American Church: The Remarkable Rise, Meteoric Fall, and Uncertain Future of Catholicism in America by Russell Shaw (review)

Russell Shaw is a prolific author, journalist, and right-of-center commentator on things Catholic.

His recent outing in American Church is a jeremiad centering on the question: Has the narrative of assimilation for American Catholics yielded a positive dividend for the church in the contemporary cultural context? His subtitle phrases "Meteoric Fall" and "Uncertain Future" suggest his response.

Shaw's story is historical in scope, conversational in tone, and anecdotal at points about his student years at Georgetown University.

Scholars of Catholicism in America will find little new information here. What readers in general will find – especially mavens of the Catholic culture wars – is a hermeneutic that interprets the situation in the church over the last half century in a narrative of decline and ecclesial implosion, and one clearly guarded about constructive dialogue with the world.

American Church has a foreword by Archbishop Charles J. Chaput, O.F.M. Cap., and is divided into four chapters. The first addresses the "Gibbons Legacy," the historical drive led principally by Cardinal James Gibbons to transform the immigrant church and Americanize American Catholicism. Shaw highlights Gibbons's assimilationist initiatives, the Brownson-Hecker debates over the issue, and how related tensions played out in the modernism/Americanism controversies of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The second chapter extols the virtues of Catholicism's triumphal era through mid-twentieth century, notably the strong community life, cultural identity, and organizational vitality earmarking the day.

Chapter three focuses on what Shaw considers the "worst year ever" (144) in the church in America – 1976. This perfect storm included the Call to Action conference, an "explosion of dissent," a discarding of too much of what had previously been emphasized, and growing division among the American hierarchy. Shaw is especially adverse to the "historical consciousness" that captured the sensibility of many post-Vatican II Catholics. He chides Catholic educational institutions and the "problematic" aspects of the Land O'Lakes document regarding the compromise of Catholic identity. Shaw is equally blunt in his critique of John F. Kennedy's 1960 bend-over-backwards speech to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association – an address he deeply implicates in eviscerating Catholicism's public presence.

The last chapter of American Church continues the "Down, down, down . . ." (182) trope, selectively drawing on contemporary sociological research (Davidson, D'Antonio, Carlin). Where Shaw entertains the possibilities of positive transformation, he believes that it will come with the emergence of a new Catholic subculture with a "strong, clear Catholic identity" – although one that wisely (in this reviewer's mind) resists cooptation by the political and cultural far right, that takes the Hispanic realities of the church into consideration, and that is purged of clericalism and secrecy. The role of the laity in the new evangelization is also key. How Shaw's vision of the "deepening" of the interior life and "stern ascesis" (209) plays out in this revitalization process remains obscure.

While not a scholarly work, per se, American Church is a serious exposition on the challenges and opportunities facing the church in the United States, especially the question of whether or not crisis has tipped into irreversible decline. Shaw's thinking resonates with right-side Catholic commentary on the question, but the tone is polite and devoid of self-righteous acrimony and name-calling.

Shaw is certainly correct that the breakdown of the insular (predominantly ethnic) Catholic subculture combined with a more dystopian social landscape and a long-term cultural shift in which an aggressive secularism – rather than an antagonistic Protestantism – has changed the historical gestalt for the church today. This calls for a recalibration of Catholicism's church/sect drama and a re-tooling of the tradition's now all too porous boundaries.

There is little in American Church, however, that suggests a different reading of the current situation; one, for example, that sees the tradition being creatively re-appropriated...