For Whom There Is No Room. Scenes from the Refugee World by Eileen Egan (review)

718book reviews In contrast, as John W Padberg, SJ., suggests, the past was the cynosure for Louis-Edouard-Désiré Pie, modestly-born and unfailingly honest and intransigent . He blended loyalty to the Bourbon pretender as "God reestablished with his rights" and obedience to the Pope as the embodiment of the universal and supernatural dimensions of the Church. Emmett Larkin summarizes his magisterial history of Paul Cullen's decisive contribution to the modern definition of Irish national identity. Jeffrey von Arx's subtle, close reading of Henry Edward Manning's creative political theology is an impressive preview of his major study of that protean and elusive figure. It fell to the late John Ciani, S.J., to evoke Camillo Mazzella, S.J., a theologian who achieved high ecclesiastical station apparently without leaving much of an intellectual mark. In narrating the career of William Henry O'Connell, archbishop ofBoston from 1907 to 1944, Gerald R Fogarty SJ., once again displays his mastery of the inner history ofthe American hierarchy during that period. At times the contributors to Varieties of Ultramontanism look beyond their institutional and ideological concerns to suggest that the Roman allegiance possessed a spiritual power that virtually ensured its triumph. If the most characteristic feature of modern Catholicism has been emphasizing God's mercy over His justice, then ultramontanism proved, in the main, to be the ecclesiology of mercy. For those in grave need, Pió Nono would probably have been a more attractive confessor than Ignaz Döllinger. Robert E. Sullivan University ofNotre Dame For Whom There Ls No Room. Scenesfrom the Refugee World. By Eileen Egan. (Mahwah, NewJersey: Paulist Press. 1995. Pp. vi, 374. $ 19.95.) In June, 1998, Pope John Paul II sent a message of congratulations to the Catholic community of Kazakhstan on the occasion of the dedication of a new church in Almaty (L'Osservatore Romano, Edition in English,July 1, 1998). For those to whom the erection ofa Roman Catholic church in the capital ofone of the Muslim republics of former Soviet Asia seems incongruous, Eileen Egan's book, For Whom There Ls No Room, provides some clarification as she chronicles the forced movement ofvast numbers ofpeople since WorldWar II. The deportation of families from the Volga, Ukraine, Poland, and the Baltic states to central Asia is just one of those stories. As a sequel to Egan's 1988 history of the early years of Catholic Relief Services (For the Life ofthe World: Catholic ReliefServices, the Beginning Years), the present volume chronicles the succeeding waves of refugees generated by the political upheavals since World War II, and the efforts ofAmerican Catholics to alleviate their sufferings through the work of Catholic Relief Services. The BOOK REVIEWS719 historical background for Egan's book includes many familiar places and events—Yalta, Potsdam, the Iron Curtain, the Indian Partition, the World Refugee Year, the Hungarian Revolution, the Berlin Wall, and the Vietnam War. Against this backdrop, from her own personal experience with CRS, Egan recounts the saga ofthe refugees. The journey begins with a group of Polish D.R's resettled on a hacienda at Santa Rosa, Mexico, and moves on to a wartime refugee office in Barcelona, to a D.P. office in Hoechst, Germany, to an Escapee Reception Camp near Nuremberg, to a lamasary of exiled Tibetan monks at Varanasi, India, to a Maryknoll-run refugee center in Hong Kong, to the CRS office in Saigon. Along the way Egan introduces the reader to the individuals who comprise the refugee world—parentless children and childless parents, families , the elderly, and, in the case ofVietnam, whole villages. There are several pitfalls in writing about the postwar refugee problem. One is that the text will devolve into a tiresome mass of meetings, organizations, legislation , and, worst of all, acronyms—NKVD, NCWC, CRS, CRALOG, UNRRA, AJJDC, IRO, PCIRO, and USEP among others. Another is that the reader will be either overwhelmed by or inured to the sorrow and suffering as the numbers reach staggering proportions. Miss Egan leads her readers past these dangers by effectively following two approaches to her story. For one, she always balances the refugee plight with the positive aspects of the story. Thus, we learn...