Pursuing a Field of Critical Catholic Studies

As co-chairs of the Roman Catholic Studies group of the American Academy of Religion (AAR), we have facilitated conference programs that featured insightful, eloquent scholars doing groundbreaking work in history and theology. Yet the conversation in sessions, especially after very strong papers, often was characterized by a nagging sense of irrelevance. Why were the only folks who attended sessions for Roman Catholic Studies primarily other folks in Roman Catholic Studies? Why did our sessions not draw a broader range of scholars? Was our field a specialized, esoteric conversation among the usual suspects, or did the study of Roman Catholicism have something distinctive to contribute to larger questions about religion and human culture, about violence, philosophical meaning, and human flourishing?

The steering committee of the Roman Catholic Studies Group decided to address this sense of intellectual marginalization directly, focusing the program of the 2013 annual meeting of the AAR around the concept of “critical Catholic Studies.” Our goal was to move beyond the standard “state of the field” appraisals toward a more robust (and potentially contentious) conversation about the forces, approaches, and assumptions that have limited the intellectual scope and heft of Catholic Studies. Inviting an interdisciplinary conversation, we asked scholars to consider what kinds of critical apparatus emerging in other fields might push against Catholic Studies and challenge it toward greater insight, clarity, scope. And – just as important – we asked scholars to identify specific theoretical issues, methodological approaches, and interpretive frameworks emerging from the study of Roman Catholicism that either enhance or challenge scholarly paradigms in Religious Studies. Our hope was to unearth those unique contributions Catholic Studies might bring to important scholarly discussions of gender, race, and imperialism, among others. The essays in this forum feature some of the most pointed and poignant voices of the excellent conversation that resulted.

The sense of intellectual isolation that scholars in Roman Catholic Studies experience is not just an academic inferiority complex. We (Jeannine and Amy) both have separately written essays that explored the complex relationship of Catholic Studies as a subfield to broader fields of religious history and systematic theology. There are concrete dynamics in the historical development of Religious Studies as a field that have contributed to the internalist orientation of our scholarly community. These dynamics continue to shape the intellectual conversations we have and the institutions that house and facilitate them. As a point of orientation to the essays that follow, it is worth pausing for a moment to survey the position Roman Catholic Studies occupies in the contemporary academy.

While there is no consensus on what constitutes ‘Catholic Studies,’ there is a history to the discipline and a pattern that has emerged in well-trod paths of scholarship about Catholic history, theology, culture, and ethics. In historical perspective, the field of Catholic Studies has often exhibited the tendency toward seeking the distinctiveness of the discipline – searching for ‘the Catholic difference’ as a way of affirming either disciplinary boundaries or Catholic identity. “From the 1940s to the 1980s scholarship on American Catholicism was structured by a dialectic in which the history of Catholic institutions and Catholic experience in the United States was alternately framed by two apparently conflicting interpretive paradigms: Catholic exceptionalism and American assimilation. Some scholars emphasized the uniqueness or superiority of American Catholicism on the American religious landscape. Other historians . . . suggested that Catholics fit with and even best exemplified certain characteristics of American religion and culture.”³ These dominant, dualistic paradigms gave way in the 1990s to historiography that focused on ‘Catholic distinctiveness.’

In theological writing, ‘Catholic’ is frequently constituted by way of boundaries and distinction from what is not Catholic. Likewise there can often be an elevated sense of ‘Catholic’ (as “leaven in the world” or lives that follow Jesus) that reflects a “desire to hold up Catholic identity as something that positively sets apart the collective from the broader social and cultural milieu.” ⁴ As a discipline in a political landscape concerned about ‘Catholic identity,’ Catholic Studies can also be informed by expectations of church hierarchy and donors. The possibility that Catholic Studies...