THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AMERICAN CATHOLIC HISTORY.<i> Edited by Michael Glazier and Thomas J. Shelley</i> .<i> The Liturgical Press: 1,632 pp., $79.95</i>
What did Billy the Kid have to do with the Sisters of Charity? What major American city is named after a Native American Catholic? Did the Spanish padres in the California missions enslave the natives? Encyclopedias are a browsers’ Disneyland. Topics tumble one upon another in a delightful disorder governed only by the happenstance of the alphabet.
“The Encyclopedia of American Catholic History” is no exception. With more than 300 illustrations and 1,200 articles ranging from Peter M. Abbalen, a contentious 19th-century German nationalist priest, to Oldrich Zlamal, a leader of early-20th-century Czech Catholic immigrants, it offers a bottomless trove of nuggets. The higgledy-piggledy logic of the alphabet gives us, in consecutive order, a crisp biography of Alfred Smith, a discussion of the church in South Dakota and an article on Catholic Francoist sentiment during the Spanish Civil War.
A Sister Blandina, we learn from the entry on American Catholic women, once nursed a wounded member of Billy the Kid’s band, so he always treated her order with respect. An entry on the Catholic Church in California says that the padres did not actually practice slavery in the contemporary legal sense. But once natives had converted, they were not permitted to leave the settlements for fear that they would backslide into “heathen” practices, and soldiers were used to round up escapees. It is not likely that the natives could tell the difference.
The high quality and evenhandedness of the encyclopedia marks the final maturation of American Catholic historiography, a process that most historians would date only from the publication of Father John Tracy Ellis’ “Life of James Cardinal Gibbons” in 1952. Up until then, the dominant tone of Catholic history was apologetic and defensive, with leading figures often presented as plaster saints. Ellis, who has his own long note in the encyclopedia, enjoyed a 50-year career as a teacher and writer of Catholic history, predominantly at the Catholic University of America. He trained a high percentage of today’s senior figures in the field, including Thomas J. Shelley, one of the editors of this volume.
As a historian, Ellis will never be confused with a Jacob Burckhardt or Henry Adams. He came out of the archival school of history and had a leaden style and a pronounced taste for the indiscriminate piling up of detail. In keeping with the times, his biography of Cardinal Gibbons was dutifully marked with the Imprimatur (“Let it be printed”) of the local bishop and the Nihil Obstat (“there is nothing objectionable”) of the official Catholic censor. But his Gibbons was arguably the first major work of American Catholic history to take a critical view of its subject.
The enormous leaps Catholic historiography has made since the 1950s are amply demonstrated by this encyclopedia. Especially during the last 25 years, the field has shed its hagiographical, apologetic heritage, thanks to the work of such scholars as Gerald Fogarty, Marvin O’Connell, James Hennessey and younger historians like Scott Appleby. Works on Catholic history no longer carry a censor’s marks. Archives have been opened across the country (although a few important collections, including those of the Archdiocese of New York, are still closed), and there are outstanding research centers at Notre Dame and Catholic University. Merely assembling the number of contributors required to put together a collection of the scope of “The Encyclopedia of American Catholic History” would not have been possible a few decades ago.
The power of religion in shaping American history and culture has always been taken for granted in, say, histories of early New England or in the struggle over abolition. But once elite society began to secularize in the early part of this century, historians appeared to assume that religion was no longer an important force. Nothing could be further from the truth. The Catholic Church was arguably the dominant cultural influence in this country during the 1940s and 1950s, the days of Bishop Fulton J. Sheen’s dominance in the television ratings, when American anti-Communism had a distinctly Catholic apocalyptic edge. Catholicism’s sway in the big industrial cities of the Northeast and Midwest was as great as that of Pentecostal Protestantism in today’s South. With some 60 million adherents, it is still the country’s largest religious denomination by far and still would be even if one counted only the most regular churchgoers in the Catholic totals. The burgeoning interest on secular campuses in the history and sociology of American Catholicism and of American religion in general suggests that an important corrective is underway.
One of the virtues of “The Encyclopedia of American Catholic History” is that besides the mandatory list of important people, religious orders and geographic surveys, there is a good selection of issue-oriented articles, including ones on lay reception of official Catholic sexual ethics, Catholic-Jewish relations, academic freedom on Catholic campuses and a fascinating history of American Catholic spirituality.
Two long back-to-back articles on the civil rights movement and Catholics and the Civil War and Catholics are models of their kind, skillfully summarizing the (fairly modest) role of Catholic influentials, North and South, during both episodes. Longer articles are frequently accompanied by reprints of original documents with some imaginative choices, such as the long letter from a Southern bishop, Patrick Lynch of Charleston, defending the Confederacy: “Taking up anti-slavery, making it religious dogma. . , [the abolitionists] have broken up the Union. . . . We, as Catholics, might everywhere smile at this additional attempt to ‘reform’ the teachings of our Savior.” Lynch concludes by hoping that the “Black Republicans” will at least fight their own war and “not send Irishmen to fight in their stead.”
Every important Catholic ethnic group, from the Irish, Germans and Italians to the Poles, Slovaks and Slovenes, has an article, and there are extended entries on Catholic African Americans and Native Americans, usually written by recognized specialists in the field. For sheer literary verve, my favorite was the entry on Ella Edes. She was a New England spinster and convert who became the Roman representative for the most conservative American bishops during the sharp ideological struggle in the late 19th century. “An agent with an agenda,” she roamed freely through the Vatican, scooping up memos of important meetings and advance drafts of policy statements and filling cardinals’ ears with partisan gossip. Edes, who usually reported to Archbishop Michael Corrigan of New York, was a major, if frequently overlooked, influence on the generally conservative ideological course charted by the American church.
The encyclopedia’s dutiful entries on Catholic political and entertainment figures occasionally have a whiff of the old Catholic obsession with numbers, as in the legendary Catholic newspaper headline: “Typhoon in Asia; No Catholics Killed.” Boston’s Mayor James Michael Curley, Chicago’s Richard Daley and former Massachusetts Congressman Tip O’Neill made much of their religion, so they probably belong here as, of course, do Jack Kennedy and Al Smith, but why Jimmy Walker? He was a rascally New York mayor who flouted the church during most of his career, although he died a Catholic. The inclusion of an entry on Josephine Baker seems odd because it never says whether she was Catholic. And if Bing Crosby gets an entry, Joseph Breen, the handpicked Catholic who ran the Hollywood Movie Production Code for almost 20 years, certainly deserved one too. One inexplicable omission is the lack of an entry for Father Edmund Walsh, the Jesuit who founded Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service and was an important voice in American anti-Communist councils for more than 30 years.
A few entries could have used a heavier editorial hand. The entry on American Catholic sexual ethics is written in an annoying present-tense telegraphic style, and Gerald Fogarty’s article on the development of the church in the late 19th century concentrates almost solely on the hierarchical politics that are his specialty, omitting the massive demographic upheavals the church was undergoing throughout that period.
But these are quibbles. “The Encyclopedia of American Catholic History” is a splendid achievement. The choice of entries is thoughtful, creative and comprehensive. The articles are high quality, written by top scholars and embody the most recent research. The encyclopedia will be an essential acquisition for any academic library, for anyone working seriously in the field or simply for buffs who enjoy random strolls through nugget-strewn groves.