American Catholic
MORRIS, CHARLES R.
Where we are, how we got here American Catholic The Saints and Sinners Who Built America's Most Powerful Church Charles R. Morris Times &.+ks. I pp_ John T. McGreevy A t the installation of...
...And Dougherty's episcopai style-salting archdiocesan payrolls with relatives, pressuring resigned priests to change their names, and ordering Philadelphia's Catholics not to attend Hollywood films-never wavered from its triumphal first moments...
...In Saginaw, by contrast, vocations to the priesthood are few, but women have been able to play more important roles in all aspects of church life, a development applauded by the vast majority of Catholic laity...
...The stakes, Morris stresses, are high...
...Unfortunately, Morris's agility in sketching Catholic leaders-their achievements as well as their faultsproduces an oddly lopsided historical narrative...
...The tone is measured, the judgments consistently fair...
...The result is a compulsively readable narrative...
...0 John T. McGreevy teaches history at the University of Notre Dame...
...One supporter of Call to Action is current Saginaw bishop, Kenneth Untener...
...Joseph of Medaille University of Virginia Metairie, LA Dead Man Walking - A journey Religion and Public Policy: The Controversy about Human Cloning EVENSONG PREACHER Yale Divinity School Ellen Davis Berkeley Divinity School at Yale Virginia Theological Seminary 409 Prospect Street New Haven, CT o6sn (203)432-5303 Commonweal 3 1 September 12, 1997...
...Morris is incapable of writing a dull sentence, even in a footnote, and his account exudes a knowing savvy, especially as he disentangles the seamy side of clerical life (sexual scandals, mean-spirited accusations, financial chicanery...
...What Lincoln does posCorragerrrw'a) 30 .t'1'tember 12, 1997 sess is a growing number of vocations to the priesthood, a group that Morris describes as an impressive, talented group of men...
...neither do they accept Nrcmanae t'itac with more enthusiasm...
...More important, Morris lucidly explains arcane, but vital, theological topics such as the ordinary magisterium, even as he leaps from Thomas Jefferson on natural law to the architecture of Saint Patrick's Cathedral...
...Even better, roughly one-third of American Catholics are intensely committed to their parishes, and have generated a plethora of volunteer and catechetical programs that put the fabled faithful of the 1950s to shame...
...Among the many virtues of Morris's account is his ability to place this particular Catholic style into a sweep extending from 1840s immigrants to the late Cardinal Joseph Bernardin's Common Ground Initiative...
...Before the appearance of Dougherty's open limousine, the crowd (organized into specific viewing stands by parish) waited out fifty brass bands...
...Catholics who self-consciously choose to be Catholic, in tither words, now constitute the heart of the church...
...Morris is not especially liberal in church terms-he rolls his eyes at mildly avant-garde liturgies, worries that Catholic theologians too quickly adopt the language of the academy, and terms discussions of gendered language "lingering spats...
...When Dougherty finally entered Saints Peter and Paul Cathedral for the installation, the seminary choir greeted him with a rendition of Ecce Sacerdos Margmls, or" Behold the Great Priest...
...Com,uonwcal readers have already read portions of the most compelling part of Morris's concluding section ("A Tale of Two Dioceses," June 6), an extended comparison of Catholic life in Lincoln, Nebraska, city upon a hill for Catholic conservatives, with the more liberal diocese of Saginaw, Michigan...
...What Morris contributes is a compelling plea not to allow these discussions to precipitate a more fundamental fracturing, a tearing apart of an institution still capable of offering wisdom to both its own members and the universal church...
...Catholics in Lincoln, Morris finds, do not attend Mass with anti more trequencv than those in Saginaw...
...Disputes over women's roles and sexuality, viewed in this sobering light, might seem relatively manageable...
...a discussion of the Reverend Edward McGivnn's travails in the 1880s overshadows consideration of nineteenthcentury Catholic piety...
...Precisely these sorts of edicts, Morris concedes, heighten the risk that active Catholics will ignore papal teaching altogether, strengthening the congregationalism so deplored by conservatives...
...Morris emphasizes that both dioceses could learn from each other, and that both have been blessed with astute leadership in the recent past...
...Catholic response to the Spanish Civil War, for example, receives as much attention as women religious...
...The American church remains one of the world's most vibrant, especially when compared to France (where less than 3 percent of the population under twenty-five describe themselves as practicing Catholics), Latin America (where Protestant evangelicals have made enormous inroads), and in some ways even Poland...
...But he convincingly argues that Catholic teaching on contraception, and increasingly on homosexuality and the role of women, is rejected by precisely the same Catholics who are energizing their parishes...
...The conflict is direct: Bruskewitz has excommunicated members of Call to Action, a reform group advocating the ordination of women...
...ENSIGN LECTURE SORENSEN LECTURE Sr...
...And a group rightly upset by insinuations that Lincoln seminarians resemble a paramilitary corps...
...For critics to label such heartfelt (and often theologically compelling) objections "cafeteria Catholicism" is, in the end, nothing more than a slur...
...I pp_ John T. McGreevy A t the installation of Philadelphia Archbishop Denis Dougherty in 1918,150.000 Catholics jammed the route from the train station to the cathedral...
...The bad news is that only an intense, evangelistic effort will reach the rest of the self-identified Catholic population, let alone anyone else...
...Even the sketch of Cardinal Dougherty's Philadelphia, a chapter based almost entirely on impressive original research, tends to view religious experience from the vantage point of the rectory...
...The good news, Morris argues, is that the church's financial problems are slowIv being resolved, at least in those dio ceses willing to adopt modern budgeting procedures...
...This evenhanded assessment seems overly sanguine, however, given the propensity of Lincoln's current bishop, Fabian Bruskewitz, to exercise a sort of ecclesiastical first-strike capability...
...Helen Prejean, C.S.J...
...James Childress Sisters of St...
...And such an effort is unlikely until Catholic leaders reduce agonizing tensions in the intertwined areas of miniistrv, sexuality, and the role of women...
...Fortunately, the last section of A+m t'riiaIl Catholic takes a wider view, since Morris roamed much of the country, chatting with parishioners, schoxolteachers, and diocesan administrators...
...Dougherty, Morris argues, marks one stage in American Catholic development, but his hnperium in imperio is bracketed on the one side by the furious nineteenthcenturv struggle to absorb Irish famine refugees and build Catholic institutions, and by contemporary attempts to develop a post-Vatican II church in a less obviously Catholic milieu...
...Reporters described elderly women rushing the police lines to kiss the new archbishop's ring...
...He is the author of Parish Boundaries (University of Chicago Press...
...a st Yale Divinity School Berkeley Divinity School at Yale rebuilding the constructing the uture October 13-16,1997 YALE DIVINITY SCHOOL TAYLOR LECTURES Jiirgen Moltmann University of Tiibingen What is Theology...
...None of this, observes Charles Morris in his sparkling new history, American Catholic, was "a ritual to encourage humiIitv...
...Mark Dyer Virginia Theological Seminary Lambeth and the Future of the Anglican Communion BAINTON LECTURE Albert Raboteau Princeton University In Search of Common Ground: Howard Thurman and Religious Community BARTLETT LECTURE Harold Hongju Koh Yale Law School How is International Human Rights Law Enforced...
...BEECHER LECTURES Barbara Brown Taylor Grace-Calvary Episcopal Church Clarkesville, GA Famine in the Land: Homiletical Restraint and the Silence of God PITT LECTURE The Right Rev...
Vol. 124 • September 1997 • No. 15
