Excommunicated from the Union: How the Civil War Created a Separate Catholic America by William B. Kurtz (review)

Excommunicated from the Union is at once a narrative of American Catholics’ experiences in the Civil War and a history of those effects the war wrought on American Catholicism. William B. Kurtz contends in this volume that “the American Civil War played a pivotal role in accelerating the antebellum trend in American Catholicism toward isolation and separatism” (p. 8). Loyal Catholics in 1861 viewed the Civil War as a stage upon which to perform their roles as patriotic citizens and, in so doing, gain respectability in American culture. Ultimately, however, Catholics grew disenchanted with the war, and their disenchantment yielded devastating consequences for coreligionists seeking assimilation into the American mainstream. In the end, for most Catholics who endured it, “the war proved an alienating experience” (p. 128).

The author develops a compelling narrative throughout. Nativism during America’s war with Mexico and anti-Catholicism in American culture made Catholics eager to prove their Americanness at the outbreak of war. Kurtz details the wartime experiences of Catholic Civil War soldiers and immigrant families, blending these narratives with considerations of Irish and German ethnicity. He skillfully demonstrates how the war especially displaced German Catholics from American culture. The heroism of priests on the battlefront and of nuns in field hospitals helped to temper stereotypes of Catholic religious orders and momentarily improved the perception of Catholic patriotism among Protestants. As the war protracted, however, it exposed fissures in Catholic opinion concerning slavery, Republican politics, and emancipation. Catholic war enthusiasm divided and waned, and its critics loudened. Although Catholics worked tirelessly in the late-nineteenth century to perpetuate authentic memorials of their Civil War sacrifice, they “were still seen as an anti-modern, anti-democratic, and alien threat to the nation’s Protestant identity, its democratic government, and its society” (p. 144).

Significantly, the author amplifies a range of Catholic voices. Public intellectuals, clergy, newspaper editors, women, and soldiers join together to deliver a rich sound and range of historical perspectives. These perspectives complement the work’s lengthened chronology. Many fine studies of religion and the Civil War treat their subjects as an isolated historical moment; Kurtz, however, extends his examination of Catholicism in the United States: he looks to 1822—the date of publication for the first Catholic periodical in America—to the Mexican-American War (at which time there appeared some forty-eight Catholic publications) and finally to the postwar years.

The book is informative, although perhaps less helpful, in other ways. The reader is reminded that Catholics gravitated naturally in 1860 toward the conservative Democratic Party. Many Catholic northerners resented Republicans for uniting Know-Nothingism with abolitionist radicals who threatened to destroy the republic. In the eyes of Catholics, these same abolitionist Republicans also threatened the foundation of religious liberty and the rule of law. In a manner reminiscent of Mark Noll’s examination of the war and its effects on Protestant churches in The Civil War as a Theological Crisis (Chapel Hill, NC, 2006), Kurtz reveals how the war diminished Catholic unity. Intellectuals and clergy determined not to go the route of American mainline evangelicalism ultimately experienced fragmentation: Catholics split culturally, even if they maintained theological unity, over slavery and emancipation. For its excellent coverage of the war’s effects on various elements of Catholic society, Excommunicated is somewhat muted on the combat experiences of Catholic soldiers themselves, amplifying instead the ideologies that motivated Catholic troops in the Union Army and how it was that soldiers understood their national service in broader terms as a sacrifice for “religious toleration” (p. 65). To be sure, there are bright moments—such as the absolution William Corby, C.S.C., pronounced over the Irish Brigade at the Battle of Gettysburg on July 2, 1863—but one wishes that, in a book about the northern Catholic Civil War experience...