The Spirit of Vatican II: A History of Catholic Reform in America by Colleen McDannell (review)

In combining survey data with material from focused interviews, sociologists devised an effective strategy for presenting the results of research. Material gleaned from individual interviews served to "humanize" the collective data, grounding that in life experience. In an analogous way, in The Spirit of Vatican II: A History of Catholic Reform in America, Colleen McDannell has used the life experiences of several generations of her family as a way to view changes experienced by American Catholics more generally. The church of her German-speaking immigrant great grandparents, that of the first American-born generation of her grandparents, the pre-Vatican and post-Vatican Catholicism of her parents—the generation that lived half of its life in the former and half in the latter—are depicted through these several lives, focusing on the impact changes in church and society had on the women. This strategy serves not only to invite the reader to see her family history as representative of much in the collective experiences of Catholics, but to see those experiences from womens' perspectives. In McDannell's hands this strategy works as she skillfully combines family experiences—especially those of her mother Margaret—with broader currents in church and society. If "the personal is political," then here "the personal is the ecclesiological"—the local church becomes a lens through which to appreciate the macro developments initiated in the universal Church.

McDannell begins her narrative with the circumstances that motivated German Catholics to emigrate, her great grandparents among them. They were married in St. Joseph's Church in Erie, which would become the site of a conflict with the Irish-born bishop over the establishment of a cemetery, resulting in the parish being placed under interdict. Dissent by Catholics did not have to wait until Vatican II. Submission of the St. Joseph parishioners to the ordinary becomes symptomatic of "a larger trend occurring in the country"—centralized ecclesiastical authority would transform the experience of parish life that had characterized "the village churches of their European hometowns" (17). The next generation, that of her grandmother Angelica, provides a window into the sacramental and devotional lives of Catholics of the post-World War I era, and the impact of ethnic diversity and of Catholic schools. Since the book is primarily concerned with "the spirit of Vatican II"—with the "constellation of changes that Catholics experienced in their homes, churches, and school" (xi), her mother Margaret looms largest. The geographical mobility that characterized many of her generation leads the family to Ohio, California, Colorado, and, ultimately, to Florida, enabling McDannell to track conciliar changes in a variety of settings that suggest the diversity of responses to the Council's work. Along the way McDannell's earlier interests in popular culture, especially movies, and in material culture broaden her narrative of Catholic experiences.

The second chapter, which finds Margaret and her family in Toledo reinforces a point made by others that, for the generation of Catholics who came of age during the Second World War, it was the fifties and not the sixties that were revolutionary. Suburbanization and access to higher education were changing the face of the immigrant church. The unstated subtext is that, even in the absence of Vatican II, American Catholicism would inevitably have been different as a result of these two factors. Their significance relative to Vatican II: "A rise in their educational level, deeper interaction with non-Catholics, and openness to new ideas prepared these Catholics for the innovations that would come with the Second Vatican Council" (35). More specifically Catholic factors reside in the impact of the Liturgical Movement and in the lay involvement in the establishment and development of suburban parishes.

The years of the sessions of Vatican II found the family in Los Angeles (Chapter 3), where Margaret's attention was captured more by what was going on in the United States with civil rights than with what was occurring in...