The American Cathofic Experience
O'Brien, David J.
of the Mind seems to have extended Shepard's staying power without enriching his art. In the past, he has used his taste for caricature in the interest of dramatic or visual truth. Here...
...In addition he is consistently attentive to the roles and experiences of women...
...seen from the bottom, religious history is not confined to church but spills over into families and workplaces, into economics, politics, and culture...
...INTERNATIONALLY RESPECTED FACULTY AND GUEST SPEAKERS An excellent resident faculty ts complemented by outstanding guest lecturers...
...DEGREE SPECIALIZATIONS Students may specialize in Scripture, Theology, Pastoral Dturgy, Pastoral Ministry, and Splntuahty ~n'the Master of Arts Program FLEXIBLE SCHEDULES The School offers: Fall, Spring, and Summer-only study options, three and stx week summer courses, four day weeks, and day and evening classes...
...GERALD WEALES Books: A MURAL IN PROGRESS D t~ING the last fifteen years professor Jay P. Dolan of Notre Dame has led a revival of American Catholic historical studies...
...For better or worse, unboundedness, confusion, incoherence, even mystery, may be more accurate characterizations of what was going on than superficalty coherent notions of "Americanization...
...Not only religious historians but historians of immigration, labor, education, the family, and women have provided valuable new information about the American Catholic experience...
...Over the course of the last decade innumerable scholars have benefited from the Center's services...
...What is important is that the older, more institutional approach made women peripheral by definition, as Mary Jo Weaver pointed out [Commonweal, "From Immigrants to Emigrantsi January 1 l, 1985], while Dolan's bottom-up approach is inclusive...
...He includes Mexican Americans in his discussion of the immigrant church and later examines the Hispanic experience in the northeast and midwest as well as the southwest and California...
...This led him to the study of popular religion, already well advanced in Europe but not yet applied to American Catholic subjects...
...Catholics, it turned out, had revivals, just like Protestants...
...Dolan examines the church from the point of view of the people...
...Here his conceptual framework becomes less clear, and he occasionally loses control over the mass of information he presents...
...Continued on page 89) 14 February 1986:87He has integrated Catholic history more fully into American history and has broken open the too simple slogans which pass for historical consciousness among many theologians and church leaders...
...While overwlaelmingly working class, ethnic groups usually found middle-class lay leaders who played a crucial role in organizing the community...
...While Hennesey recognizes the importance of social history, his survey concentrates on the institutional church and on religious ideas...
...it is a kaleidescope of images and experiences...
...In that sense, it may be more rather than less Catholic, even if it may not easily provide the clarity and coherence readers may be looking for...
...Dolan wrote this history "from the bottom up," as the social historians put it, examining baptismal and marriage records, census data, newspapers, sermons, catechisms, devotional manuals, all to provide a detailed account of how Irish and German parishes were organized and paid for, which people joined them and why, what parishioners believed and how they passed their faith on to their children...
...The book complements James Hennesey's American Catholics, the only other current general history...
...With Notre Ill I THE AMERICAN CATHOLIC EXPERIENCE A HISTORY FROM COLONIAL TIMES TO THE PRESENT Jay P. Dolan Doubleday, $19.95, 504 pp...
...Minimum tuition...
...they met human needs and assisted adjustment to American culture...
...If there is at times a sense of incompleteness about his discussion of the latter subject, that undoubtedly reflects the state of research...
...After excellent chapters on the colonial period, including a superb portrait of Catholic life in colonial Maryland, Dolan explains how Catholicism in the early national period experienced a "republican interlude" marked by lay initiative, a congregational church polity and a personalist spirituality centered less on the church than on the individual's relationship with God...
...Dolan is the first writer of a general history to pay close attention to Hispanics...
...From this perspective, Dolan offered new insight into American urban life and some tentative answers to the question of Catholic success: why did this apparently European and very conservative church not only survive but thrive in American cities of the nineteenth century...
...Given the complexity of immigrant adjustment to American society, and the diversity of classes and ethnic groups which made up the church, few firm generalizations are possible, but with admirable modesty Dolan succeeds in offering a picture of American Catholic life at the family, neighborhood, and parish level...
...Parishes continued to arise most often from lay initiative...
...516) 423-0499 IB 14 February 1986:89...
...York...
...there might be religious as well as functional reasons why Catholicism worked...
...Avoid-' ing the simplistic reductionism of earlier forms of social history, Dolan took faith seriously...
...Wrestling with modernity THE THEORY OF EONIqUNlCATIVE ACTION VOLUME I: REASON AND THE RATIONALIZATION OF SOCIETY Jiirgen Ihbermas Translated by Thomas McCarthy Beacon Press, $29.95, 456 pp...
...Dolan's work lacks the clear definitions and sharp boundaries of the earlier history...
...His second book, Catholic Revivalism (1975) examined parish missions...
...Still, there is much to be learned here about parish life, schools, social action, and church organization...
...Among other immigrants, the congregational parish of the republican period was replaced by "the devotional parish," organized around religious activities which required the services of the priest...
...Volume One, Reason and the Rationalization of Society, despite the impressive efforts of translator Thomas McCarthy, plods on for almost 400 pages, and Volume Two, Lifeworld and System: A Critique of Functionalist Reason, promises to do the same for perhaps 600 more...
...Dennis P. McCann T HE CRISIS within both church and society has been announced and analyzed so often and in so many ways that we may be tempted to turn a deaf ear toward anyone who would continue to theorize on such an overworked topic...
...For further information, call or write: Dr...
...In the last three chapters of the book Dolan caixies his story from the 1920s, the high watermark of the devotional parish, to the present...
...Combined with the organizational requirements of American pluralism and the centralization of power and authority which flowed from Vatican I, the new devotionalism created a very priestcentered church and a spirituality which emphasized sin, ritual, and "religious practice...
...they even had a form of "Catholic evangelicalism" which led men and women to religious conversion and to sacramental practice...
...Abandoning a chronological for a thematic framework, he examines parish life, religious beliefs, education, charities, and social action...
...In addition to his own pioneering work, Dolan assumed leadership in the historical profession...
...His first book, The Immigrant Church (1968) resulted from almost four years research on parish life in pre-Civil-War New...
...It will open imaginations beyond too easy generalizations about the immigrant church to rich patterns of religious experience and organization of churches, which at one and the same time were social institutions reflecting human needs, and communities of faith which called persons beyond the world of daily experience to larger worlds of spirit and myth, to experiences of memory and possibility...
...As a graduate student under Martin Mart), at the University of Chicago, Dolan decided to apply the techniques of the "new social history" to American Catholicism...
...The heart of the book lies in Dolan's subsequent discussion of the immigrant church from 1820 to 1920...
...If Dolan is to be believed, it already has...
...Lay leadership was less apparent among Italians and Hispanics, who also brought a more family-centered style of religion which maintained channels to the divine, independent of the church...
...William Vendley, Associate Dean, Seminary of the Immaculate Conception Huntington, Long Island, N.Y 11743 Tel...
...In short, Dolan's is an exciting and suggestive book...
...This is especially true if the theorist writes at such length and in such ponderous prose that, with any luck at all, the crisis may have passed before we finish reading and absorbing it...
...Jiirgen Habermas's major work, The Theory of Communicative Action could easily be dismissed in this way...
...COSTS THAT AREN'T UNGODLY Rock-bottom room and board on a beautiful campus located a short walk from beaches and fifty minutes from Manhattan...
...Here a conservative theology could sometimes serve liberating purposes, and a liberal theology could legitimate power and domination...
...Now Dolan has drawn together the results of that research into a comprehensive social history of American Catholicism...
...For those who dream of an indigenous American Catholicism or of a unique American contribution to the universal church, this is where it must start...
...Most of all, Dolan's is a history of real people...
...David O~ Dame's help, he established the Charles and Margaret Hall Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism which has sponsored publication of a string of excellent monographs by Notre Dame Press, offered small fellowships to research scholars, provided information on current research through an excellent newsletter, published a series of"working papers" arising from an ongoing seminar at Notre Dame, and held several excellent conferences, including one this fall on "Catholicism and American Culture...
...Yet while I EARN A MASTERS IN THEOLOGY DURING SUMMER VACATION...
...Here the serious side of the play is so compromised by the cartoon atmosphere that Shepard sometimes seems to be mocking the themes that have given substance and force to so much of his recent work...
Vol. 113 • February 1986 • No. 3
