In Search of an American Catholicism: A History of Religion and Culture in Tension

Abstract

In a distinguished career at the University of Notre Dame, Jay P. Dolan has written a succession of important books on American Catholic history. He was among the first scholars to apply the insights of the new social history to Catholicism in The American Catholic Experience (1985), which broke new ground by looking at the entire subject through the eyes of the Catholic laity rather than those of priests and bishops. He retired recently, and his new book, In Search of an American Catholicism, is, in effect, a summary statement of the main themes in his work and that of other Catholic historians from his generation. It has little new informational or interpretive content, but it is ideal as an introduction to the main issues and characters in American Catholic history. Dolan sympathized with the reforms of the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965) and with the reforming spirit of the council. That sympathy is vividly apparent here as he champions Catholics from earlier eras who favored adaptation to American democracy and denigrates their censorious, authoritarian rivals. He sees Charles Carroll, the only Catholic signatory of the Declaration of Independence, and the ex-transcendentalist convert Isaac Hecker as avatars of the conciliar spirit. Archbishop John Ireland of St. Paul wins high praise for his advocacy, in the 1880s and 1890s, of Americanizing immigrants and embracing religious freedom—Ireland risked papal condemnation by involving Catholics in the World's Parliament of Religions (1893). John Courtney Murray, S.J., is a hero too for finding in the 1950s a theological justification of religious liberty; his insights were incorporated into one of the Vatican II documents. By contrast, Dolan deprecates Catholic leaders such as Ireland's rivals, Archbishop Michael Corrigan and Bishop Bernard J. McQuaid, and Murray's theological critics, Joseph Fenton and Francis Connell, who trod the Vatican path of intolerance toward other branches of Christianity and toward democratic political innovations. They appear here as precursors of our own generation's Vatican hard-liners.