Religious Booknotes:

...is elegantly done...

...Of the two, Buchanan seems less touched by his immigrant past (his family has southern roots and a long history in this country) while Cuomo, who has felt the prejudiced sting of the recent arrival (his parents and older brother were all born in Italy), is quite rightly sensitive to ethnic slurs...

...and enough episodes of drunken driving and disorderly conduct fines to drive a member of Mothers Against Drunk Driving to drink...

...What holds them together...

...Apart from his family, the single biggest influence on Buchanan's life seems to be the Catholic faith which he got from his parents...

...youth with enough precision to make his contemporaries—I am one of them—nod in recognition: to this day, for instance, like Buchanan, 1 have an almost irrational fear of an ether mask, based on my unhappy experience of operations in the days before sodium pentothal...

...The editors cnun-tcrpose the restorationist argument with what is called the "integration-ist" model in which a new synthesis of the American experience and Catholicism is sought...

...he remains a Catholic who pines for the autocratic days of Pius XII when we prayed at the end of Mass for the conversion of Russia...

...Families loom large in their vocabularies (Cuomo has made it a central word in his political lexicon...

...While that may satisfy as sociological state of the question, it only means that there is a compelling need for a new Catholic synthesis which is radically traditional and radically current, drawing forth, as the gospel would have it...

...For all of their differences, both of these men are products of preconciliar Catholicism and share, from that matrix, some similarities...

...Cuomo"s Catholicism seems less marked by what he learned from the fathers there than what he read in the late 1950s...

...Buchanan's Catholicism is a classic example of that kind of religious sensibility which values a counter-cultural church as a bulwark against the slippery slope of secular society and a yardstick of moral certainty to combat the trimmers and dissemblers who yap at the ethical edges...

...In that sense, Deedy is a progressive Catholic, although he does not hesitate to point out the excesses of the progressive wing of the church...

...My overriding impression of this story is one of everyone hitting everyone else (Buchanan pere strapped the kids who did not punch the boxing bag the requisite hours per week): of cars being wrecked with abandon...

...Trained by the Jesuits in that baroque scholasticism which once passed for Thom-ism...

...At its best, however, a certain kind of sociology is reflective and interpretative journalism...

...American and Catholic contains essays by various hands on the proper relationship of Catholics and American culture...

...Somewhere along the line he got married but, aside from a few angular references to his wife, we never learn when...

...Such a shift also explains why conservative Catholics are often contributors to something like Jerry Falwell's ministries: they do not see Falwell as basically anti-Catholic but prolife, antipomography, etc...

...that it asserts more often than it analyzes...

...That sort of thing...

...McElvaine...

...Someone once remarked that sociology is only slow journalism...

...Despite these chest-thumping rites of passage...

...Are their differences cultural, theological, ideological, or a tertium quid...

...He was a true believer with credentials that predated the Goldwater campaign of 1964...

...Catholicism...

...Try to imagine a Catholic in 1950 contributing to such ministries and you see Wuth-iiow's point...

...That simple datum helps us to understand why Cuomo so embraces the progressive Catholicism of the postconciliar era while Buchanan views it with profound suspicion...

...What these books have in common is that they reflect, directly or indirectly, the urgent need for such a synthesis if we are not to dissipate our energies on in-house squabbles...

...1 have reviewed Deedy's book elsewhere, but rereading it for these notes in the light of Wuthnow's work raised some questions in my own mind...

...old things and new...

...Wuthnow, 1 suspect, would argue that the very fractiousness of American Catholicism supports his thesis of a weakened denominational sense and a heightened commitment to interests...

...His purpose, if I judge the book correctly, is to account for his passage from the middle-class environs of his Washington upbringing to the position of speech writer, spear carrier, and communications chief for the Republican presidencies of Nixon, Ford, and Reagan...

...The problem with Hollan-l's anthology is that it is so sweepmgl> given to generalization (Spretnak's essay on the Green party surveys cul ture from the neolithic period to the birth of the nation-state in three pages...

...The power of that myth has such a shaping influence on religious attitudes (and vice versa) that many scholars now turn to the Buddhist/Shinto tradition of Japan to explain its technological vitality...

...the other can tolerate ambiguity...

...Schwartz cites Mario Cuomo's now famous Notre Dame speech as a triumph of the Americanist mentality in its willingness to put tolerance above principle as a way out of the abortion impasse...

...Deedy, once an editor of this journal, has given us a good journalistic account of the various tensions in the contemporary American church...

...Their exposure to natural-law ethics brings them to moral conclusions not always shared by their partisans: Buchanan thinks that the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was immoral: Cuomo resists the majority opinion about the death penalty...

...This is a man's book...

...Some of his best pages, toward the end of the book, are devoted to his analysis of the ideology Jttendant on technology (if all problems are seen as technological problems, then, it follows, all answers are technological ones), and the tension role of religion in relation to thai ideology...

...To say it another way: we know what separates the readers of the Wanderer and the National Catholic Reporter...

...Thus, longtime Catholic activist Ed Marciniak argues for a new theology of work and Catholic work ethic that emphasizes the this-worldly experience of ordinary people and is framed in a language that does justice to their aspirations...

...If technology has given rise to a millennialist hope of an ever more perfect future fas Robert Nisbct has noted), it has also produced a legiti-mting myth about America's special role as a technological leader...

...It is a nice point...

...Educated by the Vin-centians at Saint John's in New York, and later a member of the law faculty of the same school...

...Bom into an middle-class family that would eventually number nine children, Buchanan chronicles his Washington...

...Wutfanow writes, in the tradition of Robert Bellah, Clifford Geertz, Andrew Greelcy, and Peter Berger which means, in essence, that he is profoundly dubious about any simple-minded secularization hypothesis as helpful in understanding American re-ligion and...

...They break over the issue of public law and abortion but both find abortion as a direct attack on human life...

...The question that I ask myself is this: are many of those who line up in opposition to each other on some rather basic church issues working out of different "models" of the church or are they competing interest groups who dwell under an abstraction called, for traditional reasons...

...His ma jor thesis is that the most prominent generalization one can safely make about American religion is that de-iiominalionalistn has become less important in the past few decades and "special interest" movements more important...

...Mario Cuomo is also a Catholic but his experiences with die church arc quite different...

...John Deedy's American Catholicism is more purely journalistic in its attempt to trace the enormously stormy story of the American church in the past decade or so, especially in its attempt to be both Roman and American...

...The final perspective, borrowing promiscuously from everything from New Age Thought to the politics of the Green Movement, argues for a futuristic eco-theology not dissimilar to that proposed by Thomas Berry and Matthew Fox...

...There is a good deal of conviction, passionately stated, but the level of theological reflection is not very sophisticated or sustained...

...He passionately believes that the Currans and Hunthausens are the best hope of the church as it moves towards the new millennium...

...There is a writer's cliche" about "hard-drinking, two-fisted Irishmen," but the cliche seems to come alive in this book...

...Unlike Garry Wills or Wilfrid Sheed who look on those days of starched surplices and weekly confession with ironic nostalgia, Buchanan can barely contain his rage at the tatters of the post-Tridentine church of his youth: when a young priest suggests the kiss of peace at Mass it takes ail of his self-will not to clean his clock...

...What that means concretely is that one identifies oneself less as, say, a Southern Baptist and more as a scriptural fundamentalist or a scriptu-lal moderate who happens to belong to the Southern Baptist Convention...

...Michael Schwartz, for instance, represents, a "restoration-isi"' view which demands that Catholics resist the pretensions of Americanism by being a prophetic minority against its secularized values...

...Cuomo's religion, by contrast, sees religion and culture as interdependent, with religion pointing to the "not yet" of the future...

...Wuthnow takes us through the American decades of the postwar period noting shifts and emphases in a way that is both enlightening and provocative...

...That this is a profoundly different view of things can be gleaned from a photo of Buchanan with President Reagan and Cardinal O'Connor at the White House while, we may guess, such friendly photos of the governor and the cardinal seem unlikely given their long-running mono a mono over abortion...

...He quotes with approval the observation of an executive who notes that while we have a vocabulary to talk about the work of a Mother Teresa, we do not have a religious language to talk about the work of those who arc in his employ...

...Buchanan made it through Gonzaga Prep, Georgetown, Columbia's journalism school (where, improbably, he was a classmate of Miguel D'Escoto—now foreign minister of Nicaragua), and on to the newspaper business before his entry into the political world of Richard M. Nixon...

...Religious Booknotes Catholic Lives Lawrence S. Cunningham Apart from the ser-monettes which make up the final two chapters of this book, there is little politics in this autobiography of the pugnacious Patrick J. Buchanan...

...According to McElvaine, Teilhard de Chardin's The Divine Milieu had a decisive impact on Cuomo's thinking...

...Both got a classical education in the old Catholic mold with a resultant love for language, a taste for argument, and a deep conviction that language can persuade and convert...

...By contrast, Robert Wuthnow' sociological essay, surveying the character of American religion from the close of the Second World War in the present...

...in this rather adoring biography, makes it clear that Cuomo's religion is central to his political philosophy...

...One vision prizes clarity...

...The Teilhardian notion that things in this world, however haltingly, conspire towards the better in a ideological fashion, gives urgency to Cuomo's skill as a mediator and warrant for his unwavering belief that public service is not only a good but a vocation for the perfection of the world...

...His answer, lodged in the title of the book, is that he was a conservative ab initio who could write aggressively...

...equally, is committed to seeing religion as a symbolic language which provides an overarching meaning schema for both individual and social life...