The American Catholic Revolution: How the ’60s Changed the Church Forever (review)

Summary Review

Mark Massa’s exploration of Catholics’ relationship with modern American culture, starting with articles, first appeared as a book in Catholics and American Culture: Fulton Sheen, Dorothy Day, and the Notre Dame Football Team (New York: Crossroad, 1999). With a multi-disciplinary approach, he addresses therein the 1945–1970 period in nine “episodes” to take “soundings” on a key figure or issue. His Anti-Catholicism in America: The Last Acceptable Prejudice (New York: Crossroad, 2003) takes a similar topical approach for a broad time frame but mostly post 1945.

In The American Catholic Revolution, Massa focuses on the 1960s. Taking his cue from Yves Congar’s remark, “something irreversible has happened and been affirmed in the Church,” (xi) in response to the bishops’ overwhelming approval—2,162 to 46—of Vatican II’s Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy, Massa concludes that the Council represents a “revolution” and not continuity from the past. The initial implementation of the constitution’s liturgical reforms in the United States on November 28, 1964 is the act that “would begin the American Catholic Revolution” (xi).

To explain the revolution, Massa invokes “historical consciousness” described as “recognition that everything changes, and that historical events and figures need to be contextualized within their specific times and culture in order to be understood” (xv). A related explanatory key is the “law of unintended consequences,” meaning “historical events have consequences separate from (and even sometimes quite opposed to) the intentions of the historical actors who set those events in motion.” These “unintended consequences are just as important as intended ones . . . and have the same historical validity.” While the intentions of Vatican II participants are important, their reforms “took on a life of their own, and their results cannot be judged simply by how closely they hewed to original intent.” Reform’s “dynamism . . . cannot be contained by initiators” (xvi).

From the era’s national context, Massa identifies “four seminal movements”: civil rights and feminist, and, labeled “protest movements,” free speech and opposition to U.S. military involvement in Vietnam. In addition, Catholics were “incorporating and balancing international with national loyalties in ways that were unique from the larger cultural story.” Likewise, the American Catholic Revolution was “a unique phase . . . focused on and conducted in the language of theology and religious belief,” not rights, cultural norms, or political ideology. “From first to last,” Catholics’ “belief and practice” defined debates related to their revolution (xii).

Massa’s account unfolds through eight chapters. The brief first chapter addresses “History of Catholic Time” to describe the sense of timelessness pervading the Catholic worldview up to the 1960s. For instance, the Mass was widely thought to be the same through the ages, and doctrine had no historical development.

Chapter Two on “Frederick McManus and Worship in the United States” addresses the contributions of a scholarly canon lawyer whose articles in Worship were “historically rooted, pastorally oriented, and canonically exact commentaries . . . [that] prepared the ground for the overwhelmingly positive reception” (25) of Vatican II’s liturgical reforms.

The high profile birth control controversy, addressed in Chapter Three, “Humanae Vitae in the United States,” presents Pope Paul VI’s teaching in his famous encyclical that for Catholic couples “each and every marriage act must remain open to the transmission of life” (31). Massa profiles differing views of encyclical’s defenders and critics. Several defenders including Pope John Paul II bypass the encyclical’s natural law reasoning in favor of other arguments. Critics find fault with the teaching for a variety of philosophical and theological reasons. Massa concludes “What all these postencyclical theological efforts reveal is a widespread sense, along a wide spectrum of Catholic moralists, that the older static and classical concepts and arguments from neoscholastic natural law could no longer provide a believable substructure for Catholic moral teaching” (48).

“The Charles Curran Affair” in Chapter Four recounts the famed moral theologian’s public dissent from the teaching...