Recovering American Catholic Inculturation: John England's Jacksonian Populism and Romanticist Adaptation (review)

Peter Guilday's The Life and Times of John England(New York) appeared in 1927. Fifty-five years later, Patrick Carey published An Immigrant Bishop: John England's Adaptation of Irish Catholicism to American Republicanism(Yonkers, NY, 1982). Between these two studies of John England (1786–1842), the Second Vatican Council intervened. Another study of England twenty-six years after Carey's suggests that shifts comparable to Vatican II may have occurred in the U.S. Church. The book under review makes no claim to replace Carey or Guilday. In fact, it relies heavily on them. It has the more theological intent of treating England under the rubric of inculturation, a category introduced by Pedro Arrupe, S.J., in 1978. Inculturation implies a twofold process of adaptation and transformation (implying critique) by which the Christian message and life come to dwell in a culture on the model of the Incarnation (Jn. 1). In the author's view, since the time of Carey's study, Catholicism has become "more cautious and fearful" (p. 26) and "ecclesio-centric" (p. 46). Irresponsible "sectarian" (e.g., pp. 103, 147) critics of modernity in the United States illustrate theology's recent "devolution" (p. 214) and dismiss the tradition of adaptation represented by England as mere Americanist accommodation. Bishops such as England are not likely to be appointed. Hence the need for "recovering American Catholic inculturation" of which the author takes England as a model. Based on conjecture, the term Romanticistin the title seems misplaced.

In the four central chapters of his study, McNeil offers a compelling portrait of England as a creative pastoral leader. He locates England in a minority at the margins of English-occupied Ireland prior to 1820, when he came to the United States, and subsequently as a Catholic pastor in the predominantly Protestant South. It is from the margins, he argues, that creative leaders come. To the trustee controversy that England inherited, he responded in 1823 with a constitution for his diocese. Despite a traditional ecclesiology, England had the practical wisdom to submit to the "moral authority" (pp. 148, 224) of the laity. A student of C. S. Peirce, McNeil takes England as a model of pastoral pragmatics whose esthetic sense allowed him to transcend the limits of his abstract theology. The small and scattered Catholic population of his diocese required England to travel and engage with the political culture of the southern Democrats. The heart of this study is McNeil's detailed commentary on the final 1839 text of England's constitution, a fusion of politics and ecclesiology most creatively expressed in Charleston's annual diocesan convention. Calling on a political scientist, Philip Pettit, McNeil argues that England's constitutionalism is not a form of rationalist individualism, but a genuine adaptation to Jacksonian republicanism with many precedents in Christian tradition. He acknowledges that England "egregiously erred" (p. 203) on slavery, a consequence of a view of the spiritual and the temporal that tended to silence the Church's prophetic voice.

Can a theoretical concept from theology enrich historical work? McNeil does not engage the substantial literature on inculturation, so the reader is left to wonder if England's prophetic failure on slavery should diminish his stature as a model of inculturation. The author punctuates this study with frequent references to "sectarian" critics, chiefly Michael Baxter and David Schindler. The theology of nature and grace McNeil presumes is far from settled. Although his adversaries are not the theocrats he supposes, they would not only offer an account different than the author's of how our world is graced but also read the signs of the times differently.

This book comes with an index of names and a bibliography, but is in dire need of a copyeditor. The cover's handsome portrait of a dashing England captures McNeil's portrayal of him. It will be welcomed by students of...