Faire l’histoire catholique de l’Ouest américain au 19e s. Une terre de missions à réévaluer

Abstract

The history of the American Catholic Church in the 19th century has changed a lot since twenty years. The chronology is new and the historians now study the Americanisation of the Church, the sacramental practices or the clerical world and its relations to the parishioners. But the Catholic West is still the land of the old hagiography, and not of a new catholic history. We have to use that history and the New Western History to really understand what it means to be Catholic in the 19th century West and how the Church grew. That history is above all colonial: the missionaries there must be compared with their colleagues in other colonies around the world. That history is about how the individual and collective identities appears and sometimes clash. And that history is about an institution, the Church, its individual and intellectual migration from Europe and its will to create and control a insular Catholic world.