Die katholischen Pfarrgemeinden in den USA in Geschichte und Gegenwart: Eine transatlantische Perspektive by Kai Reinhold, and: Katholische Kirche und Gemeindeleben in den USA und in Deutschland: Überraschende Ergebnisse einer ländervergleichenden Umfrage ed. by Kai Reinhold and Matthias Sellmann (review)

Many American historians examine U.S. Catholicism in light of European Catholicism, looking to the shores of Europe for insights into the former’s history and culture. The recent work of the “Crossing Over Project,” a transatlantic research initiative sponsored by the Theology Faculty of the Ruhr-Universität Bochum in Germany, shifts the focus back on U.S. Catholicism from a European perspective. Through the research of Kai Reinhold (Diocese of Essen), the initiative has collaborated with American scholars in the Chicago area, most notably the sociologist James D. Davidson of Purdue University. In 2006 the Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame conducted a new survey on U.S. Catholic parish life intended to update a national study from the 1980s, employing the aid of Davidson and Princeton Survey Research Associates. Upon learning of this project, Reinhold and his colleagues in Bochum sought to replicate the study for Catholicism in Germany. In particular, German Catholic scholars wanted to understand the dynamism of parish culture in America so as to revitalize parish life in Germany. The joint surveys gathered statistical data through phone questionnaires of a thousand registered parishioners in the United States and Germany respectively. The results provided key empirical findings for comparison and analysis on an international level, prompting the publication of the two works under review.

The first book is a revision of Reinhold’s 2010 dissertation on the historical development of parish life in American Catholicism. The work speaks to a rising interest among German Catholics in the history of U.S. Catholicism. With this intended audience in mind, Reinhold attempts to fill two lacunae in scholarship: a dearth of works in German on U.S. Catholicism and the absence of a historical narrative of the American Catholic parish that ventures beyond institutional history to incorporate the story and sensibilities of the parishioners themselves. For this joint task, the author divides the work into two parts. The first addresses the history and post–Second Vatican Council character of the American parish, and the second offers a brief comparative analysis based on the survey outlined above. In many ways, the author’s narrative in the first part stems from his research work at the University of Notre Dame, and thus it is little surprise that the reader consistently finds references to the work of Jay Dolan. Reinhold relies almost exclusively on a typology of parish development published by Dolan and Jeffrey Burns.¹ This typology traces a shift from the “congregational parish” of John Carroll and John England to the “devotional parish” of immigrant and early-twentieth-century U.S. Catholicism that finally emerges as a thoroughly “voluntary parish” after the reforms of the Second Vatican Council. There is much truth to this typology, but the author’s narrative seems to overemphasize this trend and neglects other expressions of voluntaryism in nineteenth-century American Catholicism. Although he acknowledges regional disparities in U.S. Catholicism, Reinhold’s analysis could further benefit from a closer examination of how parish participation varies according to region and ethnicity, especially amid the exponential growth of Latino Catholics in the American Southwest. Nevertheless, the book is a welcome study of parish life in the United States from a German perspective, and the American reader will be intrigued by Reinhold’s desire to introduce American Catholic models of stewardship and small communities into German Catholic parish life.

The second, edited work provides empirical support for Reinhold’s belief that German Catholics can learn from the...