In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • The Transformation of American Catholicism: The Pittsburgh Laity and the Second Vatican Council, 1950–1972
  • Martin E. Marty
The Transformation of American Catholicism: The Pittsburgh Laity and the Second Vatican Council, 1950–1972. By Timothy Kelly. (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 2009. xv plus 353 pp.).

Sociologist Everett Hughes liked to say that everything which has happened “sociologically” has happened to the Roman Catholic Church. That observation is a bit too sweeping, but a sample of that “everything” is featured bare in this study of response to one event in one diocese during twenty-two years of change. Scholars as adept as Hughes, a pioneer in Catholic sociological endeavors, know enough about the diachronic aspects of history to realize and account for the fact that fits-and-starts events shift the terms of life in every circumstance. The Second Vatican Council was a massive fit, in the eyes of its critics, and an exciting start, in the vision of its supporters. Both sets of eyes belonged to individuals and groups in the Pittsburgh diocese, and Saint Vincent College professor Kelly empathically and, so far as I can tell, accurately represents them.

Since I have a generally positive response to Kelly’s work, I should demonstrate my credentials as a critical historian and point to two distortions or deficiencies. One has to do with the title, which is qualified or redeemed by a very accurate sub-title. This is not The Transformation of American Catholicism but a Pittsburgh peep-hole toward a national landscape or churchscape. That is to say, “the” transformation would look vastly different had he focused on Boston, Santa Fe, Honolulu, or the many other dioceses which adjusted to and often resisted change. The main contribution of Kelly’s book instead is its close-up meticulous description which can set up sociologists, historians, theologians [End Page 518] and, yes, “the Laity” in general for comparative work with those many other places. We would be well-served were more historians to duplicate Kelly’s effort.

The other critique: his Chapter Five, which is the whole of Part Two, tells the story of the Council “in Rome and Pittsburgh.” The half-chapter on Rome offers too much and/or two little. “Too much,” because it is a very conventional repeating of standard histories of the Council, of which there are many. “Too little,” because Kelly fails to isolate distinctive features in the Rome narrative as they affected Pittsburgh. The Rome story is routine, lifeless, almost a Cliff Notes version of what in other accounts is exciting as they build suspense. The main Council characters were, let us say, real characters, and one needs some quotations and descriptions to become involved in the story. We do not meet them here.

For the rest, the book is well-cast and helpful. The author gives thirty pages or more to “materialism” and uses the term in the first chapter heading, “Pittsburgh Catholics and the Materialist Crisis.” He does carefully define: “In the terms of Catholic discourse, ‘materialism’ was a way of viewing human experience that denied the primacy of each individual’s spiritual dimension.” It denied the “the existence of the supernatural realm,” and often “simply made the physical so dazzling as to cause people to lose sight of their spiritual dimension.” Sometimes Kelly has to stretch the concept to cover some of the events and trends when something other than such materialism challenged the church. But whoever has had to fish for blanket terms such as “secular” or “worldliness” will sympathize and give Kelly a pass on this choice.

His case studies include stories of how Catholics put energies into anti-Communist crusades which, for a time, led to a pooling of energies throughout the diocese, along with the decline of “devotionalism,” which meant a spending of many declining energies. He carefully measures all this with charts and graphs based on conscientious surveys. A chapter on the dialectic between being separate and opening the Catholic ghetto is much to the point. So much for the pre-conciliar Church, in chapters which reinforce a thesis of the book: that much of the change which is often explained as a result...

pdf

Share