American Catholics: A History of the Roman Catholic Community in the United States by James Hennesey, S.J.

Abstract

noo:K REVIEWS 157' American Catholics: A History of the Roman Catholic Community in the United States. By James Hennesey, S.J. New York: Oxford University Pxess, 1982. Pp. 397. $19.95. The preparation of a comprehensive history indicates a new self-consciousness on the part of the community it is written within and about and suggests that one era of that community's history is at an end and another beginning. John Gilmary Shea's History of the Catholic Church in the United States (1886-92) came at the time when it seemed that the great dream of a church that could be both Catholic and American was nearing fulfillment. John Tracy Ellis's .American Catholicism (1956) and Thomas McAvoy's A Histo1·y of the Catholic in the United States came when it seemed that the failure of American Catholics to be both Catholic and American might be ending. Father Hennesey's study suggests a whole new consciousness among American Catholics, a new maturity, a new sense of place in American culture and history. American Catholics is quite different from its predecessors in its historical methods and assumptions. Earlier historians emphasized the unity of the American church : American Catholics presented a solid front to the challenge of American Protestant anti-Catholicism; they were united by shared devotions and a common loyalty to the pope; and they participated in the shared task of creating and sustaining a church in the complicated world of the United States. The first noteworthy assumption of this new history is that the American church has always been a complex community in which diversity has frequently erupted into bitter conflict. Diversity has been rich indeed: American Catholics includes helpful sketches of the history of Afro-American Catholicism, of the values and practices of the Hispanic church of the west and southwest, and of the deep piety of Native American Catholics. But the tensions have been sharp as well. The many ethnic groups which contributed rich and ancient traditions to the shaping of American Catholicism usually resented and mistrusted each other; in some cases, long and debilitating rivalries developed. Clergy and laity have often competed for authority and power and have diverged in their understandings of what is best for a particular community. The trustee controversies of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries are the best known examples of this tension, but there have been many others. Hispanic Catholics of the southwest suspected that the missionaries sent to them by the American hierarchy were there to impose a foreign culture on them. Catholics found themselves on both sides of the Civil War, when regional loyalties eclipsed their shared faith. White Catholics, as Hennesey unflinchingly shows, have not welcomed Black Catholics into their 158 BOOK REVIEWS churches. Nor has the intellectual life of American Catholics been homogeneous : Hennesey's complex picture of American Catholicism inc:udes the avant garde clergy who constituted a modernist school in New York City in the latter half of the nineteenth century. This complexity reveals the confidence of Hennesey's history : twenty years ago, these conflicts would not have been mentioned, let alone treated so seriously and calmly. This church took shape in an equally complicated society. Competition, hostility, and, much more rarely, cooperation characterized the relations between Catholics and Protestants in a nation which had established a Protestant social consensus in place of an established church. The United States is anti-Catholic in its deepest roots and American Catholic historians before Hennesey tended to construct their histories around this reality. Marked as foreign by the styles of its devotion and the national origins of its congTegations, American Catholicism struggled along as a minority faith in a Protestant land. Hennesey's second major historiographical assumption is his departure from this perspective. Hennesey's Catholics have a claim on the United States. American Catholics is not a statement from the ghetto, but a reflection of the central economic and social place that Catholics now occupy in the United States. This centrality is taken for granted. The consciousness that Hennesey describes as nascent in the church of the 1920s has come to fruition today: "The American Catholic community throughout its many layered being...