The Imperial Church: Catholic Founding Fathers and United States Empire by Katherine D. Moran

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Imperial Church: Catholic Founding Fathers and United States Empire by Katherine D. Moran Michael Skaggs Katherine D. Moran, The Imperial Church: Catholic Founding Fathers and United States Empire ( Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2020). xiv + 311 pages. Katherine D. Moran, The Imperial Church: Catholic Founding Fathers and United States Empire (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2020). xiv + 311 pages. It is tempting to save a review's highest praise for the end, but The Imperial Church is too significant a book to delay the obvious: Katherine Moran has written a landmark book that opens a new era in the historiography of American religion and empire. The tensions between Roman Catholicism and its American adherents and the rest of American society have been explored at great and fruitful length by many; leading voices in both the American past and the contemporary scholarly conversation have highlighted Protestant anxieties over the growth of Catholicism in North America. While Moran modestly situates herself within a growing cadre of scholars taking note of a more nuanced engagement between the two largest segments of Christianity, up to now most attention has been paid to the antagonism between Protestants and Catholics in the United States. Moran notes that despite some gains in a more complicated historical narrative, "at the center of the historiography of American Catholicism is a story about the rise and fall of American anti-Catholicism" (12). With The Imperial Church, Moran acknowledges and then sidesteps this long arc of historiography, instead calling on three vivid case studies to illustrate how American Protestants looked eagerly to Catholicism for lessons in empire, assimilation of a native Other, and imposition of order inflected by Christianity. Furthermore, while the role of Catholics in the eighteenth-century rebellion against the United Kingdom remains a growing area of study, Moran utilizes well the stories of Jacques Marquette in what became [End Page 135] the Midwest, Franciscans in Southern California, and friars in the Philippines to advance an ambitious, and accurate, claim: when it comes to American imperialism, Catholics make up the leading founding fathers. She notes that viewing American history from this perspective also destabilizes longstanding periodizations, writing that "in the U.S. Southwest and Far West, and in overseas colonies such as the Philippines, the 'Immigrant Church' label breaks down. In these places in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Protestant Americans were often the newcomers" (16–17). And while historians of Catholicism have often suggested pushing the founding date and site of United States history much earlier—1565 in Saint Augustine, Florida, for instance—Moran takes this reconfiguration a step further, arguing that "paying attention to this Imperial Church [sic] … requires, in the end, that scholars recognize that Los Angeles and Manila are as important to the history of American Catholicism as are Boston and New York" (17). The structure of The Imperial Church also indicates that not only history but memory is a constituent component of the American Catholic story. The book's first section focuses on Jesuit missionary and explorer Jacques Marquette, whose statue has been in the National Statuary Hall Collection in Washington, D.C., as a gift from Wisconsin since 1896. Marquette's influence on the history of European-American empire in the Midwest hardly can be overstated, and memories of the man did yeoman's work after his death for boosters of American empire. Moran offers three ways Marquette's memory was put to work in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. First, it molded American history into a "common European Christian project of advancing religion and civilization," contra the imperial ambitions of the British and the French and the existential fact of numerous Indigenous societies (26). Second, it broadened a previously narrow definition of "white" into "a capacious racial term, inclusive of what were considered various racially distinct European groups" (26). This broadening consolidated into one group the non-indigenous—thus clarifying, with long-lasting consequences, those who were not white. Finally, glorifying Marquette, known both in life and death for his piety, "cast him as a spiritualized midwestern brand"—contributing to the growth of the notion of the Midwest as inherently more religious than other parts of the country...