Faithful Passages: American Catholicism in Literary Culture, 1844-1931 by James Emmett Ryan (review)

This study examines the development of Catholic literature – broadly defined – over the course of nearly a century, beginning with "the nation's rapid development" of an "industrialized print culture" and "first significant wave of professional authorship" in the 1840s (3). While Ryan gives significant attention to the development of Catholic publishing in general, his five chapters are organized in relation to the careers of individual authors: the prolific convert Orestes Brownson; clergymen Isaac Hecker and James Gibbons; early novelists Jedediah Huntington and Anna Hanson Dorsey; and later fiction writers Kate Chopin and Willa Cather, who developed complex literary aesthetics in relation to Catholicism. Ryan's close attention to these authors and their texts is consistently informed by his awareness of broader patterns in social history – e.g., the explosive growth of Catholicism as a result of immigration, conversions, and the annexation of new territories. The study "aims to be mindful of lived religion" and of theological trends in this period even as it maintains a primary focus on "the ways that Catholicism came to be produced in rhetorical terms by a diverse array of American writers at work in an evolving commercial print culture" (7).

Ryan combines a deep knowledge of American literary and religious history with painstaking attention to differences in genres and modes of literary discourse. Hence his chapter on Huntington and Dorsey, who brought their zeal as converts to the writing of novels, demonstrates how they rejected the anti-Catholicism of the U.S. literary mainstream even as they followed that mainstream's essentially didactic bent, focusing largely on "the moral and religious world of woman characters" as they did so (84). Questions regarding gender provide a major unifying strand here. Ryan stresses Brownson's fear of an increasingly effeminized American culture – yet also that the work of Catholic writers has been wrongly "neglected or dismissed as irrelevant to American literary history" in much the same manner that "women's writing had been marginalized by scholarly opinion until the later twentieth century" (82). This affinity was perhaps sensed by Cardinal Gibbons as he employed literary devices developed by Protestant women who had created a "sentimental tradition" in American literature: his Faith of Our Fathers was, accordingly, a "sentimental catechism" that "figures the Catholic Church as a beautiful and yet suffering young woman, oppressed by Protestantism and in need of rescue by the faithful" (17). Appropriately, Ryan's study ends with consideration of Chopin and Cather, two women who have earned firm places in the American literary canon. Both of these literary modernists have richly complicated relationships to Catholicism that here receive precisely the kind of nuanced attention they deserve.

Meticulously researched, Ryan's pioneering and accessible work will be of interest to scholars in a variety of disciplines, providing an invaluable new perspective on the complex dialogue between Catholicism and American culture in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.