Catholic History Research Articles

Catholic Mobilizations in Twentieth-Century Mexico: From Pious Lynchings and Fascist Salutes to a “Catholic 1968,” Maoist Priests, and the Post-Cristero Apocalypse

This special issue, fruit of an American Historical Association panel on the entanglements of Catholicism and nationhood after Mexico's Cristero War (1926-29), offers five new histories that cumulatively give the lie to anything so monolithic as a twentieth-century “Catholic history.” As is well known, the Cristero War was a major armed confrontation between the Church and the postrevolutionary state and their respective bases, followed, as the story goes, by an uneasy truce and an enduring coexistence lasting for decades, to the 1950s and perhaps to the 1970s.

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

Reviewed by: The Imperial Church: Catholic Founding Fathers and United States Empire by Katherine D. Moran Anne M. Martinez The Imperial Church: Catholic Founding Fathers and United States Empire. By Katherine D. Moran. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2020. 330 pp. $48.95. Katherine Moran's The Imperial Church joins a growing body of literature that challenges the late nineteenth and turn of the twentieth century narrative of uniform suppression of Catholicism in the United States. Beyond national Catholic narratives, The Imperial Church expands American Catholic history alongside American empire to the Philippines in the aftermath of the Spanish-Cuban-American War. Moran analyzes narratives used by local boosters and officials about Jacques Marquette in the Upper Midwest, Junípero Serra in California, and Spanish friars in the Philippines to show that Catholic figures represented a historical order than could be inherited and promoted by Protestants in establishing their own deeper imperial roots to justify and sustain American Empire. The Imperial Church seeks to show that "American Protestants … integrated Catholic missionaries and explorers into their efforts to commemorate a meaningful past" in the face of a rapidly changing U.S. present (7). Moran challenges historians to rethink how American empire and religion are assumed to interact in this era. The book is divided into three sections, with two chapters each. Section one centers commemorative culture honoring Marquette, "the first white man" in the Upper Midwest, whose gentle braveness civilized indigenous peoples (18). Marquette's peaceful conquest leant Midwesterners a bloodless imperial domination to guide their growing [End Page 63] economic strength and identity. Section two casts Serra and the California missions as a civilizing influence built around hospitality and labor management, reimbodied in the contemporary tourism industry. Moran rightly notes that this narrative erased Mexicans claims on California and, of course, the Mexican bodies that remained in the region. Section three focuses on the ways Spanish friars of centuries past were embraced by Americans seeking to harness those civilizing forces in support of an American imperial future in the Philippines. "Americanized Catholicism was embraced by Protestants and Catholics alike as a potential carrier of Christianity and American civilization," Moran writes (200). The book is well-organized and well-argued. Each section analyzes the commemorative culture of the relevant site and then considers the shifting discourse from anti-Catholicism to imperial foundations. Each section is strong and sections one and two work well together in reframing Marquette and Serra as "founding fathers" in their respective regions. For me, there is a bit of slippage between these sections based in the United States and the final section on the Philippines. The first two sections correlate more closely with the idea of founding fathers, while the third section more closely adheres to the notion of an American Imperial Catholic Church. Moran notes that the "buffer" between lionizing local Catholic historical figures "without fully embracing the idea of Catholic clerical authority" collapsed in the Philippines case; "Americanized priests and prelates were envisioned as replacements for the friar" (174). The "local" element of the Philippines case does not correlate well to the self-promotion projects carried out in the Upper Midwest and California. The transition between these different forms of Catholic reclamation might be better articulated in the text. In spite of this friction, this is a compelling study, firmly based in diligent archival research. This would be a fine contributor to courses on U.S. colonialism and empire, as well as American and U.S. Catholic history. [End Page 64] Anne M. Martinez Rijksuniversiteit Groningen Copyright © 2022 American Catholic Historical Society

Т.С. Элиот и чувство истории

Eliot’s deep interest in ideas about history began early and continued throughout his life. In his student days, he encountered the concepts of human pre-history put forward by early anthropologists such as Emile Durkheim and Lucien Lévy-Bruhl. He studied under Josiah Royce and George Santayana, was aware of the historical writing of his distant relative Henry Adams. The paper also dwells at some length on Eliot’s attitude to the “Whig historians” and the Criterion-group historians. As Eliot entered the Christian fold, his idea of history became that of the Bible and the Church. He followed St. Augustine, was deeply influenced by the British Catholic historian Christopher Dawson. As a Christian, Eliot rejected both progressive and regressive views of history as well as determinism in favor of a belief in free will, the doctrine of Original Sin and faith in Providence. Eliot’s views involve a challenge to the secular view of history, and his key terms are based on his Christian vision: the “historical sense”, in the meaning of awareness of “tradition”, which carries the truths of Revelation and the wisdom of the ages forward in time, adapting them somewhat to various times and cultures but remaining faithful to the essential truths, the “permanent things.”

Missionary Activity and Civilization of Western Missionaries: a Case of Cochinchina (Vietnam) During the XVI and XVII Centuries

As in many other religions, missionary activity is seen by Catholics as a self-fulfilling mission, a sacred act to expand the scope of God’s kingdom. The geographical discoveries, along with the progress of the maritime industry in the 15th–16th centuries, opened a great prospect for “spreading the Gospel” to faraway lands, including Cochinchina (Vietnam). Along with missionary activities, Western civilization also followed the missionaries, who introduced it into the indigenous social life, contributing to the creation of the West–East connection, and the world integration of this land. Based on the many sources, such as the memoirs and correspondence of the missionaries themselves in Cochinchina and the works on the Catholic history of some Vietnamese and foreign researchers, especially the latest studies of Vietnamese historians, the article focuses on studying about missionary activities along with the introduction of Western civilization by missionaries in Cochinchina from the 16th century to the 18th century. The resusts show that the activities of the missionaries under the encouragement policy of the Cochinchina government are the basic factors promoting the process of spreading Western civilized values in Vietnam. This is an inevitable result of the spread of Catholicism which is an important role in the cultural exchange between East and West in Cochinchina in the 16th and 17th centuries. The paper contributes to clarifying the history of the development of Catholic doctrine in Vietnam and affirm the merits of Western missionaries as a bridge to bring European scientific and technical knowledge to Cochinchina.

Afterlives of Komitas K‘eōmurchean (1656-1707): Commemorating an Istanbul-Armenian Martyr in Armeno-Turkish Literature and Sacred Pilgrimage

Komitas K‘eōmurchean (1656-1707) was an Istanbul-Armenian priest and the younger brother of the prolific writer Eremia K‘eōmurchean. While Eremia was an Apostolic Armenian layman, Komitas was a clergyman known for his Catholic learnings, which brought him into conflict with leading Apostolic churchmen. Ultimately, he was sentenced to death before an Ottoman court and executed. After his death, Komitas’ grave became a site of ecumenical veneration for Armenians of all denominations, along with some Greeks and Muslims. This article describes how Komitas was commemorated after his death in Armeno-Turkish literature (Turkish written in the Armenian alphabet), and it presents transcriptions and translations of the Ottoman court record of Komitas’ trial and of his tombstone’s Armenian inscription. The article sheds light on Armenian Catholic history in the early modern period, and it contextualizes Komitas’ life and afterlife among broader trends in Ottoman cultural history, namely “neo-martyrs” and sites of sacred pilgrimage.

Review: The Early Modern Invention of Late Antique Rome, by Nicola Denzey Lewis

Review: The Early Modern Invention of Late Antique Rome, by Nicola Denzey Lewis

Scandal in Somers town: conspiracism and Catholic schools in early Victorian England

The middle years of the nineteenth century are notable in the history of Catholicism in England for the development of the ‘papal aggression’ crisis. Catholic emancipation had been met with suspicion by Protestant groups and this suspicion grew into violent antipathy with the publication by Nicholas Wiseman of ‘Ex Porta Flaminia.’ At the same time that this crisis was emerging, Catholic charitable organizations were also attempting to garner support from the state for the building of Catholic schools. With a boom in the poor, urban population, fuelled by the arrival of Irish refugees, this assistance was urgently required. In the midst of this a small school in the heart of London became the focus of a cause célèbre. The belief that this school had been funded by lucre, defrauded from dying and vulnerable members of the Somers Town community by simonist priests, provided the source of a widespread conspiracy theory. The result of this conspiracy theory was a lawsuit, brought in 1851 by the relatives of a deceased benefactor of the school, against the newly enthroned Cardinal Wiseman. Metairie vs. Wiseman became one of the most celebrated and cited cases of the early Victorian era.

Wolff , Larry Disunion within the Union: The Uniate Church and the Partitions of Poland (review)

SEER, 99, 3, JULY 2021 570 Chapter four, the last in the book, ‘A Case of Infanticide and Witchcraft in Szczurowczyky’, is a detailed and fascinating account of a case in 1753 conducted under Magdeburg Law in the town of Kremenets, in which a young woman was accused of infanticide by taking a magic potion from a witch. She confessed, and under torture also incriminated the witch who gave her the potion, described the coven to which she allegedly belonged, and even claimed she had flown on a broomstick! An ‘Afterword’ briefly describes the presence of witches and witchcraft in later literature and popular culture. Warburg Institute W. F. Ryan School of Advanced Study, University of London Wolff, Larry. Disunion within the Union: The Uniate Church and the Partitions of Poland. Harvard Papers in Ukrainian Studies. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 2019. 152 pp. Notes. Index. $18.95: £15.95: €17.00 (paperback). The eighteenth century, especially for the territories not annexed during the partition of Poland by the Habsburgs in 1772, has generally been neglected in the history of the Uniate Church and in Ukrainian national history. Unlike the renamed Greek Catholic Church of Habsburg Galicia that played a leading role among the Ruthenians of that crownland in their development as a national community, the eighteenth-century Uniates represented the highpoint of Polonization and Latinization of the church, hardly positions to be admired by the Ukrainian national movement and the present-day Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church. Yet the disappearance of the Uniate Church under Russian persecution in the nineteenth century and the rejection by its former adherents of Polish identity except for the Chełm (Kholm) region and certain areas of Belarus in time left the eighteenth-century Uniates outside the narrative of Polish history and to a degree outside the history of Catholicism in Eastern Europe. Still, an institution that encompassed the majority of the Ukrainian and Belarusian population and that left an imposing documentary and artisticliterary legacy could hardly be ignored, however few its modern claimants. Nevertheless, after World War Two and the outlawing of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church in the Soviet Union, scholarship faced major problems. While Polish historians of the Catholic Church such as Ludwik Bieńkowski examined the structures of the Uniate Church and scholars centred in Rome such as Izydor Patrylo mined the Vatican archives for documents, especially on the Basilian order, it was only the fall of the Soviet bloc and the opening of archives in the former Soviet Union that permitted a more comprehensive REVIEWS 571 examination of the church, devoid of the confessional and national optics that had long dominated in the field. The works by Barbara Skinner, David Frick, Richard Butterwick, Ihor Skochylas and a whole new generation of church historians in Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania joined by Polish colleagues that Wolff cites have broadened our understanding of the multifaceted nature of the Uniate Church of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. It was a church that with the Polish partitions found itself divided among the Russian and Habsburg empires and the rump Commonwealth that embarked on substantial reforms, including in its treatment of the until then discriminated against Uniate Church, just before the state was to be dismembered. Larry Wolff’s short monograph brings a new vision to the study of the eighteenth-century Uniate Church. It constitutes a rethinking of a long piece that he wrote over thirty years ago for a compendium on Ukrainian church history published in 2002–03 in Harvard Ukrainian Studies. That article had represented largely the view from Rome and by the papal nuncios on Ukrainian and Belarusian church affairs. The monograph broadens the discussion of these events based on the research that has been conducted by others since then, but also by Wolff’s engagement in other topics such as his monograph on inventing Galicia and his explorations of the eighteenth-century conceptualization of Eastern Europe. He divides his new monograph into two very distinct parts. The first part demonstrates how concepts of Enlightenment and the goals of states and rulers affected both the Habsburgs and the Russian monarchs in dealing with the Uniate Church. In so doing Wolff revises the usual...

Prize Announcement: The British Catholic History Best Article Prize

Prize Announcement: The <i>British Catholic History</i> Best Article Prize

Nationalism, Secularism, and Ethno-Cultural Diversity in Quebec

An ongoing debate over the intersections between secularism and ethno-cultural diversity is taking place in contemporary societies. For example, in just over a decade, Quebec has witnessed multiple attempts to reframe its approach to issues of nationalism in the context of secularism and the regulation of ethno-cultural diversity. This qualitative and historically minded article studies the relationship among nationalism, secularism, and the regulation of diversity, through three stages of analysis. First, it explores the Catholic history of Quebec and the secularization dimensions of its nationalism since the Quiet Revolution and the ongoing debate within the province about religious accommodation and the integration of immigrants. Second, it lays the stage for examining the political and historical rise of the recently passed Bill 21 An Act Respecting the Laicity of the State in Quebec, through analysis of the failed, yet pivotal, proposal for a “Quebec Charter of Values” during the leadership of Parti Québécois (PQ) Premier Pauline Marois (2012–14). Throughout this article, the content of the charter under the PQ and the successful Act under the Coalition Avenir Québec are discussed in light of policy transfer from France to Quebec regarding secularism and the public display of religious symbols, as well as Quebec’s unique context within the Canadian federation. Finally, it turns to recent political and policy developments in Quebec, including the passing of the new Act, as they relate to the changing relationship among nationalism, secularism, and diversity.

Providence and the sacred womb: La estirpe de la mariposa and women’s place in Spanish national historiography

ABSTRACT Within the last quarter of the twentieth century and now well into the twenty-first, the historical novel has been a prolific and popular form in Spain for commentary on the dictatorship, the Transition and contemporary politics, as well as a vehicle to reimagine and revise the more distant past. This article examines La estirpe de la mariposa – poet Magdalena Lasala’s first foray into narrative fiction, published in 1999 – as a product of this period of collective rethinking. Seeking to shift the historiographical focus from men to women in medieval Iberian history, La estirpe traces the lineage of five mostly fictional women that are imagined to have shaped and influenced the great men in caliphal Córdoba. This article analyzes the mechanisms the novel employs to refocus national historical narratives on women and their historical contribution to Spanish society, identifying several specific historiographical strategies employed by canonical Spanish National Catholic histories that not only are resuscitated in La estirpe de la mariposa but are at the heart of the portrayal of the female protagonists.

American Catholics: A History by Leslie Woodcock Tentler

Reviewed by: American Catholics: A History by Leslie Woodcock Tentler Kathleen Holscher, Philip Gleason, Robert Trisco, Joseph M. White, Paula M. Kane, and Leslie Woodcock Tentler American Catholics: A History. By Leslie Woodcock Tentler. (New Haven: Yale University Press. 2020. Pp. xiv, 402. $30.00. ISBN 978-0300-21964-7.) Introduction Kathleen Holscher (University of New Mexico) For decades the field of American Catholic history—its scope and arc, its protagonists and problems—has been defined by a handful of sweeping studies of Catholic church and life across the span of U.S. history. With American Catholics: A History, Leslie Woodcock Tenter contributes to this genre. Tentler is, notably, the first female historian to publish a survey of this sort, and American Catholics joins and advances works by male counterparts, including Jay Dolan, Patrick Carey, James Fisher, and James O’Toole. Drawing upon her pathbreaking academic career in U.S. Catholic history (Tentler is Professor Emerita in the Department of History at Catholic University of America), and her expertise in urban Catholicism and Catholic family life, Tentler offers readers a well-organized account of U.S. Catholicism over four centuries, built from selective original research paired with synthesis of existing scholarship. American Catholics proceeds in fourteen chapters divided among five sections. Tentler opens each section with a profile of a Catholic figure whose life, and sometimes saintly afterlife, manifests themes of the section. Tentler’s choice of profiles across the book—Eusebio Kino, Samuel Mazzuchelli, Mother Frances Xavier Cabrini, John C. Cort, and Patricia Caron Crowley—demonstrates her commitment to building an account of American Catholicism in which ordained and lay actors, men and women, cradle Catholics and converts, all make defining contributions. In Part One, “On the Fringes of Empire,” Tentler departs from histories that locate the origins of American Catholicism in the Protestant British colonies. Instead, Tentler begins her story with the imperial projects of Spain and France. She introduces the Catholic Reformation in Europe as context for the work of Franciscans and Jesuits who sought to [End Page 277] transform the earthly lives and eternal souls of Native peoples in territory claimed by Spain, stretching from “La Florida” to California, and in Wendat and Iroquois territory claimed by France. Tentler considers how Natives responded to missions, and she highlights the role of Catholic sisters in New France from the mid-seventeenth century. In centering women religious early on, she establishes an important theme for her book. “Adaptable and surprisingly independent,” Tentler writes, “women religious in New France created a template of sorts for the nascent church in the United States” (42). After this foundational treatment of European imperial Catholicism, the remaining four sections of American Catholics proceed chronologically. Parts Two (“Growing with the Nation, 1815–1870”) and Three (“A Turbulent Passage, 1871–1919”) treat the long nineteenth century. Episodes that anchor Tentler’s narrative here—including the development of Catholic urban strongholds amid European immigration, the expanding presence of priests and women religious in and beyond ethnic Catholic communities, and resulting American concerns about Catholic influences in politics and education—will be familiar to scholars who regularly teach “Immigrant Church” oriented courses on U.S. Catholic history. Here too, though, Tentler finds opportunity for fresh historical consideration, notably through in-depth discussion of rural or “frontier” Catholicism as it expanded with the formation of dioceses across what is now the Midwest. “The frontier experience,” writes Tentler, left “in its wake a Catholicism open to the nation’s democratic culture and even its pluralism” (83). Tentler’s chapter on “Slavery and the Civil War,” in which she treats Catholic leaders’ critiques of the Emancipation Proclamation alongside evidence of anti-Black racism that characteried Irish Catholic regiments fighting for the Union cause, is also noteworthy (125). Parts Four and Five of American Catholics, entitled “Exuberant Maturity, 1920-1962” and “A World Unbound, 1963–2015,” span the last century of U.S. Catholic history. Here Tentler follows a U.S. Catholic Church as it develops via engagement with American social movements, and in response to its increasingly affluent, educated, and suburban white laity, even as it is rocked, midway through the period, by Second Vatican Council reforms. While Tentler...

Parish Boundaries at 25: A Personal History

Parish Boundaries at 25:A Personal History 61 John T. McGreevy As a senior in college without a plan, I pondered attending law school, even taking the LSAT. I simultaneously considered graduate school, despite knowing very little about what graduate school entailed. Most of the graduate schools to which I applied rejected my application—I had only the haziest "research agenda"—but I snuck by the Stanford admissions committee. So to Palo Alto I went. I loved the coursework and even the oral examinations, and enjoyed working with superb faculty such as David Kennedy and George Fredrickson, ultimately the first and second readers on my dissertation. But I agonized over choosing a dissertation topic. Despite completing seminar papers on agrarian populism in 1890s California and on draft resisters during the Vietnam war, I doubted whether I could sustain interest in either topic for the long haul.62 I "stopped out" (to use Stanford vocabulary) for a year and taught at Hales Franciscan high school, an overwhelmingly African-American Catholic High School on Chicago's south side. A graduate school friend, Daryl Scott, now a distinguished historian at Howard University and then working on his history of twentieth century ideas about race and social psychology, turned out to have attended the school. We marveled at this coincidence when we would bump into each other while working in the nearby University of Chicago library. 63 By then I had settled on writing about Catholicism. I did so not because I had read about Catholics in graduate school—I hadn't—but because I knew the depth of the milieu. Both of my parents had attended Catholic grade schools, high schools and colleges. (My father also attended a Catholic medical school.) Both had worked in Catholic hospitals for much of their professional lives. The sheer size of the [End Page 29] subculture made its absence from the standard literature on the United States glaring. Historians of, say, imperial Germany, where Catholics were an equally large part of the population, had done much more to make Catholicism a core topic of inquiry.64 But what would be my angle? No subject seemed more exciting to graduate students doing United States history at Stanford in the 1980s than "race" and George Fredrickson's work, and more distantly that of David Roediger, Barbara Fields and others animated late night conversations.65 J. Anthony Lukas's Common Ground, on Boston during the busing crisis, amazed me with its narrative force and recounting of the city's Catholic history. I wrote Lukas out of the blue and he encouraged me to examine his notes deposited at the Wisconsin Historical Society. I remember my excitement when I first plucked Arnold Hirsch's Making the Second Ghetto off a shelf in a Berkeley bookstore.66 Hirsch mentioned Catholics only episodically. But his brilliant research prompted me to ask: what did it mean that Black migrants to the northern cities encountered so many Euro-American Catholics? I tracked Hirsch's footnotes, which led to a full summer going through the Catholic Interracial Council papers at the Chicago Historical Society. So I had a topic. What I didn't anticipate was that interest in religion in modern United States history would explode in the twenty years after turning in my dissertation.67 As it turned out, and as often happens, I was not alone even in my specific interests. Gerald Gamm's Urban Exodus, on Jews and Catholics in Boston, published three years after Parish [End Page 30] Boundaries, even more convincingly displayed the importance of Catholic institutions in shaping American urban life.68 Thomas Sugrue's Origins of the Urban Crisis, published the same year as Parish Boundaries, became the lodestar for our generation's collective understanding of postwar urban history.69 To my mind it still is. Sugrue only touched on Catholicism—as he acknowledges—but almost against his will it popped up in his analysis at various points. He was the first person, I think, to cite my just about to be published dissertation. Sugrue's scholarly example makes me even more grateful for his commentary in this forum. I especially appreciated his discovery of a real estate listing...

The Best Catholics in the World. The Irish, the Church and the End of a Special Relationship by Derek Scally

Review articles Derek Scally, The Best Catholics in the World. The Irish, the Church and the End of a Special Relationship (Dublin: Penguin-Sandycove, 2021), 336 pages The author of this important book has been writing for the Irish Times for some twenty years. From his long experience of working as a journalist in Germany, he has become familiar with the concept of die Vergangenheitsbewältigung, the process of coming to terms with the past, so vital for Germans in the light of all that has happened in their country in the 20th century. His book is a pilgrimage, literal and metaphorical, in aid of making the case for something like this process in relation to Ireland – on his own behalf, in the first instance, and, if he can help to promote it, on that of the country and its culture as a whole as well. He writes as the accomplished journalist he has shown himself to be over the years and with considerable research behind his enquiry. He depicts characters and situations with what can sometimes seem like a novelist’s touch, and he has an eye for the telling phrase. Irish seminaries in the past are, for example, described as having been ‘hothouses of theology and freezers for emotion and sexuality’ (104). The result of his skill as a writer is that, despite its length, The Best Catholics in the World is, for the most part, an easy – if often rather depressing – read. His exploration begins in Edenmore, the parish in north Dublin where he grew up in the 1980s, and ranges as far as the Stasi (secret police) museum in Berlin, the city where he has been living for many years – a certain German frame of reference, often quite illuminating, recurs throughout the book. The journey takes him by way of an instructive, if eclectic, itinerary of places in between, associated in one way or another with the often cataclysmic changes in Irish Christian and Catholic history over the centuries since St Patrick arrived on these shores, not least those in the last several decades. And so, beginning somewhat at the beginning, he finds himself in Trinity College, examining the Book of Kells – ‘even the Book of Kells has a shadowy side’, the author informs us (37), the comment a harbinger of not a little debunking of familiar myths in the pages to come. Later he is in Dingle, en route to Skellig Michael, and later again in Glendalough, iconic sites of Review Articles: Winter 2021–22 Studies • volume 110 • number 440 480 early Irish monasticism and what we think of as Celtic Christianity – although that concept will be questioned in due course too – ‘no such thing as Celtic Christianity … the Church was always utterly subservient to Rome’, one academic historian is quoted as declaring (45). He attends Mass at a Massrock in Hollywood, Co. Wicklow, relic of penal days. He goes to consult the Central Catholic Library in Merrion Square, Dublin. In Baggot St, at one end he visits the office of Judge Yvonne Murphy, who presided over several recent investigations into clerical sexual abuse, and, further along, Mercy International, headquarters of the Sisters of Mercy, a significant Irish religious order, more recently embroiled in other abuse scandals. He goes to several Dublin art galleries, to view the artwork of Patrick Bolger (an abuse survivor) and Alison Lowry (inspired by the mother and baby homes and Magdalene Laundries). He travels to St Patrick’s College, Thurles, location of the 1850 Synod and ‘symbolic starting-point of modern Irish Catholicism’(205).We find him in Galway Cathedral, where a traditional novena to Our Lady is being conducted by a Redemptorist priest. He goes to Áras an Uachtaráin in the Phoenix Park to attend the President’s garden party for Magdalene survivors. He visits the offices of One in Four, an organisation founded by a prominent survivor of clerical sexual abuse in 2003 to help other childhood victims, in Holles St. He goes to Belmullet in Co. Mayo to meet Fr Kevin Hegarty, whose progressive editing of Intercom in the 1990s, including an article that would touch ‘on every issue that would convulse Ireland for the next...

Obituary: Frank John Coppa (1937–2021)

ObituaryFrank John Coppa (1937–2021) Roy Domenico Click for larger view View full resolution Frank J. Coppa, who taught Italian and Catholic History at St. John’s University in Queens, New York, passed away on January 13, 2021. Born in 1937 in New York City, Coppa obtained his BA from Brooklyn College in 1960 and went on to The Catholic University of America where he earned the PhD in 1966. His dissertation there, under John K. Zeender and funded in part with a Fulbright grant, concerned the work of Italy’s pre-World War One Prime Minister Giovanni Giolitti. Titled “Giolitti and Industrial Italy: An Analysis of the Interrelationship between Giolitti’s Economic Policy and His Political Program,” the Catholic University of America Press published it in 1971 as Planning, Protectionism, and Politics in Liberal Italy: Economics and Politics in the Giolittian Age. It was the first of his twelve books. Beyond a biography of Count Cavour and a study of the Italian Wars of Independence, Coppa devoted the balance of his book-length studies to aspects of the papacy, particularly the pontificates of Pius IX and Pius XII. Much of his later work focused on the Holy See and the [End Page 163] Jews and he became keenly interested in interfaith dialogue. Among those later studies, his The Papacy, the Jews and the Holocaust: From Nineteenth-Century Anti-Semitism to the Third Millennium, which the CUA press published in 2006, earned him particularly glowing reviews. He also edited or co-edited fourteen books beginning with the 1969’s (with Benjamin Bast) From Vienna to Vietnam: War and Peace in the Modern World. Frank Coppa joined the faculty of St. John’s University in 1965, reached the full professor rank in 1979, and he remained there until his retirement in 2010. Known as a charming and collegial figure among his peers and students, Coppa served as Department Chair. He also established and directed St. John’s doctoral program in World History. Professor Coppa was a tireless worker and produced three more books after his retirement, displaying an energy that St. John’s recognized when it honored him in 2012 with Emeritus status. Frank Coppa was also a long-standing and loyal member of the ACHA, which chose to award him with its first Lifetime Distinguished Scholarship Award at the 2011 meeting in Boston. Father Steven Avella, the ACHA president at the time, remarked that the award honored Coppa’s “contributions, which have fundamentally animated the research of others, beside being significant in their own right.” Coppa’s wife, Rosina, who often accompanied him to conferences, survives him as do their daughters, Francesca and Molina, and two grandchildren. Professor Dolores Augustine, a colleague and friend at St. Johns, noted that Frank Coppa was not only “one of the most preeminent scholars in the field of Catholic history, but, equally important, he . . . contributed to a general spirit of collegiality in the History Department.” [End Page 164] Roy Domenico The University of Scranton Copyright © 2021 The Catholic University of America Press

Introduction

Introduction Thomas Rzeznik, Co-editor Introduction This year marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of the publication of John T. McGreevy's Parish Boundaries: The Catholic Encounter with Race in the Twentieth-Century Urban North (University of Chicago Press, 1996). Still in print, the book remains one of the best-known works in American Catholic history. Cited extensively by scholars beyond Catholic studies, it has had significant influence on our understanding of the history of U.S. race relations and urban community life. It made making a convincing case for why an understanding of Catholic faith and culture matters, challenging those who might not otherwise have paid much attention to Catholics and their parochial affairs to take a closer look. To mark this anniversary, American Catholic Studies invited five accomplished scholars to reflect on McGreevy's work in light of their own research and specializations. They were asked to consider how the work reads now, twenty-five years later. What are its enduring contributions or potential limitations? How has it shaped our understanding of American Catholicism and what research is still needed? At a time of renewed racial reckoning within the church and society, does it continue to speak to us today? Participating in this forum are Dr. Matthew J. Cressler of the College of Charleston, a religious studies scholar interested in the intersection of religion and race; Dr. Thomas Sugrue of New York University, an expert on urban history and the civil rights movement; Dr. Deborah Kanter of Albion College, who has recently written about [End Page 1] the history of Mexican American Catholics in Chicago; Dr. Stephen Koeth, CSC, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Notre Dame, whose research examines the Catholic shift to the suburbs in the post-World War II period; and Dr. Craig Ford of St. Norbert College, a moral theologian with interests in critical race theory and racial justice. Their essays are followed by a response from John McGreevy, professor of history at the University of Notre Dame. We are grateful to these scholars for agreeing to be part of this forum, which had initially been planned as a roundtable for the American Catholic Historical Association's annual meeting this past January. But as with so many other events of the past year and a half, the gathering was cancelled on account of the Covid-19 pandemic. We are pleased that they accepted our invitation to adapt their planned remarks for publication here. [End Page 2] Copyright © 2021 American Catholic Historical Society

Parish Boundaries and Postwar Suburbia

Parish Boundaries and Postwar Suburbia Stephen M. Koeth31 CSC When I arrived at Columbia University in the summer of 2012, my professors and fellow doctoral students were eager to express interest in my research by discussing what they knew of American Catholic history. Invariably, one of the texts with which they were most familiar was John McGreevy's Parish Boundaries. Although religious historians may lament that theology and religion are still not sufficiently engaged by scholars of twentieth century America, Parish Boundaries' greatest contribution is that it so powerfully showed how "theological traditions help believers interpret their surroundings" and are therefore crucially important for understanding the past.32 Specifically, Parish Boundaries argued convincingly that because Catholics in the postwar period represented an increasing percentage of urban whites, Catholic priests, politicians, union workers, and homeowners played an outsized role in debates over public housing, urban renewal, highway programs, and in the history of race relations in the urban north, which was so deeply intertwined with all these issues.33 Most importantly, whereas other scholars had treated labor competition as central to race relations in the urban north, McGreevy showed that housing was, in fact, the crucial issue. White Catholics fought to defend their urban ethnic neighborhoods—and were slower to depart for the suburbs—because their sacramental sense of place imbued their parish and neighborhood with deep theological meaning.34 Nevertheless, a focus on housing also highlights that, in the very period McGreevy explores, suburbanites were becoming the majority in American Catholicism. Even though Parish Boundaries did not aim to study those Catholics who left the urban core for the suburbs, McGreevy still gets a great deal right about suburbanization's effects on Catholic life. Still, as Thomas Sugrue has stated, there is much about "the [End Page 19] history of Catholic suburbanization, its impact on Catholic understandings of family, and community, and its implications for Catholic politics" that remains unexplored.35 Indeed, historians have largely overlooked suburban religion in general.36 Since the suburbs were at the heart of the postwar United States, more scholarship on Catholic suburbia would not only bolster and refine Parish Boundaries' arguments, it would also help better integrate Catholics into the history of twentieth-century America–a goal for which McGreevy has rightly advocated.37 Although McGreevy makes little mention of redlining, and only briefly references Federal Housing Authority (FHA) mortgages and realtors who created racial panic, his focus on housing has been validated by subsequent scholarship on housing inequality and racism in federal policy, banking, and real estate practices.38 In particular, recent research into Home Owners' Loan Corporation (HOLC) appraisals of urban real estate has shown that while Black Americans were undoubtedly the greatest victims of racist housing policies and redlining, European ethnic Catholics were victims too. As residents of HOLC Grade-C neighborhoods, which were coded yellow on HOLC maps, they would have been less likely to receive FHA mortgage insurance and lower interest rates and therefore also suffered the ill effects of disinvestment.39 Greater attention to federal policies and real estate practices would only serve to make clearer that the ultimate collapse of the urban [End Page 20] Catholic neighborhood—and the flight of white ethnic Catholics to the postwar suburbs—was not only an effect of individual racism but very much a result of federal, state, and local policy.40 HOLC appraisals resulted in depressed home values, which gave white ethnic Catholics concrete financial motivations to take advantage of the GI Bill's lowcost home loans and move to the suburbs, an option not available to Black veterans and their families. Parish Boundaries makes clear how Catholic parishes defined urban geography, marking the boundaries and shaping the life of the city neighborhoods Catholic suburbanites left behind.41 But suburban space, too, was shaped by Catholic homebuyers and clergy and their desire to transplant much of the Catholic infrastructure they had known in the city into suburban environs. Precisely how the presence of Catholic parishes, schools, hospitals, and summer camps did and did not determine the contours of suburban life is ripe for further exploration in the model of Parish Boundaries. That racial exclusion was a crucial aspect of...

American Catholics: A History by Leslie Woodcock Tentler

Reviewed by: American Catholics: A History by Leslie Woodcock Tentler Michael Pasquier American Catholics: A History. By Leslie Woodcock Tentler. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020. 416 pp. $30.00. There are many ways to tell the story of American Catholicism. And yet there are only a handful of scholars who, in recent times, have tried to craft grand narratives of American Catholic history. They include Jay Dolan, Patrick Carey, James Fisher, Chester Gillis, and James O'Toole. That's it! Enter Leslie Woodcock Tentler, Professor Emerita of History at the Catholic University of America and one of the most accomplished historians of American Catholicism in a generation. American Catholics: A History displays Tentler's knowledge and insight into the Catholic Church's position in American history from the colonial period to the present. She's guided by the obvious, but nonetheless notable fact that "[t]he United States would have been a different kind of country without its Catholic minority" (xii). What results is a book that captures the diversity of human experiences in the Catholic Church and illuminates how that diversity mapped onto American public life. Tentler divides American Catholics into five parts. She begins Part One, "On the Fringes of Empire," with a profile of Eusebio Kino, SJ, and his role as "an agent of empire" in New Spain (5). Missionary priests take center stage in Tentler's account of Spanish colonialism in North America. The same applies to her treatment of New France, usually with an eye toward Native American encounters with Catholicism. In the British colonies, Tentler tracks the impact of anti-Catholicism on the lives of English settlers in Maryland, followed by a description of Catholic involvement in the making of the United States as exemplified through the person of John Carroll. Part Two, "Growing with the Nation, 1815–1870," opens with Samuel Mazzuchelli, an Italian [End Page 97] Dominican missionary who demonstrates "that Catholic life varies in its rhythm, mood, and texture according to the environment in which a church takes root" (72). Chapters on "The Frontier Church," "An Urban Stronghold," and "Slavery and the Civil War" reinforce Tentler's attention to the peculiarities of place and the uneven development of the Catholic Church in different parts of the United States. Part Three, "A Turbulent Passage, 1871–1919," dives headlong into the "institutional growing pains" that European immigration brought to the Catholic Church in the United States (147). Irish, German, Italian, and Polish immigrants enlivened parishes and packed schools, though not without conflict, controversy, and compromise. Tentler turns to Mother Frances Xavier Cabrini, MSC, as someone who modeled the tension between ethnic and national identities among Catholics, as well as the "woman problem" that simmered beneath the surface of a religious institution so defined by clericalism (146). Part Four, "Exuberant Maturity, 1920–1962," tracks the rise of a "confident church" in the twentieth century, one that permitted a Catholic convert like John Cort to leave Harvard and follow the life of a Catholic Worker (217). Through the events of the Great Depression and World War II, Tentler notices the Catholic Church shifting "from the margins to the center" of American society, epitomized in the election of a Catholic president (267). Part Five, "A World Unbound, 1963–2015," captures the "institutional crisis" that came with the Second Vatican Council and the cultural transformations of the 1960s (301). Tentler looks to Patricia Crowley's life as a "lay pioneer" in the sexual politics of the Catholic Church for insight into the "post-subcultural world" that Catholics made for themselves in the second half of the twentieth century (289, 343). "Two milestones"—the Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965 and Roe v. Wade in 1973—inform Tentler's characterization of the Catholic Church's "uncertain future" following the long tenure of Pope John Paul II and the ongoing consequences of the clerical sex abuse crisis (324, 327). Tentler ends American Catholics by reflecting on "the dwindling inheritance of a time when the church possessed far greater unity and spiritual élan than it does in the present" (351). Priest shortages, church closures, moral failures, demographic shifts—there is no shortage of worry at this moment in American...

Catholic Confederates: Faith and Duty in the Civil War South by Gracjan Kraszewski

Reviewed by: Catholic Confederates: Faith and Duty in the Civil War South by Gracjan Kraszewski Adam L. Tate (bio) Catholic Confederates: Faith and Duty in the Civil War South. By Gracjan Kraszewski. (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 2020. Pp. 216. Cloth, $45.00.) During the past fifteen years, scholars have rediscovered the history of Catholicism in the antebellum South and reexamined Catholic religious practice in the armies during the Civil War. For example, books by James Woods, Andrew Stern, Michael Pasquier, William Kurtz,1 and others have scrutinized Catholic engagement with mid-nineteenth-century culture. Interest in Civil War–era religion also drove the 2016 publication of the massive Civil War diary of Confederate chaplain James Sheeran and the 2019 edition of David Conyngham’s unfinished nineteenth-century manuscript, Soldiers of the Cross, which details the efforts of Catholic chaplains and religious sisters during the war.2 Recently, Benjamin Miller’s In God’s Presence: Chaplains, Missionaries, and Religious Space during the American Civil War (2019) incorporated the experiences of Catholic chaplains into a broader study of religion in Civil War armies. The new scholarship reveals that Catholicism, which by 1860 was the largest Christian denomination in the United States, needs broader incorporation into the general narratives of both southern religion and the Civil War. As part of this emerging literature, Gracjan Kraszewski’s Catholic Confederates demonstrates that southern Catholics strongly supported the Confederacy while considering themselves devoutly religious. Kraszewski, surprised by Catholic allegiance to the South, creates a term, “Confederatization,” to describe Catholics’ acceptance of their new nation. Confederatization, he notes, “propelled Southern Catholics toward prioritizing [End Page 127] a new national identity above older ethnic ones” (xviii–xix). Kraszewski uses letters, diaries, and newspaper sources to explain this process among a handful of Confederates. While the volume contributes to knowledge about religion during the Civil War and American Catholic history, his argument suffers at times from the inconsistent use of his model of Confederatization. Catholic bishops in the South, Kraszewski shows, varied in the enthusiasm they demonstrated toward the Confederacy, but all tried to separate their spiritual duties from their personal political beliefs. Patrick Lynch, the bishop of the Diocese of Charleston, was the “most Confederatized of bishops” (121). He publicly celebrated secession and the fall of Fort Sumter and, in 1864, served on a failed diplomatic mission to the Vatican to obtain formal recognition for the Confederacy from Pope Pius IX. Despite his political zeal, as Kraszewski notes, Lynch “encouraged Catholics to tend to their faith first, regardless of external pressures, for neither war nor circumstances of time could change the Church’s mission” (75). When the archbishop of Baltimore suddenly died in 1863, Lynch even recommended a northern bishop to fill the see, a sign of the episcopacy’s “cross-sectional spiritual unity,” Kraszewski contends (77). Kraszewski also discusses William Henry Elder, bishop of Natchez, Mississippi, who gained notoriety in June 1864 by refusing Union orders to read a prayer for President Abraham Lincoln during mass. At that time, Elder claimed that interfering with divine worship was not the business of the United States government. Refusing to bend, Elder suffered arrest and was imprisoned in Louisiana. Previous scholars have seen Elder’s actions as either genuine spiritual concern or “southern partisanship” (91). Kraszewski, however, depicts Elder’s stand as a perfect example of Confederatization. Elder could appear to be a good Catholic and good Confederate simultaneously with no cognitive dissonance. Elder had told his priests “not to make any pulpit statements about secession” so as not to “scandalize” Catholics who had already taken loyalty oaths to the occupying Union forces (87), but his arrest in 1864 brought him wide acclaim from Protestant southerners and made for newspaper fodder throughout the land. Unlike most of their bishops, however, Catholic Confederate chaplains and soldiers, Kraszewski asserts, “were highly politicized” (xvii). He relies on the diaries of three chaplains—James Sheeran, John Bannon, and Louis-Hippolyte Gache—and three Catholic soldiers—John Dooley, a Virginian, and two Louisiana men, Henri Garidel and Felix Pierre Poche. In particular, Kraszewski finds that the chaplains intensely focused on their spiritual mission to help the troops while frequently referencing their [End Page...

Manly Sacraments and Masculine Devotions: Catholic Manhood in the Civil War

Manly Sacraments and Masculine Devotions:Catholic Manhood in the Civil War William S. Cossen55 Religion continues to be a subject of growing interest among historians of the Civil War era. Chandra Manning notes that it is in the midst of "a comeback, after decades of more or less benign neglect."56 The war has often been presented by scholars of U.S. Catholicism as a venue in which Catholics claimed for themselves and for their church a firmer inclusion in the American nation. Catholics' wartime loyalty, whether to the Confederate or Union causes, provided them with convincing proof of their patriotic virtue and functioned as a pointed rejoinder to claims of Catholic outsider status. Whether it was through the dedicated service of the Irish Brigade, Father William Corby's much-heralded, mass absolution of Catholic and non-Catholic soldiers at Gettysburg, or the distinguished record of wartime chaplains, Catholics could rightly point to the Civil War era as one that offered great potential for American Catholicism to claim its place as a leader in the wider national community. While the ethnic and nationalist dimensions of Civil War Catholicism have been the subjects of much research in Catholic studies, the topic of Catholic gender has not.57 To be sure, there has been ample scholarship on the work of women religious as nurses and on the dozens of priests who served as chaplains on battlefields and in camps, but what has been lacking in these studies is an exploration of how the war shaped Catholic soldiers as men.58 Additionally, because [End Page 29] research on the everyday, lived religion of Catholic soldiers has also been lacking in the ever-growing body of scholarship on the history of the war—for example, soldiers' reception of sacraments, their use of sacramentals, their prayer practices, and their conceptions of spiritual matters—we should spend some time considering how these wartime activities formed Catholic soldiers as Catholic men. Catholic newspapers, chaplains' diaries, soldiers' correspondence, and reminiscences of women religious who served as nurses in Civil War hospitals provide glimpses of a world in which Catholic women played formative roles in forming Catholic men's religious lives and in shaping a distinctly Catholic manhood. This is not altogether surprising given the conclusion of scholars that so many devotional practices in American Catholic history were frequently understood, whether explicitly or implicitly, as feminine, and that it is common to follow Ann Braude's lead in starting with the assumption that "women's history is American religious history."59 However, one of the dangers in not further interrogating these ideas is that it becomes easy to conclude that men, many of whom devoted themselves in the Civil War era to the cultivation of what historian Amy S. Greenberg terms "martial manhood," were only peripherally connected to these supposedly feminine practices.60 Assuming an innate femininity for the devotional practices of the past also risks reinforcing nineteenth-century anti-Catholic portrayals of an effeminate Catholicism opposed to a masculine Protestantism.61 As Colleen McDannell has explained, Catholic men were active and enthusiastic participants in nineteenth-century [End Page 30] devotional life, and "we do not know how 'feminized' Catholicism was in the late nineteenth century."62 Male Catholic soldiers indeed turned frequently to praying the rosary, wearing Miraculous Medals and donning scapulars, and they saw such items as not just spiritually nourishing but as physically protective as they enacted their martial manhood on the battlefield. Reverend J. Francis Burlando, the provincial director of the Daughters of Charity in the United States, remembered "poor invalid Catholics and Protestants all going to the chapel of the Sisters to assist at the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, at the Way of the Cross, and other practices of piety! . . . And, what eagerness to obtain a Medal of our Immaculate Mother, a chaplet, an Agnus Dei." Burlando noted that "only when furnished with a medal" would "they return to their regiments."63 Another Catholic writer noted of soldiers receiving both communion and scapulars at a Mass in New Orleans during the first summer of the war, "Ah! would to God every Catholic young man who engages in the conflict may so fortify...