Confidence and Crisis: A History of the Archdiocese of Milwaukee, 1959–1977 by Steven M. Avella (review)

When does “the past” become “history”? At what point, in other words, do we gain sufficient perspective on recent events to place them with reasonable confidence in an overarching political, social, or cultural narrative? There seems to be a growing consensus among historians of American Catholics that the decades immediately following the Second Vatican Council have become “history.” Nonetheless, it requires courage to navigate this particular piece of the past, given the controversies that still surround it and the presence among us of many who lived through those turbulent times. Steven Avella is thus to be congratulated for his scholarly boldness in producing a history of the Archdiocese of Milwaukee during the episcopate of Archbishop William Cousins (1959–77).

Cousins was an amiable if not terribly distinguished churchman, whom Avella treats with a nice mixture of sympathy and intelligent criticism. He was well-suited to the prosperous times that prevailed in the Archdiocese of Milwaukee until 1965. The early years of Cousins’s tenure were years of building, largely in Milwaukee’s burgeoning suburbs, along with ambitious planning for a major expansion of the local seminary. Presumably some at the chancery were concerned, at least in passing, about white flight from the center city and its growing impoverishment. But until the mid-1960s, the Cousins chancery appears to have assumed that the future of the archdiocese would be much like its recent past. Vocations would continue to increase, as would the numbers of Catholic schools, and racial segregation in housing—and hence, for the most part, in education—would continue to be the order of the day. Cousins was cautiously sympathetic to the civil rights movement, particularly in its Southern manifestations, and no laggard when it came to implementing the various liturgical reforms associated with the Second Vatican Council. But his instinct was always to conciliate, indeed to temporize, rather than take a principled stand.

Circumstances changed abruptly in 1965. As in other dioceses of the United States, Milwaukee saw a sudden diminution in seminary enrollments, even as growing numbers of priests left the active ministry. The numbers of women religious fell sharply, too, which endangered the future of local Catholic schools. A hitherto quiescent black population erupted into militancy, especially around the issues of housing and schools. And much to the astonishment of local Catholics, the city’s best-known civil rights activist by 1965 was James Groppi, a priest ordained for Milwaukee in 1959. Passionate in his espousal of open housing, school integration, and economic justice, Groppi made the national news with his leadership of local protests that sometimes ended in arrests. (He was the first priest in the history of the archdiocese to spend time in jail.) Groppi was a divisive figure among the local clergy and even more so among the laity. But Archbishop Cousins remained on the fence, neither disciplining his famous priest nor condemning the racism displayed by many of his critics. In the end, Groppi drifted out of the priesthood, marrying a local activist in 1976 and fathering three children.

Avella’s two chapters on Groppi are his best—the most alive and charged with personality. Other chapters examine the implementation of the Council reforms in the archdiocese, the eventual crisis of the parochial school system, changes in seminary education and related developments among the local clergy, the altered contours of vowed religious life, postconciliar parish life, and ministry to Hispanics. The breadth of its subject matter is among the book’s many strengths. The author has little to say, however, about the changing religious mentality that marked the turbulent years he chronicles; perhaps he concluded that, in this respect, these years are not yet ripe for historical analysis.