A History of the Catholic Church in the American South, 1513–1900 (review)

This book is important because of its subject matter, one infrequently written about - Roman Catholics in the South. It spans from 1513 to 1900, while its method is traditional, institutional history. The author calls the work “a synthesis.” Based on secondary sources, the book cites any primary sources from either published volumes of primary sources or from quotations in secondary sources. The author demarcates the South as the eleven States of the Confederacy, plus Maryland, West Virginia, Oklahoma, and Kentucky, plus the District of Columbia.

Beginning with Ponce de León’s sighting of Florida in 1513, the book’s three major sections cover the Colonial Period (1513–1763), the European Decline and American Republican Period (1763–1845), and Resistance, Rebellion, Reconstruction, and Regionalism (1845–1900). One could quibble about the author’s choice of dates for each period. Why not start with the establishment of the first parish in St. Augustine in 1565, rather than the sighting of Florida in 1513? Although the author states (252) that “the year 1845 proved to be a watershed for southern Catholicism,” he fails to make a clear case for why this is so. Also, why not stop with the beginning of the United States engagement in World War I in 1917, rather than 1900, a date which seems to have no specific significance other than it is the start of a new century?

The book’s strength, as well as its weakness, is its comprehensiveness. This is a massive treatment of the institutional development of the Catholic Church throughout the entire region - no small feat. The author’s skillful narrative weaves the reader through all the periods and all the dioceses without creating a sense of being dislocated from one place and period to another. But, all of the names begin to read like a Russian novel. The author wants to include every episcopal figure of every southern diocese, with the details associated with their tenure, including a brief biography of each. It gets a bit tedious, even if the reader is familiar with most of the names. It could be downright confusing for someone with less acquaintance with the episcopal players. For the most part, it is left to the reader to determine who and what is of most significance, which leads to the book’s greatest weakness - its lack of judicial analysis and historical imagination. Even in the places where the author tries to analyze statistics, the reader can easily get lost in the sauce of numbers. The author tries to make up for this deficiency in his final chapter on “Migrations, Movements, and Ministry, 1845–1900.” It is more thematic, less concerned with individual bishops, more statistically analytical. Themes such as: lay trusteeism, immigration, slavery, politics, and the role of religious women are also covered. However, it may be too little too late.

Although the author presents no new thesis or interpretive framework to help us understand the shape and style of Southern Catholicism, he does suggest some important concepts which could be further developed by historians: the uniqueness of Louisiana Catholicism; the effects of decolonization on Catholicism; the movement of the Irish in the South from being a tiny alien minority grappling with slaves for menial jobs to Confederate patriots who identified with the South and the Confederacy (both the war and the Lost Cause).

The value of this book is that it is the first comprehensive study on Southern Catholicism, which takes into account many of the secondary works of a more topical or regional nature. As James Hennesey, SJ, did for United States Catholicism in American Catholics, Woods does, using a similar methodology, for Southern Catholicism. The key question still to be addressed is what is unique about the Southern Catholic experience and how does that fit into the national narrative of American Catholicism? Wood’s largely leaves those questions to future historians, but his grand synthesis will be an...