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  • Catholic Borderlands: Mapping Catholicism onto American Empire, 1905–1935 by Anne M. Martínez
  • Thomas W. Jodziewicz (bio)
Anne M. Martínez, Catholic Borderlands: Mapping Catholicism onto American Empire, 1905–1935 (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2014). xviii + 293 pages.

While this is not an exceptionally lengthy monograph, it is a rather detailed, and critical view of what in diplomatic circles is sometimes referred to as “hitch-hiking imperialism.” The specific reference is to the apparent “me-too” tendencies of American activities in nineteenth-century China: the British would unceremoniously extract concessions from beleaguered Chinese officials, whether economic, political, or racial … and the United States would seem to be not too far behind, asking for the same considerations. And not having to feel too guilty in their own participation in imperialism since equivalence would seem to be a lesser imperious initiative. Built into this Anglo-American adventure in Asia was a good measure of racial superiority so that even American efforts to protect these foreigners and their property, and to bring them the Gospel through the zealous activities of Protestant missioners, carried an obvious taint of Western condescension. Much of the same story line can be discerned in this exploration of U.S. Catholic efforts to protect and to foster the faith in the “Catholic borderlands,” i.e., “former Spanish territories that had to find their respective places within a growing U.S. sphere of political, economic, and cultural influence in the first three decades of the twentieth century” (3). Very involved in this imperial growth, according to the author, was the newly-emerging U.S. Catholic Church, but especially the founder in 1905 of the Catholic Church Extension Society, Father Francis C. Kelley (1870−1948).

During his nineteen-year leadership of this American home mission enterprise headquartered in the activist Archdiocese of Chicago, Kelley led [End Page 105] an extraordinarily energetic and fruitful campaign to solicit funds to build churches and schools, and to support liturgical and evangelization efforts throughout rural America where an oftentimes forgotten twenty percent of the growing Catholic population could be found. Part of his vocation was the editing of Extension Magazine, a very popular Catholic publication that promoted Extension’s good work, but also served as a public and attractive voice for a religious group that had historically been quite unwelcome in the Protestant republic, but was now becoming a formidable presence in a Progressive and imperialist moment in U.S. history. Kelley’s Extension project was accordingly broadened in the face of Protestant missioners’ efforts to proselytize the American way, naturally to be marked by their Reformed Christianity, in the newly-acquired Philippines and Puerto Rico, as well as in neighboring Mexico. Whether as editor, fund-raiser, diplomat, lobbyist, or official representative of the exiled Mexican hierarchy, Kelley would work against the prospect of a loss of the Catholic faith in these “Catholic borderlands.” The author suggests that Kelley’s was a very complicated project: a sort of American Catholic “hitch-hiking imperialism” that did do good for the Mexican Catholic Church in the face of a sustained secular, anti-clerical assault associated with the Mexican Revolution beginning in 1910. Kelley especially had influence with the U. S. administrations in Washington, D.C., and the ear of Vatican officials. He was able at times to complicate the Mexican government’s implementation of anti-Catholic elements present in the Constitution of 1917. He was active, for example, in efforts to provide a haven for exiled Mexican Catholic clergy and religious, and even to help to create and fund a short-lived Mexican Catholic seminary in Castroville, Texas (1915−1918). When he left the Extension Society in order to serve as the bishop of Oklahoma (1924−1948), his legacy of involvement in the circumstances of Mexican Catholics, including the Cristero Rebellion (1926− 1929), was kept alive in efforts to encourage the U.S. government to attempt to accommodate Catholic liberties and the Mexican revolutionary agenda. The author acknowledges all of this, but the sub-text of the book elaborates more darkly on this American Catholic participation in the history of the Mexican Catholic Church and in Mexican politics:

The Extension Society’s...

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