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

Summary Review

The venerable heritage of U.S. Catholic history has been enriched by approaches that feature great figures, institutions, movements, theology and ideas, and ethnic groups. Recent historiography has expanded to attend to the interiority, perspectives, and piety of the general membership of the community. This is an important development, giving us a window into the prayer life of Catholic Christians in the last century and a half since the nineteenth-century immigrations. This author documents the discontinuities and continuities that feed into a future “in a world where the life of prayer will be even more dramatically marked by informal, independent, lay-centered initiatives capable of feeding an enduring hunger for contact with God” (183).

The chronology takes on the familiar periodization: 1) Immigrant emergence in the nineteenth century; 2) American century twentieth-century acculturation; 3) mid-century assertive crusading spirit; 4) second half century coming of age, secular and Vatican II response; and 5) end of the century pluralization, polarization, with its personal and political fragmentation. In all of this the author discerns a deepening spiritual appropriation of the faith in prayer by the lay faithful as a democratization process that, from centralized, authoritarian, post-Vatican I, immigrant devotional life; to the partisan pro-life, anti-clerical Voice of the Faithful, social activism, charismatic diversity of the twentieth century, which places the center of the Christian faith and prayer in Catholic’s relationship with God; whatever the accompanying devotional vehicle, ecclesiastical framework, or disposition of authority and ecclesial credibilities.

In each era he selects various prayer themes for emphasis, which are more evocative and indicative, than scientific and descriptive of the whole community. For this reason, his book is as much an invitation to research, as it is a description of the resources available for understanding the five epochs he sketches so suggestively. This approach to history; rooted in the French Annales school, and Latin American popular religion, “bottom up,” liberation hermeneutics; is an important contribution to the growing U.S. historiographical task of mining the presuppositions and content of popular piety for understanding what is going on in society and church, whatever the ecclesiastics, pundits or theologians may say.

The first phase of this story outlines the contribution of the institutions and loyalty of the clergy to the peoples’ devotion, from whatever European tradition; and the pressures of an anti-Catholic ethos contributed to a prayerful, devotional solidarity that transcended old world diversities. However, this institutionally supported devotionalism, and its institutional loyalties instilled an internalization of Catholic piety that gave it an ironic independence of the institutionalized Catholic culture of the old world that enabled this emergence of lay Christian integrity. This form of piety would motivate an integration into, and transformation of American culture unimagined by those who nourished this prayerful independence and strength among lay American Catholics.

The second step, in early twentieth-century Catholicism, accounts how the increase in status and integration into the culture is accompanied by devotions that encouraged solitude and personal encounter with God and therefore a personalized lay piety. Devotions to the Little Flower and the Sacred Heart of Jesus also deepened a sense of family oriented and active, missionary engagement that empowered a generation of lay Catholic faithful as they struggled, through their unions and urban parishes. This community became an established part of the American landscape, and an irreversible American phenomenon that had its own influence on global Catholicism and its affirmation of the values of pluralism, religious freedom, and lay spirituality.

The mid-century assimilation, and assertive spirituality, typified here by Father Patrick Peyton’s Rosary Crusades, so adapted to contemporary media utilization and film celebrity; demonstrated a communal piety, ecumenical openness and cultural adaptation. This Crusade was as sophisticated as any of the media evangelists of the emerging Billy Graham generation or beyond. The author uses Dorothy Day’s Catholic Worker piety as a counterpoint and compliment. A rich...