Revolution or Rejection?

Mark S. Massa’s The Structure of Theological Revolutions: How the Fight Over Birth Control Transformed American Catholicism is a study on two levels. On one level, it is a study of the responses of select American moral theologians to Pope Paul VI’s 1968 encyclical on contraception, Humanae vitae (hereafter, HV). On another level, it is a second-order reflection on these theological responses, using them as data, as it were, for a theory about how theology changes or does not change over time. The book certainly succeeds on the first level. I am not sure, however, that that success translates easily to the second level. To the extent that it is possible, I would like to work with these levels successively, even if, for Massa, the two are accomplished simultaneously, since the narration of the “brilliance” (passim) of the individuals treated is tied to the narration of how each of them radically broke with the paradigm of natural law that Massa claims is enshrined in HV.

Lapsed Catholics and Other Religious Non-Affiliates

Lapsed Catholics are sometimes referred to as one of the largest religious groups in America, and yet we know little about what beliefs and behaviors may be associated with this social category. Using data from the Pew Religious Landscape Survey, this chapter compares the religious beliefs, social attitudes, and voluntary behavior of lapsed Catholics and other religious non-affiliates (nones, atheists, and agnostics) alongside lapsed evangelicals and lapsed mainline Protestants. Generally speaking, lapsed Catholics fall somewhere in the middle between practicing Catholics and those with no religious affiliation, but they are notably more liberal in their attitudes toward abortion and same-sex marriage. This study affirms the importance of considering the heterogeneity within the category of “nonreligious” by considering the lingering attachments people may hold to religion outside of church attendance. The chapter concludes by considering whether the glass is half full or half empty for those interested in the future of American Catholicism.

The Making of American Catholicism

The Making of American Catholicism: Regional Culture and the Catholic Experience argues that regional and transnational relationships have been central to the making of American Catholicism. The book traces the development of Catholic cultures in the South, the Midwest, the West, and the Northeast and their contribution to larger patterns of Catholicism in the United States. Exploring the history of Catholic cultures in New Orleans, Iowa, Wisconsin, Los Angeles, and New York City, the book carefully explores the history of American Catholic cultures across regions and their relation to factors such as national origin, ethnicity, race, and gender. The chapters include close analysis of the historical experiences of Latinx and African American Catholics as well as European immigrant Catholics. Eschewing a national or nationalistic focus that might elide or neglect global connections or local complexity, the book offers an interpretation of the American Catholic experience that encompasses local, national, and transnational histories by emphasizing the diverse origins of Catholics in the United States, their long-standing ties to transnational communities of Catholic believers, and the role of region in shaping the contours of American Catholic religiosity. Drawing on extensive archival research, the book argues that regional American Catholic cultures and a larger American Catholicism developed as transnational Catholic laity and clergy ecclesiastically linked to and by Rome in a hierarchical, authoritarian, and communalistic “universal Church” creatively adapted their devotional and ideological practices in particular American regional contexts that emphasized notions of republicanism, religious liberty, individualistic capitalism, race, ethnicity, and gender.

Holy Cross on West Forty-Second and the Transformation of New York City’s Irish American Catholicism

Archbishop John Hughes created Manhattan’s Holy Cross Parish in 1852 to serve the thousands of Irish Catholics moving north of Lower Manhattan into what became known as Longacre Square (later Times Square) and the developing neighborhood of Hell’s Kitchen. Holy Cross maintained a strong Irish American identity into the mid-twentieth century, and its path charted the transformation of the disciplined folk piety created by the “devotional revolution” in Ireland in the nineteenth century into an American Catholicism dominated by Irish American clergy who sought to defend communalistic Catholic distinctiveness amid the rapid urban growth and burgeoning individualistic capitalism of a historically Protestant nation. In the early twentieth century, clergy and laity at Holy Cross converted Irish Catholic longing for an independent Irish nation and ambivalence about American society into a powerful synthesis of Irish American culture and American patriotism. In subsequent decades, Irish American Catholics at Holy Cross also participated in an emergent reactionary critique of the changing sexual mores and increasing ethnic and racial diversity of urban America. The white ethnic Catholic stance on American social change would become a key rhetorical and ideological element of resurgent American conservatism in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.