American Catholics: A History by Leslie Woodcock Tentler

Abstract

Reviewed by: American Catholics: A History by Leslie Woodcock Tentler Kathleen Holscher, Philip Gleason, Robert Trisco, Joseph M. White, Paula M. Kane, and Leslie Woodcock Tentler American Catholics: A History. By Leslie Woodcock Tentler. (New Haven: Yale University Press. 2020. Pp. xiv, 402. $30.00. ISBN 978-0300-21964-7.) Introduction Kathleen Holscher (University of New Mexico) For decades the field of American Catholic history—its scope and arc, its protagonists and problems—has been defined by a handful of sweeping studies of Catholic church and life across the span of U.S. history. With American Catholics: A History, Leslie Woodcock Tenter contributes to this genre. Tentler is, notably, the first female historian to publish a survey of this sort, and American Catholics joins and advances works by male counterparts, including Jay Dolan, Patrick Carey, James Fisher, and James O’Toole. Drawing upon her pathbreaking academic career in U.S. Catholic history (Tentler is Professor Emerita in the Department of History at Catholic University of America), and her expertise in urban Catholicism and Catholic family life, Tentler offers readers a well-organized account of U.S. Catholicism over four centuries, built from selective original research paired with synthesis of existing scholarship. American Catholics proceeds in fourteen chapters divided among five sections. Tentler opens each section with a profile of a Catholic figure whose life, and sometimes saintly afterlife, manifests themes of the section. Tentler’s choice of profiles across the book—Eusebio Kino, Samuel Mazzuchelli, Mother Frances Xavier Cabrini, John C. Cort, and Patricia Caron Crowley—demonstrates her commitment to building an account of American Catholicism in which ordained and lay actors, men and women, cradle Catholics and converts, all make defining contributions. In Part One, “On the Fringes of Empire,” Tentler departs from histories that locate the origins of American Catholicism in the Protestant British colonies. Instead, Tentler begins her story with the imperial projects of Spain and France. She introduces the Catholic Reformation in Europe as context for the work of Franciscans and Jesuits who sought to [End Page 277] transform the earthly lives and eternal souls of Native peoples in territory claimed by Spain, stretching from “La Florida” to California, and in Wendat and Iroquois territory claimed by France. Tentler considers how Natives responded to missions, and she highlights the role of Catholic sisters in New France from the mid-seventeenth century. In centering women religious early on, she establishes an important theme for her book. “Adaptable and surprisingly independent,” Tentler writes, “women religious in New France created a template of sorts for the nascent church in the United States” (42). After this foundational treatment of European imperial Catholicism, the remaining four sections of American Catholics proceed chronologically. Parts Two (“Growing with the Nation, 1815–1870”) and Three (“A Turbulent Passage, 1871–1919”) treat the long nineteenth century. Episodes that anchor Tentler’s narrative here—including the development of Catholic urban strongholds amid European immigration, the expanding presence of priests and women religious in and beyond ethnic Catholic communities, and resulting American concerns about Catholic influences in politics and education—will be familiar to scholars who regularly teach “Immigrant Church” oriented courses on U.S. Catholic history. Here too, though, Tentler finds opportunity for fresh historical consideration, notably through in-depth discussion of rural or “frontier” Catholicism as it expanded with the formation of dioceses across what is now the Midwest. “The frontier experience,” writes Tentler, left “in its wake a Catholicism open to the nation’s democratic culture and even its pluralism” (83). Tentler’s chapter on “Slavery and the Civil War,” in which she treats Catholic leaders’ critiques of the Emancipation Proclamation alongside evidence of anti-Black racism that characteried Irish Catholic regiments fighting for the Union cause, is also noteworthy (125). Parts Four and Five of American Catholics, entitled “Exuberant Maturity, 1920-1962” and “A World Unbound, 1963–2015,” span the last century of U.S. Catholic history. Here Tentler follows a U.S. Catholic Church as it develops via engagement with American social movements, and in response to its increasingly affluent, educated, and suburban white laity, even as it is rocked, midway through the period, by Second Vatican Council reforms. While Tentler...