Religious Lessons: Catholic Sisters and the Captured Schools Crisis in New Mexico by Kathleen Holscher (review)

Kathleen Holscher’s book, Religious Lessons: Catholic Sisters and the Captured Schools Crisis in New Mexico, although burdened with a bulky title, is a lucid and engaging presentation of a complex event. Hoslcher directs attention to a bitter New Mexico quarrel that flared between Catholics and Protestants over the public school employment of sisters garbed in religious habits. The author argues that in post–World War II society, Americans, with time to rethink their positions about the separation of church and state, created a watershed moment in long-standing tensions between Protestants and Catholics. In concert with other postwar cultural transformations, the New Mexico legal case influenced substantive alterations in national Catholic-Protestant relations that persist to modern times.

Drawing on a plethora of Catholic and Protestant primary sources, conducting personal interviews, examining newspapers, and delving deeply into legal records, trial transcripts, and constitutional law, Holscher crafted an impressive analytical narrative. Such an assortment of administrative and political detail with legal interpretations as a dominant theme, suggested a page-by-page challenge to the reader’s attention. Instead, Holscher produced a fascinating legal history, weaving into the prose the poignant voices of the participants.

The six chapters include an explanation of how Catholic sisters came to be public school teachers in New Mexico villages populated by Hispano families, until an influx of Anglo-Protestants altered the demographics; the attitudes, positive and negative, toward the sisters, as Protestants and Catholics increased their mutual religious hostility; and a portrait of the curriculum and atmosphere inside a public classroom overseen by a Catholic sister. The book then discusses the organized Protestant resistance, led in Dixon, New Mexico, by Lydia Zellers and at the national level by an organization known commonly as the POAU, which pushed the inflammatory phrase “captive schools” to convey its view of the Catholic threat in public education. The author details the POAU’s national momentum and the Catholic response, the Protestant distaste for all religious habits, and the 1948 Zellers lawsuit that charged no separation of church and state existed in the Dixon public schools. As Holscher relates, the resulting painful trial brought students and sisters to the witness stand in what became in the main a debate on the religious habit, and the court decision convinced various women’s congregations to close their New Mexico schools, withdraw from the state, and seek other mission opportunities. All of these events played out against a backdrop of national legal and pedagogical implications, multisided religious intolerance, and divisive community relationships.

Each of these subjects embraces significant Catholic concerns that apply directly to religious frictions in modern America. There are, however, two other reasons why this book is an important addition to Catholic history.

First, it firmly establishes that the western Church contributed some of the most critical elements in building American Catholicism. Hoslcher moves western Catholicism away from its “quaint” adobe mission images, placing it at the center of national debates about religious freedom. Religious Lessons demonstrates that from the remote Southwest emerged a Catholicism confronting riveting theological and legal questions, absorbing apparent losses, and regrouping through religious principles to build a stronger professional place in education.

Second, Catholic sisters appear as articulate advocates for the western Church and themselves. Conversant with American law, but adhering to their religious identity, they negotiated taxing relationships in many arenas. The results of congregational decisions on entire villages led to community void and personal loss when sisters closed their missions.

This is an outstanding book, one especially for those who doubt the pivotal role of the West in the American Catholic Church or discount the informed thoughtfulness with which sisters influenced local politics, even as they strengthened their congregational identity.