Religious booknotes
Cunningham, Lawrence S.
Catholic America Lawrence S. Cunningham To celebrate the bicentennial of the appointment of John Carroll as the first bishop in the United States (1789), the American bishops com-missionejd a...
...That being said, we must also praise it, along with Mary Jo Weaver's New Catholic Women (Harper & Row, 1986) as a pioneering attempt to describe the powerful, yet insufficiently recognized, presence of women in the American church...
...we have James Hennessy on John Carroll...
...It is easy for readers to cavil at his omissions or quarrel with his focus (he is text-oriented and nearly silent on the arts, belles lettres, and music) but he has most decidedly provided us with a model and method for this kind of study...
...In a somewhat cautious final paragraph, he sees a blend of conservative ecclesial policy and social progressivism as most in communion with the past...
...They are most instructive both because they provide perspective on the current ecclesial and theological scene (indeed, one gets a sense of deja vu while reading them) and because they demonstrate clearly the intricate relationship between theological reflection and the practical life and polity of the church...
...This closely argued monograph fleshes out what is often only mentioned in other volumes...
...Mary's Seminary in Baltimore by noting that the Sulpicians are "unknown to the faithful at large...
...This would all be rather tame stuff except for the fact that O'Brien has a thesis that is baldly stated in the introduction to the volume and which runs as a leitmotif through the work: "after two centuries of organized existence in the United States, the American church has not evolved a coherent understanding of its public role and responsibilities...
...Joseph Chinnici's book on American spirituality is not a full history but, in the words of the author, a "series of case studies" on the various historical manifestations of Catholic piety in the United States...
...In 1850 there were roughly one-and-a-half million American Catholics...
...Marvin O'Connell on John Ireland, etc...
...a decade later there were over three million...
...In 1941, the late Archbishop John J. Mitty spoke at the sesquicentennial of the opening of St...
...history educating priests in their seminaries...
...In the final part of the book, four figures (Virgil Michel, Dorothy Day, James Keller, and Thomas Merton) are the emblematic figures chosen to characterize the reform impulses alive in the church between 1930-1965...
...Jtr S£$0 millan, $29.95...
...William O'Connell) with exemplars (Paul Hallinan...
...the rigid clericalism of American Catholicism...
...Gerald Fogarty's introduction to the volume on episcopal leadership is worth the price of the volume he has edited...
...Her six chapters are "case studies" that treat the Enlightenment's impact on early episcopal leadership...
...the unwillingness of the hierarchy to support a strong intellectual life (the issue of Catholic University's place in this is an old and continuing one...
...Hecker's "Americanism...
...His lengthy work details the labors of the Society of Saint Sulpice in their nearly two-hundred-year Tradition and Transformation in Catholic Culture: The Priests of Saint Sulpice in the United States from 1791 to the Present, by Christopher J. Kauffman, Macmillan, $29.95, 366 pp...
...The close identification of culture, language, and religion among the Poles shaped Polish Catholicism in a manner quite different from that, say, of the Irish or Germans...
...Similarly, contemporary discussions of the relationship between papal oversight and episcopal jurisdiction mirror similar problems in the nineteenth-century church...
...Finally, there was the issue of bigotry and prejudice both from the Nativists outside the church and from within the church as well...
...Those words are equally true today but this monograph should go far in remedying their obscurity...
...and the easy optimism of the postwar period was shaken by the convulsions of the Civil Rights Movement, the Vietnam War, and shifting global arrangements...
...One cannot help but be struck by the contrast between the nineteenth-century "Immigrant" and "Americanist" vision that derived from their competing spiritualities...
...The Tridentine character of Catholicism had eroded...
...and a final chapter on an emerging pluralism from 1920 to the end of Vatican II...
...Those broad surveys are framed by an introductory essay on the ideals of American Catholic womanhood and closing reflections on Catholic feminism...
...The Sulpicians have not only rendered yeoman service to the church for nearly two hundred years but they have contributed much to the public life of the church (one of their members was a cofounder of the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor) and, in the last century, along with the Paulists, were the most distinguished intellectuals in the American church...
...The issue of how American the church was to be was not only an issue of liberal versus conservative...
...In 1830 the American church had a dozen dioceses...
...I, forexample, was delighted to see mention of Justus George Lawler's journal Continuum and a good discussion of its value, but sad that Reher did not treat Cross Currents which, RELIGIOUS BOOKHOTI25 in its over thirty years of existence, has been a valuable conduit of European thought to American audiences...
...I would add one other that is particularly regrettable, given the demographics of contemporary Catholicism: the absence of any systematic firing & Strue of Catholic likriltf Sfitt reflection on Hispanic spirituality, especially the spirituality of the Southwest...
...The urban organization of the church had to take into account ethnic differences in a way that was not always apparent to the Irish who emerged, for a number of reasons, as predominant in the church hierarchy...
...The general editor promises a further volume on colonial church history to coincide with the quincentennial celebration of Christopher Columbus's first landing in the New World...
...Church problems, like the poor, are always with us and both require our devoted attention...
...He lucidly shows how piety intersects with different ecclesiologies and diverse ChristologicaJ elements...
...the immigrant nature of American Catholicism was shifting to new Hispanic arrivals...
...They are, in fact, like us, human beings with their moments of greatness and mediocrity who must constantly grapple with their inherited culture and the rich demands of their Catholic faith...
...articulate vehicle of expression has been the Catholic Worker movement...
...O'Brien does not believe that any of the three models-republican, immigrant, or evangelical-will win the day...
...it was also in the last century, an issue of how to hold onto an inherited culture and a different language...
...Margaret Sanger, Mary McCarthy) in quite public ways whose protestations would have shed much light on the tensions between the institutional church and women's needs...
...It is a fitting tribute to a band of priests who will celebrate their own American bicentennial in 1991...
...Again, there is a vast list of American women who turned their backs on the church (e.g...
...And the future...
...It is a very delicate matter, one prelate wrote in 1899, how to tell the pope "how utterly faithless the specimens of his country coming here really are...
...What all of them had in common, even though their suggested solutions were different, was a desire for a synthesis that would overcome the fractures in the experience of being both American and Catholic...
...Those who follow contemporary trends in the American church cannot but read O'Brien's volume with that argument in mind...
...This book, in short, is too short...
...I read these books as a theologian, not as a historian...
...topics...
...They all desired a democratic spirituality open to all, a dissolution of barriers that separated religious or cleric from lay person, and an authentic concern for the vast sea of humanity that exists outside the church...
...308 pp...
...John Tracy Ellis on James Gibbons...
...Some of Chinnici's best pages spell out the rise of eucharistic devotion, the retreat movement, Marian devotion, and the first stirrings of the liturgical movement as these impulses gave shape to both church order and development of Catholic Action...
...Despite a few shining moments and fewer concerned church people, the story of American black Catholics is sad...
...It is an exemplary study...
...Their connections with the American bishops, the clergy (there are 12,000 Sulpician alumni in the U.S...
...In one of my recent book notes, I cited with approval the observation of an author who said that bad history makes for bad theology...
...In short, Fo-garty's volume should be required reading for anyone who wishes to understand the contemporary turmoil and divisions in church governance...
...Liptak has a final chapter on the "post-immigrant" church but, as she makes clear, "postimmigrant" only describes a historical pause...
...Reher's final chapter is a very compressed but highly informative survey of those stirrings which would form the seedground for the reforms of Vatican II...
...By contrast, the "immigrant" response looked inward to church needs and church imperatives while viewing the larger culture with suspicion and/or contempt...
...the Romanticism of Orestes Brownson and the young Isaac Hecker...
...This response produced the "Americanist" bishops of the last century who have their descendants today...
...There is a great ty,C.SJ fcocmilkirt...
...These are large omissions, indeed...
...today), and their often disputatious relationship with The Catholic University of America is recounted in detail by Kauffman...
...Under the general editorship of Christopher J. Kauffman, a team of scholars worked in thematic areas to approach American church history in a new and fresh way...
...Chinnici notes, in his introduction, that women are slighted, some conspicuous figures are missing, and the role of the religious orders is neglected...
...I read the single portraits, not in historical order, but ad libitum, alternating my personal villains (e.g...
...Of all the volumes in this series, however, this one also has a particularly contemporary appeal: it gives perspective on the contemporary scene...
...they are known only to their students and their bishops...
...Dolores Liptak's book makes it quite clear that these immigrant groups were not of a piece...
...By "public" Catholicism, David O'Brien means that consciousness with which American Catholics experienced the wider communities of city, state, and nation...
...The Bishops Program of 1919 was excoriated as socialist meddling by the business community with the same fervor as those who howled when the pastoral on the economy appeared in the 1980s...
...What has changed now, of course, is that the three factors that had given shape to the American church were, by the 1960s, in disarray...
...Finally, there is the basso continuo of power: Who will have it...
...They represent the mixture of per-sonalism, attention to biblical and patristic sources, liturgical possibilities, social activism, and public engagement that would characterize postconciliar Catholicism...
...its more LAWRENCE S.CUNNINGHAM is d professor of theology at the University of Notre Dame...
...24.95, mpp...
...ToJohn Tracy Ellis'sfamous 1955query about the causes of the paucity of Catholic intellectuals, Reherhas answers that could not have been articulated then: the heavy hand of Rome...
...His book serves as an antiphonal voice to the other volumes (e.g., that of O'Brien) because the spiritual outlook of people, almost of necessity, determines how they will regard the more general culture and the character of ecclesiology...
...Nonetheless, the conspicuous merit of this fine volume is to get us thinking about the issue in some coherent fashion...
...Karen Kennelly's volume on Catholic women consists of seven long essays that deal with women in religious life, the ideology of domesticity, women in the labor force, the fight for equality, and reformers and activists...
...The first he styles as "republican" for its willingness to embrace the culture and even find religious significance in it...
...Likewise, we miss mention of the one area where American Catholics have gained true eminence: biblical studies...
...What Chinnici does treat, he treats very well by using broad categories of interpretation...
...His hooks include The Catholic Experience and The Catholic Faith: An Introduction, both from Paulist Press...
...Everything from the liturgical movement and a revitalized Thomism to the rise of Fulton Sheen as a public figure finds its place in these pages...
...In short, O'Brien's book is a study of the relationship of religion and culture with "Catholic" and "American" being the specific terms of that paradigm...
...deal of naming in this volume, some of it very interesting indeed...
...and the unresolved tensions in ec-clesiology...
...The epitome of bigotry was reflected in the church's attitude toward black Americans...
...One sees that vividly in the tension between the rather tolerant worldview of John Carroll and the more rigid view of those who had to cope with the immigrant church of the nineteenth century, a tension noted at the time by Catholics and non-Catholics alike...
...His contributors are also well prepared to write on their Patterns of Episcopal Lea*fcrs|p| edited by Gerald P. Fogarty...
...Nineteenth-century defenders of orthodoxy denounced clerics to Roman authorities for their lack of Roman zeal as often (and frequently in the same language) as their contemporary counterparts...
...Modernism and Catholic social thought...
...Margaret Mary Reher's book is the briefest of the six and this is a shame because it is well done and one longs for more...
...by 1860 another sixty-five had been created...
...That the American bishops should lend their support to this project, so ably launched, is one of the more hope-filled signs of the times...
...If I find fault with this volume, it is not with what it says but what it leaves out: why, for example, should a tendentious figure like Mary Daly get three pages of attention when a world-class writer like Flannery O'Connor is not even mentioned, much less commented upon...
...Catholic America Lawrence S. Cunningham To celebrate the bicentennial of the appointment of John Carroll as the first bishop in the United States (1789), the American bishops com-missionejd a multivolume history of the church in this country (Makers of the Catholic Community: Historical Studies of the Catholic People in America, 1789-1989, $160 per set...
...A third position, small in number but powerful in impact, O'Brien calls "evangelical" Catholicism...
...It oscillates between interesting analysis of motifs and litanies of names with conspicuous omissions noted everywhere...
...Everyone will lament particular omissions...
...O'Brien neatly points out the unresolved tension by recalling the Democratic Convention of 1968: a powerful Catholic politician (Richard Daley) sent out the police against demonstrators who were, in part, energized by another Catholic politician, Eugene McCarthy...
...Catholics who despair of recent episcopal appointments based on narrow tests of orthodoxy and broad requirements of Romanita will be consoled to know that there is a long history behind this sort of procedure...
...John Neumann (1811-1860) left off his ministry to the Indians to work with immigrants, work that required him to evangelize in eight different languages, including Gaelic and two Slavic tongues...
...Chinnici's topic is a vast one...
...The converse is equally true...
...It is comprehensive (almost alone among the many pages in these books he treats Eastern Rite Catholics), balanced, and in full command of the sources...
...but whether that will be the model for the next millennium is as much a question for O'Brien as it is for most of us...
...We shall have to wait for Gerald Fogarty's promised monograph on that topic for a full history of the subject...
...Christopher Kauffman oversaw the entire series but his book on the Sulpi-cians was not part of it...
...Liptak's chapter on the black experience is a painful one to read...
...Each of the volumes reviewed above deals with the immigrant church in one fashion or another...
...Similarly, Geraldine Ferraro, an archetypal Catholic daughter of immigrants turned professional and feminist, does not figure in this work at;11...
...Broadly speaking, he sees three types of responses to the issue of Catholicism and American culture...
...Clyde Crews on Joseph Flagert...
...As James Keller would say, he has lighted a candle instead of cursing the darkness...
...With some exceptions we learn that the bishops are not good guys or bad guys...
...Within those six chapters are sharp vignettes treating everything from American discussions of evolution and the emergence of The Catholic Encyclopedia to the impact of German romantic theology and the suppression of the New York Review in the antimodernist reaction of the early twentieth century...
...It has been said that women's history is, first of all, an act of recuperate naming, i.e., calling up those whom the historical tradition has forgotten...
...A few facts will explain why...
...the issue of The Catholic University of America...
...It is almost as if one were comparing the editorial pages of the Wanderer and the National Catholic Reporter today...
...Who will shard in it...
...This is permissible to do once one has the basic history straight (Fogarty gives us that at the beginning) so that one can enjoy that most wonderful form of reading: the good browse...
...Through what vehicles and/or channels will it be organized...
...Capsule biographies of women who, after fighting great odds, made their way into the professions orextended the ministries of the church or fought for social reforms or political equality flesh out the good start that scholars like Jay Dolan and Mary Jo Weaver have made in creating space for American women in church history...
...The new immigrants (think of the Catholic composition of New York, Los Angeles, Miami, and South Texas) bring with them new challenges and problems that may bring the immigrant church once again to the fore...
Vol. 116 • April 1989 • No. 8
