Michael J. Pfeifer’s The Making of American Catholicism: Regional Culture and the Catholic Experience is a fascinating exploration of the intersection of place, culture, time, and identity. In date- and place-bound situations, he surveys themes of contemporary concern (globally, but especially in the United States). Pfeifer’s skill in making connections across seemingly disparate places and events prompts the reader to extend the insights beyond the representative areas specifically addressed in the book.
Pfeifer’s book considers “regional and transnational relationships” that are part of the development of American Catholicism. The author examines Catholic cultures in specific areas: the South through race and Our Lady of Lourdes Parish, including an investigation of themes related to New Orleans Catholicism from 1905 to 2006; the Midwest, through transnational identities, Marianism, and ethnicity at St. Mary’s Parish in Iowa City (1840 to 1940); the West, devotional practices and identity in Los Angeles's oldest Catholic church; and the Northeast, Holy Cross Parish (1852) and New York City’s Irish American Catholicism. The epilogue provides a helpful framework for what the book accomplishes and could be read just as profitably as an introduction.
The book is an important contribution, carrying forward recent studies in American Catholicism that examine historical factors that have shaped the American Catholic experience, beyond traditional institutional and ecclesiastical considerations. Pfeifer includes an examination of local experiences and practices, such as those at parishes and dioceses. He highlights the “delicate interplay of a hierarchical international religious culture centered in Rome with a American [sic] republican culture strongly influenced by Protestant and secular critiques of Catholicism” (1).
American Catholicism is examined according to such factors as religiosity, national and cultural origin, race, gender, class, and region. Pfeifer illuminates the roles that these play in the historical construction of movements and trends and thus in religions and cultures as a whole. Pfeifer’s insights about the construction of religions and cultures themselves can be applied to other movements as well. For example, Pfeifer uses what he calls “the spatial and temporal development of American Catholicism” (2) to explore transnational ties and Catholic cultures after migration, and many of the events he details regarding German and Irish immigrants in Iowa City deepen our understanding of factors such as “ethnic factionalism” (66) and transmission of devotional practices and objects “in diasporic communities evolving in response to American conditions while remaining in communication ... with their national/religious homelands” (67).
Pfeifer traces the development of Catholic cultures in the South, Midwest, West, and Northeast within larger patterns of Catholicism and identity in the United States over time. In this way, his descriptions resonate with the experience of Catholic readers and scholars of Catholicism, who experience and observe the religion within the tensions of continuous development, located and lived in parishes, dioceses, and countries. And yet Catholicism remains global, a tradition purporting timeless elements.
The insights of the book are broadly applicable. They can be applied beyond the particular contexts of New Orleans, Iowa, Wisconsin, Los Angeles, and New York City, and beyond the religion of Catholicism in America. Academics and graduate students, as well as historians and sociologists interested in the development of America more generally (religious identity, culture, race, and so on), will find this book interesting and relevant. It certainly has a lot of content. This reviewer has read it several times and continued to discover new insights with each read.
Mary Beth Yount is a professor of theological studies at Neumann University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Mary Beth Yount
Date Of Review:
September 22, 2022
