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  • The American Catholic Revolution: How the ‘60s Changed the Church Forever
  • Leslie Woodcock Tentler
The American Catholic Revolution: How the ‘60s Changed the Church Forever. By Mark S. Massa, S.J. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010. 191 pp. $27.95.

I

Who doubts that the Catholic Church changed profoundly over the course of the 1960s? Ancient certainties crumbled, seemingly overnight, revealing an ecclesial landscape that was simultaneously exhilarating and deeply destabilizing. Doubts are still in order, however, when it comes to explaining this sea-change. We know in a general sense why it happened. Certain developments, evident in both Europe and North America, were obvious and necessary pre-conditions: rising levels of education among Catholics, escalating rates of social mobility, the concomitant erosion of hitherto insular Catholic sub-cultures. The various reforms of the Second Vatican Council, and especially the irenic discourse that marked its four sessions, clearly played a role. So did the turbulent political movements that largely defined the later years of the secular 1960s. But we do not yet fully understand how these various developments came together to generate change in the church that was more rapid and radical than anyone had anticipated. This is the very big problem Mark Massa’s slender volume is meant to address.

Massa approaches the problem as an intellectual historian, not dismissing the social factors just mentioned but apparently assuming that they have been adequately dealt with elsewhere. His task, he tells us, is to explore the “overarching ideas or ideologies” that gave “meaning and direction” to the events of the Catholic sixties (xiv). Of these ideas, as Massa sees it, none was more important for explaining [End Page 63] change than the sudden acquisition by Catholics of historical consciousness. “Many Catholics in 1964 lived in a hermetically sealed universe when it came to their faith and religious practices . . .” (xv). But once Council-mandated liturgical reform altered the allegedly changeless ritual of the Mass and Catholics were encouraged to engage in such hitherto-forbidden practices as ecumenical dialogue, even ordinary folks in the pews were more or less forced to think in historical terms. If the church could change, as it was so evidently doing, then it had presumably changed in the past and would do so in the future.

Massa opens his narrative with a brief summary of liturgical reform and its implementation. He does not focus on the particulars – how the laity were prepared (or not prepared) for the accelerating changes or how those changes were (or were not) explained theologically. He emphasizes instead the reform’s existential impact – the jolt it inevitably administered to the a-historical mind of the modal Catholic. But after this brief nod toward the pews, Massa’s narrative focuses almost exclusively on what a contemporary Protestant would have called church professionals. Four chapters are devoted, directly or indirectly, to priest-theologians, one to the Berrigan brothers, and one to the famous dispute in Los Angeles between Cardinal Francis McIntyre and the Immaculate Heart of Mary Sisters. Given his commitment to writing a “history of ideas,” Massa’s elite focus makes a good deal of sense. The lives of priests and vowed religious are defined by the church to an extent that is simply not true for most laity. They have particular reason to be articulate about ecclesial change and its meaning, not to mention readier access to Catholic publishing venues than most laity enjoy.

But engaging as Massa’s various chapters are, the largely missing laity do constitute a problem. Consider his two chapters on the birth control imbroglio, one of which discusses the American reaction to Humanae Vitae, the other of which concerns the closely-related controversy over Charles Curran’s employment at the Catholic University of America. Almost no lay voices are heard in these chapters, despite the laity’s self-evident investment in the question at hand. Perhaps this is what leads Massa to assert that the issuance of Humanae Vitae ignited the American Catholic debate over birth control – an assertion which is simply wrong. That debate was ignited almost four years earlier by theologically-literate laity, who soon emboldened an impressive roster of moral theologians to...

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