The Making of American Catholicism: Regional Culture and the Catholic Experience

Abstract

Michael J. Pfeifer highlights the importance of region to the history of American Catholicism in five compact parish histories, ranging from New Orleans to Los Angeles, and from Iowa to northeastern Wisconsin to New York City. The book elegantly elaborates the diversity of Catholic experience across the continent from the eighteenth into the twenty-first centuries while emphasizing its colonial origins and transnational contexts. The book opens with Our Lady of Lourdes, founded in 1905 in New Orleans as the city expanded into the Uptown neighborhood of Freret. Over the next century, this segregated white parish transformed into a Black-majority parish in 1970, practicing African-style liturgies led by Nigerian missionary priests before merging with another parish after Hurricane Katrina. The next two chapters examine Catholics in Iowa and Wisconsin. St. Mary's Parish in Iowa City was founded in 1840 to serve Irish, German, and Bohemian immigrants in a Protestant-majority region before splitting into three separate parishes along ethnic lines. Its sesquicentennial celebrations honored Korean, Chinese, and Mexican parishioners. Catholic culture in Wisconsin, by contrast, combined French Canadian, Belgian, Irish, Native American, and, later, eastern and southern European influences. Rural Wisconsin was especially fertile soil for Marian devotions: a series of Marian apparitions in the late 1850s received official sanction in 2010, the only American apparitions so designated, while a century later, a reported one hundred thousand pilgrims gathered in tiny Necedah to await an apparition of Mary who would offer a Cold War message. The village remains a place of pilgrimage.