Public Voices: Catholics in the American Context (review)

Public Voices: Catholics in the American Context. Edited by Steven M. Avella and Elizabeth McKeown. [American Catholic Identities: A Documentary History.] (Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books, 1999. Pp. xxiv, 375. $50.00 hardcover; $30.00 paperback.)

Christopher Kauffman is the general editor of the "American Catholic Identities" document series, and this book is one among its nine volumes. It is a first-rate resource for American Catholic History and Catholic Studies classes as they enter the academic mainstream, and should become the standard assignment for students in such courses.

The 109 documentary selections on Catholics in public life, linked by brief editorial comments to orient the reader, are weighted in favor of recent affairs. The eighteenth- and nineteenth-century selections are, in fact, quite conventional, including five from John Carroll, the first Catholic bishop in America, and four from Archbishop John Hughes of New York (plus a letter to him from Patrick Lynch). I sympathize with the editors' dilemma: Carroll and Hughes are more readable and rewarding than most of their Catholic contemporaries, especially on these political questions, and it's difficult to resist the temptation to lean heavily on them, as anthologies have done for a century. Still, a word about politics from Orestes Brownson or Isaac Hecker and a bit more from the nineteenth-century deep South would have added variety.

Two-thirds of the book deals with post-1920 issues and justly so, since Catholic engagement with national affairs is mainly a twentieth-century phenomenon. It is in this area that the book distinguishes itself. The familiar names show up again (notably the N.C.W.C.'s social action priest John A. Ryan, with five appearances) but now they are in the company of people we hear from less often, because our generation of Catholic historians is embarrassed to be reminded of them. In this category stands Cardinal William O'Connell of Boston (document 41), who writes in 1924 that Ryan, campaigning for the abolition of child labor, is "making straight for trouble as slyly as he can," that his objective is "nefarious and bolshevik," and that his ally, the Secretary of the National Council of Catholic Women, is "a rather impertinent specimen of modern social worker" (p. 149).

The editors ably represent Ryan's institutional approach to reform and Dorothy Day's more radical Catholic critique of capitalism (doc. 57). What is missing, however, is an example of the whole-hearted embrace of the American economic system which many Catholic leaders and parishioners showed through the mid-century decades. Not until the inclusion of Michael Novak's criticism of the Bishops' pastoral letter on the economy (1985--doc. 87) do readers encounter a thoroughly pro-capitalist Catholic. The section on race, likewise, illustrates the eagerness of Catholic leaders in the 1950's and 1960's to condemn segregation and discrimination (docs. 67-70), but omits the voices of Catholic segregationists, who were equally strident in upholding the old system.

By contrast, the various sides of the Communism controversy are well covered. Nearly all Catholics condemned Communism between the Russian Revolution and the Vietnam War and saw their church as the world's best antidote to the Red Menace. Some, like the diocesan priests of St. Augustine, Florida, did a little red hunting of their own (document 63 is their response to the N.C.W.C.'s "confidential questionnaire" of 1945 on Communist infiltration of schools, labor, and media) but others, like Bishop Bernard Sheil of Chicago, condemned the McCarthyite response to Communism in a rousing speech to the United Auto Workers (doc. 65). Some supported America's role in Vietnam (William Shannon's "The Case for the War" [doc. 75]) while others (the Berrigan brothers [doc. 73] and the Nine Trappist Abbots [76] condemned it, especially after 1968. The section on sex, contraception, and abortion is also as comprehensive as space permits, as are those on foreign policy and social justice.

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