Oxcart Catholicism on Fifth Avenue: The Impact of the Puerto Rican Migration upon the Archdiocese of New York by Ana Maria Diaz-Stevens (review)

BOOK REVIEWS119 managing editor's job at Commonweal in 1937 in the uproar following his criticism of the pro-Franco sentiment among American Catholics. But even in his late years, Shuster's conscience was not slack as he was stirred, for example, at age seventy-four by the lack of episcopal respect for the 1968 conscientious dissent on contraception by Auxiliary Bishop James Shannon and a strange proposal for his taking up residence outside the United States atVatican expense, but without priestly or episcopal ministerial duties. Shuster wrote Father Hesburgh that the case and the proposed quasi-exile was "such a grave and incredible abuse of ecclesiastical authority" that he was "earnestly considering making a public statement about it" and that if he decided to make such a statement [he organized a support letter among academicians with five Notre Dame colleagues, and gathered five hundred signatures] he was "quite prepared to sunder my relationship with the University if that seems desirable." It wasn't. Occasionally one wishes, of course, that Blantz could have talked with Shuster himself in doing the biography, e.g., regarding the jilting in the St. Mary's-Notre Dame marriage. One regrets also the underdeveloped familial dimensions: both wife Doris, the courtship of whom is warmly related, and it is clear she is a strong woman, but we only get rare glimpses of her later on, as for example when she upbraided Heinrich Bruening; and son Robert, whose treatment is so spare that it may raise more questions than a fuller treatment would have. These are minor quibbles, however, that may indeed be beyond the opportunities presented to the author. Blantz concludes with a somewhat laid-back appraisal of Shuster. For example, regarding Shuster's Catholicism and his adaptation of "the eternal truths of revelation to an everchanging American scene" we are told that "sometimes he did it well; sometimes not so well." For this reader, however, the case for the former was well developed and established throughout the book, while I'm left rather curious as to what some examples of the latter would be. The important news is that this is a first-rate biography of one of the most significant Catholic laypersons of the century. It is a model of conscientious scholarship. It deserves a wide readership and a place in every college and university library. Rodger Van Allen Villanova University Oxcart Catholicism on Fifth Avenue: The Impact of the Puerto Rican Migration upon the Archdiocese ofNew York By Ana Maria Diaz-Stevens. (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press. 1993· Pp- vi, 295.«34.95.) The eighteen years between 1946 and 1964 mark the period of the Great Puerto Rican Migration, when 614,940 natives of the island migrated to the 120BOOK REVIEWS mainland. It was the first airborne migration in history. For the great majority, their destination was New York City, which was where the planes landed. At one point in this process, nearly forty percent of all the Puerto Ricans in the world lived in New York and the northeastern United States. By 1980 Puerto Ricans constituted the single largest ethnic group among Catholics in the three New York City counties of the Archdiocese of New York. This migration presented the Archdiocese of New York with a daunting pastoral problem, which is the subject of this sociological study. The title is meant to suggest the gap between the popular ("oxcart") Catholicism of rural Puerto Rico and the highly structured world of the New York Archdiocese. (Why not "Madison Avenue" instead of "Fifth Avenue"?) The author, a native of Puerto Rico who teaches at Union Theological Seminary, writes both as a sociologist of religion and as a committed Catholic who was herself part of the Great Puerto Rican Migration. Her book originated as a doctoral dissertation at Fordham University, where she studied under Father Joseph Fitzpatrick , the Jesuit sociologist who played a key role in shaping the response of the archdiocese to this pastoral challenge. The author's focus is not on the way that Puerto Rican immigrants adapted to mainland Catholicism, but on the way that the Archdiocese of New York adapted its structures and policies to meet the...