All Good Books Are Catholic Books: Print Culture, Censorship, and Modernity in Twentieth-Century America by Una M. Cadegan (review)

Abstract

All Good Books Are Catholic Books: Print Culture, Censorship, and Modernity in Twentieth-Century America. By Una M. Cadegan. [Cushwa Center Studies of Catholicism in Twentieth-Century America.] (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. 2013. Pp. x, 230. $39.95. ISBN 978-0-8014-5112-6.)Cadegan adds to the body of recent scholarship that seeks to explain the complex relationship between Catholicism and intellectual culture in the years leading up to the Second Vatican Council. Her main theme is that in the area of literary culture, involved in literary work (p. 17) moved from an adversarial attitude toward the dominant modernist aesthetic in literature early in the century to creatively engage, reconcile, and eventually appropriate many modernist elements within the scope of own literary framework in the years that followed.Cadegan asserts that Catholics managed this accommodation primarily through the development of a flexible, theologically-driven literary aesthetic that, while refusing to affirm modernity in its entirety, managed to remap the divide (p. 65), imaginatively reconfiguring and reconciling the conflicting oppositions that had delimited modemist-Catholic rapprochement since the 1890s. Attitudes of U.S. Catholics toward censorship experienced similar reconfiguration, as Catholics developed rationales that attempted to both reassure the faithful and make censorship more understandably American to modems. Cadegan writes that the larger importance of this journey is that in working out an intellectually serious response to modernity in the Catholic literary enterprise became an site (p. 54) by which U.S. Catholicism as a whole worked its way back to engagement with important existential philosophical and theological questions that, although off-limits to theologians since the papal condemnation of modernism in 1907, were fair game in any discussion of modernist literary technique and outlook. In this way, literary history is perhaps more central to the intellectual history of twentieth-century U.S. Catholicism than has yet been appreciated (p. 48).The book is composed of eight chapters, including several that reprise material from previously published articles. Three chapters address the problem of censorship. The remainder of Cadegan's narrative details the developing Catholic aesthetic: the challenges posed by modernity to orthodox belief and traditional Catholic literary analysis; the means by which Catholic writers, critics, and teachers reframed and reconciled these oppositions; and, finally, how, through employing their own categories and criteria for defining and evaluating literature, Catholics reclaimed their place in the cultural and intellectual landscape (pp. …