Habits of Devotion. Catholic Religious Practice in Twentieth-Century America (review)

Habits of Devotion is one of the first fruits of the "Catholicism in the Twentieth Century" study hosted by the Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism at the University of Notre Dame. James O'Toole has ably edited this important volume on Catholic practice and Catholic identity. Four scholars, well-known in American Catholic studies, examine the "week-to-week" experience of "ordinary" Catholics in America by taking a "long historical view" of the material for the half-century (1925-1975) which encompassed the Second Vatican Council. The historiography complements the work of anthropologists, oral historians, and ethnographers, who have treated similar material. The sources used include religious pamphlets, church bulletins, diaries, letters, and national conference proceedings. A central theme explores how Catholic belief and practice both changed and remained the same in differing social and political times, as well as the insight that modifications in public and private prayer life had begun earlier than the Second Vatican Council.

Joseph P. Chinnici, O.F.M., provides a substantial chapter on prayer. Analyzing an array of national prayer movements, including lay retreats, various liturgical groups, the Christopher Movement, and the Confraternity of Christian Doctrine, Chinnici traces the continuities and discontinuities in American Catholic prayer life and concludes that because of a "pedagogy of participation" (p. 39), American Catholics generally accepted the liturgical changes which preceded and followed from the Second Vatican Council. Secondly, part of the reason for a "piety void" which coincided with the collapse of the Cold War can be related to a transformed social world and to a gap between experience and theory. Finally, Catholics sought a new relationship between contemplation and their social world, a dimension of American Catholic prayer life often overlooked by scholars.

Paula Kane analyzes the malleability of Marian devotion from its ethnic expressions to anti-communism, the impact of the Second Vatican Council, and the apocalyptic aspects of the devotion in the 1980's. Marian devotion provided both divine assistance and resistance to social evils, especially communism and sexual immorality. She notes the international origins of the turning points in American Marian piety and suggests reasons why contemporary expressions reflect something quite different from devotion in the post-World War II years.

James O'Toole investigates the practice of private sacramental confession and the factors which led to a dramatic decrease in its observance in a short period of time. Social factors of gender, ethnicity, geographic location, as well as penitents' perception of the theological elements of confession affected the reception of the sacrament. But between 1965 and 1975, dissatisfaction with the practice of confession, changing understandings of morality, especially with respect to birth control, "psychologizing" confession, and other liturgical changes, all contributed to a meteoric change in practice.

Margaret McGuinness explores Eucharistic devotional practice from the 1926 International Eucharistic Congress, which displayed the public force of Catholicism with clear theological and social boundaries between Catholics and Protestants, to that of the 1976 International Eucharistic Congress, which placed a catechetical stress on the social implications of the Eucharist. In three periods—Tradition, 1926-1945; Transition, 1945-1960; Transformation, 1960-76—McGuiness examines Eucharistic "etiquette" (p. 198) and Eucharistic devotional theology to illustrate the change of Catholic attitudes toward the Eucharist brought about partially through the increased participation in the sacrament.

Ample footnotes in the chapters provide fine resources for further research. While many readers of the Catholic Historical Review will have personal remembrance of the practices noted by the authors, my graduate students have replied that, in addition to the perceptive analyses in the chapters, the depiction of the practices was also helpful in understanding their parents' religious world.