What Parish Are You From? A Chicago Irish Community and Race Relations by Eileen M. McMahon (review)

book reviews145 PhiUp Gleason has written a stimulating and important book that makes a valuable contribution to understanding American CathoUc inteUectuaI culture in the first half of the twentieth century. Because it offers a thoughtful challenge to many contemporary interpretations of that past, it deserves a wide readership. "The post-Vatican II reaction against Neoscholasticism," the author summarizes, "has tended to blind recent commentators to the positive role it played Ui the second quarter of the twentieth century" during the "CathoUc Renaissance " (p. 17). Scholars and students of CathoUc higher education wUl welcome this useful reappraisal and find Ui it rich subjects for future research as they re-examine the various personaUties,institutions,movements,journals,and organizations that played key roles in the history of preconciUar CathoUc higher education. Gleason has propeUed us toward a new comprehension of a largely ignored aspect of that story. Gerald McKevitt, SJ. Santa Clara University WhatParish Are You From!'A Chicago Irish Community and Race Relations. By EUeen M. McMahon. (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky. 1995. Pp. Xu, 226. $32.95.) Throughout the years the CathoUc Irish have combatted the gibes and insults of a dominant and often-domineering Protestant-American culture,with the aid and concurrence of the CathoUc parish, Ui Chicago and elsewhere in the nation . CathoUc parishioners,from whatever parish, tackled die issue of their reUgious faith and then· struggle for social and poUtical justice, as a parish community. In this they were set apart from American society at large by what CathoUcs viewed to be the prevalent anti-CathoUcism and by theU local Irish ethnicity. EUeen M. McMahon in What Parish Are You From? traces the historical fortunes of one such Southwest Side Chicago parish, St. Sabina's, from its "prairie" foundation by Archbishop George W. Mundelein (1916), to the period of racial, white-black tension and the accompanying disappearance of the Irish parishioners into the distant suburbs in the 1960's and 1970's. This book is based on skillful delving into archdiocesan and parish archives and articles in CathoUc journals; a fit coUection of scholarly books on the subject; and, above aU, the author 's interviews with major participants. McMahon's oral history is splendid: thoughtful and sensitive, as she guides the reader through the often-raciaUy prickly material. The embourgeoisement of the Irish CathoUcs came about in the economic boom afterWorld War ?, enhanced by the G.I. BiU which gave white CathoUcs, among others, greater opportunities for skUled and professional jobs. By the mid-1950's the CathoUc Church in America was middle-class, not working-class as it had been earUer. McMahon leaves no doubt that it was the preponderance 146book reviews of blacks that caused the eventual dissolution of St. Sabina's Irish parish Ui the 1960's and '70's, not the embourgeoisement alone which made ethnic CathoUcs move to the far suburbs. She dates it precisely to August, 1965, when the murder of seventeen-year-old Frank KeUy by two black youths caused hundreds ofwhite famiUes to leave the parish. St. Sabina's became a predominandy Afro-American "community." Apart from a smattering of racism Ui the priesthood, the Uberal CathoUc clergy tried to broaden the horizons oftheir parishioners Ui these trying times. But Irish devotionaUsm did not demand a more encompassing social conscience . Locked into a "parish mentaUty," St. Sabina's ethnics were unable to achieve permanent integration. Despite liberal biases of the day of the 1960's, and the prejudice against the bonds of ethnicity (where the "white ethnic"was presumed to be an ardent racist), and the influences of Vatican CouncU II, the Irish neighborhood parish of St. Sabina, UteraUy disbanded itself. EUeen McMahon's book is profoundly disturbing and pessimistic and not uplifting at aU. The events portrayed by the author are historicaUy accurate. The decline of the parish in America is a precursor of the decline of CathoUc communaUsm , historicaUy at odds with American individuaUsm. The book leaves the reader flat. The final sentence is: "... the CathoUcs and the Irish have lost a vital aspect of theU ethnic heritage." Peter d'A.Jones University ofIllinois at Chicago Changing Witness: Catholic Bishops and Public Policy, 1917-1994. By...