American Catholic
The Saints and Sinners Who Built America's Most Powerful Church
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4.7 • 3 Ratings
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
"A cracking good story with a wonderful cast of rogues, ruffians and some remarkably holy and sensible people." --Los Angeles Times Book Review
Before the potato famine ravaged Ireland in the 1840s, the Roman Catholic Church was barely a thread in the American cloth. Twenty years later, New York City was home to more Irish Catholics than Dublin. Today, the United States boasts some sixty million members of the Catholic Church, which has become one of this country's most influential cultural forces.
In American Catholic: The Saints and Sinners Who Built America's Most Powerful Church, Charles R. Morris recounts the rich story of the rise of the Catholic Church in America, bringing to life the personalities that transformed an urban Irish subculture into a dominant presence nationwide. Here are the stories of rogues and ruffians, heroes and martyrs--from Dorothy Day, a convert from Greenwich Village Marxism who opened shelters for thousands, to Cardinal William O'Connell, who ran the Church in Boston from a Renaissance palazzo, complete with golf course. Morris also reveals the Church's continuing struggle to come to terms with secular, pluralist America and the theological, sexual, authority, and gender issues that keep tearing it apart. As comprehensive as it is provocative, American Catholic is a tour de force, a fascinating cultural history that will engage and inform both Catholics and non-Catholics alike.
"The best one-volume history of the last hundred years of American Catholicism that it has ever been my pleasure to read. What's appealing in this remarkable book is its delicate sense of balance and its soundly grounded judgments." --Andrew Greeley
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Journalist Morris (Computer Wars) has here written a sound popular history of the American Catholic Church. Morris's story is the tale of how the religion of Irish immigrants in major urban areas came to dominate and form American Catholicism. In the 19th century, American Catholics faced a variety of prejudices. They were persecuted for being communists, anti-Christian and satanic. By the end of the 19th century, however, under the leadership of people like Bishop John Ireland, the Midwestern priest whose oratory emphasized the benefits of capitalism and Catholicism, and Cardinal James Gibbons, a moderate who pushed for both a Catholic labor organization and a papal university, American Catholicism grew to become the single largest American religious denomination by 1890. From the end of WWI until Vatican II, Morris writes, the American Catholic Church developed its own culture characterized by the virulent anti-communism of Joe McCarthy, the Index of Forbidden Books and Movies and the dogmatism of papal authority. For Morris, these years represent the triumph of the American Catholic Church. In a final section, Morris discusses the decline of American Catholicism after Vatican II, because of the issues regarding limits of authority and dissent, the role of women in the church and the future of ministry. This a splendidly written grand narrative of the rise, triumph and fall of an American religious denomination.
