Author’s Response

Rather than respond to the very smart questions asked by specific reviewers, I will “bundle together” questions asked by several (or all) of the participants in this review symposium, and organize my response around three major themes.

First: The appropriateness of utilizing a “history of ideas” approach to narrating the United States Catholic past without also utilizing “social” or “cultural history” approaches to supplement the acknowledged lacunae of intellectual history. And even more specifically, the appropriateness of not utilizing the voices of lay Catholics sufficiently, but rather privileging “official” figures (theologians, bishops, etc.).

These are obviously both pertinent and smart questions. My decision to utilize the “history of ideas” approach in narrating the Catholic version of the “Long Sixties” was shaped to some extent by my sense that social and cultural history – sometimes termed “history from below” – had not only proven their importance in the narration of the religious past, but had largely carried the day. Thus, it seemed to me that the studies of the United States Catholic past given most scholarly attention and discussion during the past three decades were largely shaped by those approaches. Studies of popular devotion and piety, lay sodalities and retreat movements, the missa recitata, and the widespread attempts on the part of “non-professionals” (i.e., nonclerics) to grapple with the church’s teaching (especially the church’s teaching on various aspects of sexuality) have dramatically broadened and deepened our understanding of the Catholic past. Further, such studies have finally done justice to the call (first issued during the 1960s) to move beyond “elites” to examine the lives of the vast majority of Catholic faithful – that 99 percent of believers without whom, as Cardinal Newman wryly remarked over a century ago, the church would look pretty silly.

I would never want to imply that the application of such approaches to the Catholic past has been anything but a boon to the discipline. Having said that, however, I must confess to have two major concerns about the privileging of those approaches in the academy: first, I confess to a fear of a loss of “normativity” in narrating the Catholic past. An uncritical reading of some of the most famous of the studies published in the past thirty years might lead to a sense that there was no significant difference between a “Catholic’s view” and a “Catholic view.” That is, some studies of the United States Catholic past lend themselves to a fairly uncritical view that everyone’s “take” on Catholic Christianity was somehow equally valid in understanding Catholicism’s history in the United States. This strikes me as a potentially dangerous – and actually untrue – position to take in narrating a religious tradition that (at least for the last millennium) has emphasized the hierarchical nature of its take on Christian truth. In narrating a decade famous for its social, political, and intellectual upheavals, I sought a narrative voice that quite consciously privileged “official” debates about issues roiling the community. This was because of my belief that some debates were intrinsically more important than others, not only because of the ideas being debated, but because of the people doing the debating. By confessing to a fear of “loss of normativity,” then, I mean a fear that giving all Catholics the same amount of “play” implies (incorrectly, I think) that everyone has the same right to offer an opinion, and that all the resulting opinions rested on a level playing field. I actually think that this is a mistaken approach to narrating the community’s religious past, as I would thus argue that the debates between Rome and Charles Curran were, in fact, more important in understanding the Catholic discussion about sexuality than the concerns of Pat and Patty Crowley – however important those latter concerns undoubtedly were.

Second, my decision to utilize the “history of ideas” approach was also based in a decision to approach the Catholic “long sixties” from the standpoint of historical theology, and not church history or religious history. The latter two historical disciplines (quite obviously) play a crucial role in helping us understand the Catholic community’s presence in North...