Prayers of the Faithful. The Shifting Spiritual Life of American Catholics (review)

James P. McCartin, Assistant Professor of History at Seton Hall University, has written a spiritual history of twentieth-century American Catholicism. His thesis is that the practice of devotional prayer performed under the aegis of the recognized spiritual authority of clerics or bishops in the immigrant church at the beginning of the century gradually changed by the end of the century to an emphasis on personal spiritual authority, as Catholics appropriated "novel" ways to pray "that transcended the formal rites" of the immigrant church (3). Changing practice in prayer catalyzed an increasing spiritual autonomy. The author's initial examples given to illustrate his thesis contrast, on the one hand, a scene of parishioners gathered for communal prayers to Saint Anne led by the parish priest at the beginning of the twentieth century—in what anthropologists might identify as exhibiting "high role definition" with clear, hierarchical modes of relationship, which reflected a spiritual hierarchy of devotional practice. At century's end, on the other hand, we are shown a woman in the pre-dawn hours in a redwood forest in California, who pondered her previous spiritual and ecclesial life, felt profoundly that everything of her past fallen away, and in that experience prayed her first prayer. Both experiences were emotionally and religiously charged and touched deep wells of faith, one in community, one by oneself. But, McCartin argues, the seeds of the more recent experience were embedded within the earlier practices that featured affectivity. Public devotional prayer and its nourishment in parishes changed over time and reflected the social location of American Catholics over the century. In the underlying social and religious contexts, the reader observes Catholics move from an immigrant status to that of "integrated" Americans.

Against the background of summations or period overviews in American Catholicism, McCartin lays out and supports his argument with particular examples from newspapers, devotional manuals, and documentation from archdiocesan archives in San Francisco and Boston, the Paulist Fathers, Holy Cross Family Ministries, the California and New England Provinces of the Society of Jesus, the Sisters of the Presentation, San Francisco, Sisters of St. Joseph of Boston, as well as from expressions of the sacred reflected in architecture and media. The author's work continues the conversation begun by, among others, Ann Taves (External Devotions and the Interior Life, 1983), Joseph P. Chinnici (Living Stones, 1989), Robert Wuthnow (After Heaven. Spirituality in America since the 1950s, 1998), Robert A. Orsi (The Madonna of 115^th Street, 2002), and James O'Toole (Habits of Devotion, 2004), with respect to the interpretation and categorization of American Catholic religious practice. McCartin's insights have implications for theories of "reception," sacred place, and material culture, as well. From the field of psychology, Christopher G. White's, Unsettled Minds: Psychology and the America's Search for Spiritual Assurance, 1830-1940 (2009) could also be engaged in the conversation.

Authors need to include disclaimers, indicating just what they will or will not include. In this respect, McCartin indicates the story is not about all American Catholics, but centers on immigrant groups at the start of the twentieth century, which presumably would be the Irish, Germans, Eastern European and those who came from the Mediterranean basin. However, even of these, not all ethnic communities had the same reference points in relation to institutional spiritual authority. Italian immigrants, for example, tended to be anti-clerical, a carry-over from their experiences in Italy. The author mentions Hispanic Catholic practice, a group he did not include as "immigrant" in the first decades of the twentieth century, and notes that most of them practiced their devotions with "limited reference to the institutional church" (178). He cites this as an illustration of his thesis. However, that would have been true all along for Hispanics, who also had a quite different relationship as "immigrants" to the United States than did Europeans and Eastern Europeans.

What are the issues in spirituality that he investigates? Not...