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Roman Catholicism occupies a paradoxical place in American How can any one book adequately cover religious culture with so many millions of members and whose history is a mosaic of such diverse ethnic groups? The book manages to artfully include the diversity of Catholics and their historical experiences in a sevenpart survey of a five-hundred-year history. The author enlivens the narrative for a highschool audience by using a wide range of primary documents, including political cartoons, commercial art, maps, portraits, and first hand accounts of explorers and immigrants. Religious terminology is defined for the nonexpert. The resulting treatment conveys what it has meant for immigrants, politicians, women mystics, and labor reformers to be Catholic in America. Fisher charts the dynamic impact of immigration on the Catholic community and its changing relationship with the larger society. In popular American lore, the devoutly religious English Pilgrims first settled in lands that are now a part of the US. Fisher, in contrast, describes how the Spanish landed in Florida roughly one hundred years before the Pilgrims and how English Catholics set up one of the original thirteen colonies. Initially, the small Anglo Catholic church in the new American republic was highly assimilated. In the 1840s, waves of Irish and German immigration transformed the character of the Catholic Church and dramatically increased the influence of the church in American society and thereby often led to social tensions. Despite the persistent religious and racial prejudices of the white, Protestant majority, later immigrants and ethnic groups (Poles, Italians, Blacks, and MexicanAmericans) continually sought to be fully accepted as both American and Catholic. The New Deal and the Second World War (19331945) helped break down barriers to Catholic participation in the mainstream cultural and political life of the country. Social reformers and political crusaders applied their Catholic social teaching in radically different ways, ranging from Dorothy Day's Catholic Worker Movement to Father Coughlin's radio antiSemitism. Catholics encountered a mixture of successes and stubborn challenges to their full participation in politics and popular culture, as epitomized in John F. Kennedy's Presidency and reflected in sympathetic Hollywood movies. Finally, the book ends with the momentous changes set in motion by the church's Vatican II Council and other events of the 1960s: painful political divisions among the laity, mainstream status in the larger society, and decreasing numbers of priests and sisters to staff institutions. Fisher argues that the search for renewed unity will have to begin with a celebration of diversity, which has always been a hallmark of the US Catholic tradition. Catholics in America is a highly interesting and readable treatment of a tradition that any high school teacher in religious studies or history would find important to cover in their classes. review ©2000 by Glenn Zuber and RSiSS
Religion in American Life Return to Oxford's Religion in American Life Series
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