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Reviewed by:
  • The American Catholic Revolution: How the ‘60s Changed the Church Forever
  • Paul Lakeland

II

A book with such an ambitious project that is completed within 200 pages will have to make some serious choices about how and what to include. Mark Massa, in his engaging and highly readable account of the American Catholic Church in the years immediately following the Second Vatican Council, makes his choices explicit in the brief [End Page 65] preface to the book. His four organizing principles are quite defensible, but they are not all of the same order. To chose a thematic rather than a chronological approach and to employ a history of ideas model are prudential decisions. To focus on historical consciousness and the attendant “law of unintended consequences” are substantive choices about what the author considers to be critical to the study he has undertaken. These choices are quite deliberate and are consequently open to greater challenges. Indeed, the present state of postconciliar thought in the church centers around exactly these two points. Was the Council more about change or more about continuity? And are the “unintended consequences” evidence of the healthy unfolding of Tradition or deplorable lapses in judgment?

What Massa has to say is valuable. Inevitably, any quibbles the reader might have will have more to do with the weight he assigns to this or that element in the story. So, the introductory chapter’s focus on Bernard Lonergan’s recognition of the shift from classical to modern consciousness is an inspired choice, though one that is examined too briefly, especially compared to the greater attention given to Cardinal James McIntyre, to the Charles Curran affair, to the Catonsville Nine, and, especially, to a lengthy apologia for Avery Dulles. One has to respect Massa’s decision to pay greater attention to the narrative than to the underlying causes of change, but there may be danger in focusing too much on world-historical individuals as explanations of change that may have had at least as much to do with changing mass-culture. To take just one example, one that Massa has chosen not to highlight, the tension between individual conscience and obedience to ecclesiastical authority cannot be explained satisfactorily in terms internal to the church. Whether we see the tension as more or less positive, its importance is testimony to the fact that American Catholics today are as much creatures of secular culture as they are of Catholic tradition. For better or worse Catholics make their own decisions on so many issues where once they simply conformed, at least on the surface. More significantly, perhaps, their sense that church leaders must earn their authority is not an insight found in Vatican II, but something we can only explain in terms of larger cultural shifts than the even the Council fathers envisaged. But while a longer book would undoubtedly have addressed these issues, the shorter book we actually have is full of charm and insight. [End Page 66]

Paul Lakeland
Fairfield University
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