Latino Catholicism: Transformation in America’s Largest Church (review)

In his newest book, the noted theologian and historian Timothy Matovina has produced a sweeping and comprehensive history of United States Latino Catholicism. He offers a definitive history of United States Latino Catholics’ lived histories, and emphasizes the necessity of integrating these histories with non-Latino Catholics’ histories. The result of such integration, he shows, is a richer, more diverse, and more historically accurate rendering of United States Catholic lives, practices, and histories. Matovina recognizes commonalities among United States Catholics as much as he understands and honors the unique contributions and challenges of each immigrant and ethnic group. Latino Catholics are neither privileged nor are they marginalized in this book. Their cultural and theological histories are recognized as essential components to a larger and more comprehensive portrait of United States Catholicism. Latino Catholicism is a must read for scholars in United States religious history, United States Catholicism, and Latino Studies as it provides an imaginative look at how United States Catholicism can be written in a comprehensive way that includes multiple voices and perspectives, and as such serves as a model of how other traditions can be reimagined and remapped.

In Latino Catholicism, Matovina painstakingly details how U.S. Latino Catholic history has impacted the historical, sociological, and anthropological dimensions of United States Catholicism more broadly. Moreover, he introduces historical vignettes that have gone unnoticed or unexamined by scholars of both Catholicism and religious history in the United States, and uses these stories to challenge the way Latino Catholics’ experiences have been pushed to the periphery of the broader historical and cultural landscape of United States religious history. For example, Matovina opens the book with the 1884 murder of the Franciscan Father José Antonio Díaz de León in east Texas, to highlight the very real challenges Latino Catholics faced from non-Catholics and Anglo-Americans. Matovina introduces stories such as the murder of Father Díaz de León to show how United States Latino Catholics’ experiences are inextricably linked to United States Catholics’ histories more broadly. The murder of this particular priest was during a time of intensive anti-Catholicism that swept the nation. Most scholars and teachers of United States Catholicism know about the burning of the Ursuline convent in 1834 and we have assigned and taught selections from Rebecca Reed’s 1835 Six Months in a Convent as well as Maria Monk’s more famous 1836 anti-Catholic piece The Awful Dislosures of Maria Monk in our classes, to elucidate how and why anti-Catholicism spread so rapidly in the mid-late nineteenth century. What Matovina asks us to do in this beautifully written and crafted book on Latino Catholicism, is to think about Latino Catholic histories in a new way. We need not teach separate sections on Latino Catholics nor devote separate chapters in our books on Latino Catholics, but work toward integration in teaching and scholarship. I plan to assign Latino Catholicism in the first graduate course on United States Catholicism that I teach at the University of Iowa in the fall, and encourage colleagues in United States Catholic Studies to assign this book and to discuss the important ramifications of integration with their students.