownson, one of the most celebrated converts to Catholicism in the history of the United States, was greatly exercised about this problem in the middle of the nineteenth century and argued almost passionately, in Gleason's words, that since "it would clearly be suicidal for the Catholic religion to allow itself to be identified with any foreign nationality . . ., it was imperative to distinguish between nationality and Catholicity, so that immigrants would not abandon their faith in the process of Americanizing, and Americans would understand that to become a Catholic one did not have to give up his nationality...

...Brownson...

...His books include The Challenge of the Mahatmas and Dreams of Adventure, Deeds of Empire (Basic Books...