Church and Revolution: Catholics in the Struggle for Democracy and Social Justice by Thomas Bokenkotter (review)

BOOK REVIEWS General Church and Revolution: Catholics in the Strugglefor Democracy and Social Justice. By Thomas Bokenkotter. [Image Books.] (New York: Doubleday. 1998. Pp. xii, 580. $15.95 paperback.) How did the Catholic Church become a staunch defender of human rights in the late twentieth-century world, after having spent the nineteenth century in emphatic denunciations of the French Revolution and its "rights of man"? A seasoned historian proposes to cast light on this question chiefly by presenting a series of biographical portraits that illustrate his subtitle. "Lives and times" are what the reader finds here, presented with great care for factual accuracy and balanced judgment. Though highly selective, it is not a gallery only of heroes and champions of human dignity: alongside of Daniel O'Connell, Frédéric Ozanam, Luigi Sturzo, and Dorothy Day one finds Monsignor Umberto Benigni (1862-1934), whose campaigns for the social ideals of Leo XIII, as he understood them, and against political democracy, led him eventually to adopt a clerico-fascist stance. The temporal and geographical range of the figures treated is broad. The sixteen chapters go from Lamennais and companions in the first generation of Liberal Catholics to Oscar Romero's martyrdom in 1980 and Lech Walesa's contemporary "revolution." France (Albert de Mun,Jacques Maritain, Emmanuel Mounier) and Ireland (O'Connell, Michael Collins, and Eamon de Valera) are prominent. Italy has its pair as noted, while England is represented by Cardinal Manning; Germany (only) by (Karl Marx and) Konrad Adenauer. The need to sketch the appropriate context for each life excluded any attempt at blanket coverage of all the interesting and significant Catholics prominent in the human rights struggles. Performing feats of condensation, the author vividly and not uncritically portrays the predicaments of his protagonists. In the chapter on Adenauer, for instance, he makes excellent use of Noel D. Cary's Path to Christian Democracy (1996) and provides enough of the history of Germany and the Center Party to put Adenauer's accomplishments in context. The popes of the era do not appear on center stage, either; Leo XIII and Pius X are accurately if briefly described in the chapter on Benigni; as is Pius XI in 261 262BOOK REVIEWS connection with Don Sturzo. The contributions of Rerum Novarum, Quadragesimo Anno, the Second Vatican Council, and John Paul II are recognized, but the plan of the work is not to deal with "the Catholic Church" (often equated with the hierarchy, as on p. 569), but with some striking figures of social and political "Catholicism." Such limits make sense; a good deal of material, relatively speaking, is available on the modern papacy. The book is a particularly welcome addition to Catholic studies for instructional purposes. Though lacking a bibliography or "suggestions for further reading ," it has a good, if less than exhaustive index; its footnotes are well placed (at the bottom of the page) and adequate, while kept to a useful miriirnum. Its limpid style and modest price should help assure it broad use. Paul Misner Marquette University Dizionario degli Istituti di Perfezione. Edited by Guerrino Pelliccia and Giancarlo Rocca. Vol. LX: "Spiritualità-Vézelay." (Rome: Edizioni Paoline. 1997. Pp. xxvi, 1,960; 17 colored plates.) These truly monumental volumes, undertaken in the wake ofVatican Council II in 1968, ambition covering all monasticism, religious Orders, and analogous movements, not excluding non-Catholic and Asian analogues, from the Early Church to the present day, from a largely historical perspective, including themes, mentalities, theologies, and movements, in comprehensive scope. Its riches are so varied and sometimes unexpected under their Italian indicators that we Anglophones must hope for ample multilingual indexes at the end. Major themes can amount to small books, as with Historiography of religious life (77 columns), the role of Study including libraries (85 columns), Third Orders both regular and secular (81 columns), or Virginity (56 columns). Generous space is also accorded Theater, monastic Taxes, Trent on religious life, Theology, and concepts such as Spouse of Christ, State of Perfection, Tonsure, and the process and history of Leaving (Uscita). Some entries are particularly contemporary: the problem of an aging population in Orders (Terza Eta), the pros and cons of the Third Way as...