Reseñas proporcionadas por Syndetics

CHOICE Review

Although this six-volume bicentennial history is authorized by the National Conference of Catholic Bishops and subsidized by the Knights of Columbus, it is anything but the noncontroversial and stuffy "house history" that one might expect to be the result of such official sponsorship. The formats of the volumes very considerably, and collectively they do not present the sort of unified, chronological accounts offered most recently by James Hennesey (American Catholics, CH, Jul '82) and Jay P. Dolan (The American Catholic Experience, CH, Mar '86). Each, rather, is an exploration of a strand or set of themes in American Catholic history, summarizing and at times adding materially to the burgeoning scholarship in the area, which is reflected in the number of highly talented historians contributing to the set. The names of the editors--four Irish, one Slavic and one Italian--are further indicative of the diversity and cultural change that characterize contemporary American Catholic scholarship. Two volumes--Patterns of Episcopal Leadership, ed. by Gerald P. Fogarty, and American Catholic Women, ed. by Karen Kennelly--are collections of essays by many authors. The first studies the development of styles of episcopal leadership, focusing on representative bishops over two centuries in engaging as well as thoughtful sketches. Forgarty's own sketch of the career of New York's Francis Cardinal Spellman is based on original archival research, and it pulls no punches in dealing with the back-room politics characteristic not only of Spellman's career but of the episcopate and the Vatican more generally. Kennelly's volume is more topical; its contributors deal with nuns, working women, feminism, social reformers, and ideals of womanhood, generally in a scholarly but readable manner. James Kenneally's essay on the Catholic role in American women's quest for political equality contains an interesting appraisal of the career of the ultraconservative Phyllis Schlafly and her role in the defeat of the ERA. Detracting from the volume's usefulness, however, is the lack of any overall interpretive essay or conclusion. The other four works are all by single authors. Two--Dolores Litak's Immigrants and their Church, which is on immigration and ethnicity, and Margaret Mary Reher's Catholic Intellectual Life in America--are rather brief summaries of current scholarship. Liptak's is rather sketchy, not overly well documented, and strangely brief on the Hispanic Catholicism so significant and problematic today. The author has more to say about older ethnic groups, such as Poles and other Eastern and Central Europeans. Her accounts, however, deal more with political themes, and do not evoke the cultural dimensions extensively for these highly diverse communities. Reher's, though also short, has much more extensive annotation and deals provocatively with such neglected figures as Cincinnati's Archbishop McNicholas. As an intellectual historian, the author focuses on representative though not very original thinkers to achieve a balanced portrait of Catholic thought. The final two volumes are more substantive, and they parallel one another significantly in the authors' interpretive schemata. In Public Catholicism, David O'Brien deals at length with the church's relationship to the social order. In doing so, he invokes a tripartite interpretive schema of "republican," "immigrant," and "spirtual/evangelical" styles to good effect. As do all of these authors, O'Brien makes clear the impact of the past two decades on American Catholic life and offers a critique of the unresolved state of the contemporary situation. Though his work is less smoothly crafted than O'Brien's, Joseph P. Chinicci has contributed the most orignal scholarship to the series in his Living Stones, a study of American Catholic Spirituality, which he defines broadly to include many aspects of theology and liturgy. This is almost completely unexplored territory, and his attempt to relate the topic to broader American issues is highly provocative. He deals with a wide variety of well-known figures ranging from John Carroll to Isaac Hecker to Thomas Merton, some of whom, like Carroll, have not previously been approached from this perspective. His treatment of James Keller of the Christophers is intriguing, but he neglects Bishop Sheen and other, less well known but internally influential popular devotional writers. Also reflective perhaps of the novelty and tentativeness of his endeavor is his failure to draw his materials together into a well-shaped conclusion. Still, this is a fine beginning in a new direction. On the whole, this is a lucid and valuable series which belongs in all libraries concerned with American religious and especially Catholic history. P. W. Williams Miami University (OH)