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

Kathleen Holscher's Religious Lessons examines the cross-section of legal and religious history in New Mexico via Catholic Sisters who taught in and supervised the state's unique system of public-parochial schools. Holscher holds that Zellers v. Huff (1948), the New Mexico case that challenged the arrangement, marks an important shift in Catholic-Protestant disputes on the separation of church and state. Catholics and Protestants, although pitted against one another in the 1940s and 1950s, based their arguments in the case on a religious framework, which would shape a Catholic-Protestant alliance in the 1960s. She proposes an affective dimension to legal history, in which social practices and religious experience motivate legal action and determine its assertions.

Religious Lessons situates New Mexico between two competing educational systems: the established parochial schools of the Catholic, Spanish-speaking population and the inroads of Anglo, Protestant public schools. By the 1910s, Catholic Sisters began teaching in public schools or parochial schools converted to public status. The public-parochial system that emerged created a "Hispano-Catholic alliance" and subverted the Anglo, Protestant public system. When a small, Protestant contingent from the town of Dixon launched an investigation of public-parochial schools across New Mexico and filed suit in 1948; a flurry of activity to hide or remove religious paraphernalia ensued in the Sisters' classrooms.

Protestants and Other Americans United for Separation of Church and State (POAU) provided financial support and national publicity for the Dixon group. POAU also employed a longstanding, anti-Catholic rhetoric to fuel opposition to cases of "captive" schools throughout the 1950s. The National Catholic Welfare Council (NCWC) took up the Sisters' defense. The NCWC employed a "strategy of compliance" that lacked an intellectual framework on separation and encouraged the Sisters' withdrawal. The accused Sisters were barred from public schools and state funding, textbooks, and busing for parochial schools was discontinued. Bv 1951. the New Mexican Supreme Court declared the Sisters' religious habit to be a violation of separation. Holscher suggests that the case, although never appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, addressed a more widespread and enduring issue than its national precedents. She argues that the religious visibility of material objects continues its ambiguous and binary hold on society as a sign of devotion or infringement.

Holscher brings to life northern New Mexico, the classroom, and courtroom through detailed descriptions and diverse sources. She fills a gap on the study of American Catholic education and women religious in the pre-1950 era, when the restrictions of convent life contrasted with the flexibility of the classroom. Her description of the Grand Rapids Dominicans and Sr. Maura McDonald, O.P. lends personality and voice to the women discussed, although the majority of Sisters appear prey to church-state relations and subject to their vows and communities. While such an interpretation may be accurate, the author might have incorporated the individual histories of other Sisters to give a more active role to the women whose work incited the case. She might also have considered more fully the Sisters' understanding of their vows and how individual communities interpreted them. Their interpretation, alongside Holscher's analysis of authoritarianism, would add complexity and an element of self-determination to the women involved in the case. Holscher's Religious Lessons would benefit library shelves and graduate courses on cross-cultural studies, legal history, U.S. education, American religion, and the history of women religious. The work also sheds light on neocolonialism within the United States through religious and educational perspectives.