American Catholics in the Protestant Imagination: Rethinking the Academic Study of Religion (review)

Sociologist Michael P. Carroll challenges historians of religion on the traditional interpretation of Catholic immigrants coming to North America. He doubts the interpretation of Charles A. Goodrich in his history of 1851, which proposed that Catholics were degraded by their historical ties to an inferior brand of Christianity, and thus were not suitable immigrants. Carroll contends that secular historians for the last 150 years adopted this historical model when writing immigrant history. He writes that ‘Protestant metanarratives’ set the historical environment determining the image of American Catholic immigrants as being more foreign and less than good Americans. From chapter to chapter, Carroll cleanses the historical air to make way for objective history. His research published elsewhere leads him inevitably to this conclusion.

Carroll corrects two misinterpretations and questions two others. He reviews the myth that Irish immigrants were historically devout Catholics coming to North America and demonstrates that both Protestant and Catholic Irish settled there. Owing to the absence of Catholic clergy in the American south, many Catholic settlers drifted into Protestant communities for fellowship. He also contends that the post-Famine Irish Catholics developed their devout Catholic culture in North America and founded staunch Catholic communities on the East Coast, the Midwest, and the California coast. Carroll writes that the type of Catholicism that ‘Irish American immigrants and their immediate descendants embraced was very similar to the type of Catholicism that the strong-farmer class in Ireland adopted,’ that is to say, it was functionally providing a national identity rather than devout Catholicism.

Carroll gives us an alternative look at Italian piety. He argues that Italian piety was formed in North America and was not a retread of Italian regional piety imported from Italy. Essential differences distinguished North American Italian piety from Italian. Italian Catholics in North America formed their own network of Italian-American parishes, Italian-American Madonnas, Italian-American patron saints, and Italian-American religious customs. Carroll calls on the authority of Silvano Thomasi to say that ‘the festas most popular with early immigrants were the ones with a pan-Italian, not a localized, appeal.’ Also, Carroll points out that Italian-American piety was distinct from Irish-American piety dominating American Catholic culture when the Italians arrived.

Carroll’s research on Acadian Catholics has led him to the conclusion that, after the Expulsion from Acadia by the British Army, the Acadians did not carry Gallican Catholicism to New Orleans. He doubts the romantic picture of Acadians as devout Catholics found in the famous poem ‘Evangeline’ published in 1856 by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. The Cajuns, after arriving in Louisiana, initiated their own practices of Catholicism, which were unique to them, but for Carroll there is ‘no evidence that Cajun males had ever exercised authority in the religious sphere.’

The fourth group of immigrants Carroll explores is Hispanic Catholics who arrived in the major us cities and throughout the south. He argues that their Catholicism was not carried lock, stock, and barrel from their home countries but created anew in the United States. Put under the historical microscope, Hispanic devotions and pilgrimages do not have a lengthy history but emerged after the Second World War in the United States. Their devotions are recent and specific to the needs and desires of Hispanic newcomers.

Carroll’s research raises questions about the traditional ideology of American historians, which has been tinged by the degradation narrative of history presuming Catholics to be less American. Carroll contends that Catholic newcomers in North America finding themselves in a new religious and political environment created a new brand of Catholicism that was unique to their circumstances in North America. Historians of religion will take note of Carroll’s provocative contentions and discover a more thoughtful understanding of American religious history.