Books American Catholics

...It would be foolhardy to think that Hennesey's American Catholics provides an adequate basis for pastoral planning in Peoria...

...Parishes, schools, hospitals, movements, all just seem to appear, with the implication that they resulted from the energetic work of the bishops, priests, sisters (especially foundresses), and dedicated lay persons whose names fill the book...

...At first glance, the critic may think that this book is too "academic," too filled with names and facts, too modest in its interpretations...

...Well informed historical consciousness remains one of the most needed, and the most missing, elements in contemporary American Catholicism...

...This is a liberal Catholic interpretation, liberal in valuing truth, freedom, concern for social justice and political reponsibility, and open discussion of differences, but thoroughly Catholic in appreciating the institutional church, the links with other churches and Rome, continuity with the past, the heritage of Catholic culture, and the importance of clear ideas about faith: "the fundamental challenges facing American Catholics in 1981 are challenges rooted in theology...

...The American church, after the somewhat exotic period of French and Spanish missions, really begins with the Maryland Catholics and the founding father, John Carroll...

...With a post-conciliar chapter added in 1969, the paperback edition continues to be widely used in courses and has been the only readily available response to the question asked by so many active Catholics: "What can I read that will give me a brief overview of the American Catholic experience...

...Only Ellis provided the necessary information but increasingly his book was limited by the fact that it preceded a rapid expansion of research and publication on American Catholic themes, not only by traditional church historians but by scholars working in urban, immigrant, working-class, and intellectual history...

...he has provided badly needed information and his excellent notes point to most of the best research...

...David I. O'Brien FEW books on American Catholicism published in the last two decades have been more welcome than James Hennesey's new history of the church in the United States...

...Father Hennesey has told the story exceptionally well...

...Like Ellis before him, Hennesey welcomes Americanization, but is conscious of its shortcomings...

...Yet an author cannot do everything in one book...

...Hennesey's work has many of the qualities which distinguished that of his "teacher and friend'': thorough research, incredible accuracy in dealing with thousands of names and dates, a gift for capturing the public personality of bishops, a determination to honestly set forth both the strengths and weaknesses of the church, in short, a blend of scholarly excellence, literary grace, and intellectual integrity...

...For two decades the only good one-volume history has been John Tracy Ellis's American Catholicism, originally presented as the Walgreen Lectures at the University of Chicago in 1955 and published the following year...

...Now James Hennesey, well known for his excellent scholarly work on the nineteenth century American hierarchy, has provided us with a comprehensive, fact-filled short history, appropriately dedicated to Ellis, who has written an elegant Foreword...

...Only an approach which examines the whole story from another angle, from the function that parishes and symbols serve in the lives of people, and the function that church institutions and symbols play in larger social structures, can begin to answer those questions...

...Together, church history and social history might well enable American Catholics to understand their past in ways which will contribute to an intelligent response to the challenges facing them...

...Carroll's plans failed, overwhelmed by the immigrants who poured into the country between 1820 and 1920, giving the church a foreign tone and its people a sense of being outsiders...

...Ideas, too, derive mostly from Europe...

...They will do well to take the next step, searching out additional work on the subject and encouraging Catholic scholars, and the academic communities on which they depend, to continue the badly needed work of researching our past...

...he values movements, apostolates, and missionary endeavors, but worries about belief, unity, and especially intelligence and theological coherence...

...In the twentieth century, foreign-ness receded, replaced by an ecclesiastically-centered subculture at once aloof and self-righteous in its social life and cultural attitudes and thoroughly American in its political and economic practice...

...Moreover, there is a clear interpretive framework here, once again similar to that of Monsignor Ellis...

...Hennesey calls his "a history," not "the history," of the American church...

...The Ellis/Hennesey survey, telling the story as national and fundamentally ecclesiastical, can not always explain why things happened the way they did...

...When one considers how decentralized and mobile the United States was in the nineteenth century,and how parochial and/or ethnocentric the consciousness of most Catholics in the United States was and remains, the value and potential usefulness of such approaches seems obvious...

...even if it were, it would complement, not displace, the older forms of church history with their emphasis on institutions and major personalities...

...For Catholics suffering from historical amnesia and for Americans who never incorporated Catholics into the common national memory, an effort to lay out the facts, to tell the story in as much detail as possible, is both necessary and desirable...

...The new social historians have broken down Americanization into themes of urbanization, industrialization, and cultural adjustment in an effort to understand more explicitly the role played by religion in its widest sense in the American experience...

...Ellis notes that the new book takes into account the recent development of social history''from the bottom up," noting the experiences of diverse ethnic groups and attempting, where the current research allows, to capture something of the experience of ordinary Catholics in their parishes and neighborhoods, all the while keeping the organizational focus on the institutional church...

...Those who read it will be grateful to Hennesey for writing that most unusual of books, one for which there is a real need...

...it remains the best one for telling the story of American Catholics as Catholics...

...The recent history, what Hennesey, quoting Gustave Weigel, calls "a revolutionary moment," represents the climax of that Americanization...

...In the meantime, church history need not apologize to social history...

...The literature is not yet abundant enough to allow for a general social history of American Catholicism...

...The book can still be classified as church history, and it is church history at its best...

...While it incorporates some of the information provided by the work of such historians as Jay Dolan, Philip Gleason, and William Halsey, it does not fully accommodate their interpretations...

...Integrated into the planter culture of the region and sharing many of its values, Carroll and his generation wanted a church thoroughly at home in America, Catholic in religion, American in its dedication to republican institutions, with active lay leadership and sharp limitations on Roman authority...

...This interpretive framework is principled and modest...

...Once the paperback edition of this rather expensive book is published, there will be no excuse for ignoring the American dimension of Catholicism in the United States...

...it will be the foundation for new expressions of Catholic life in the future...

...why some seem to work and others don't is never very clear...

...John Cogley and Andrew Greeley prepared interesting short histories after Ellis's appeared, but both were skewed by their authors' distinctive experience and concerns...

...Similarly, European historians under the heading "popular religion'' are trying to get at the role of religion in the lives of people and local communities...

...Organization and leadership made a difference, and they still do...

...the church is finally fully at home in America but Catholics still have that "special sense" derived from common faith and shared experience...

...it would be equally foolish to rewrite American Catholic history on the basis of Jay Dolan's work on antebellum parishes in New York City or Timothy Smith's marvelous essays on religion in the lives of new immigrants from Eastern Europe...

...The immigrant church of the nineteenth century and the bishop-centered church of the twentieth each represented a form of Americanization, adaptation of traditional institutions and beliefs to new world conditions...