Confidence & Crisis: A History of the Archdiocese of Milwaukee, 1959-1977 by Steven M. Avella (review)

In 1959, the year Steven Avella begins his history of the Archdiocese of Milwaukee, every available metric – seminarians (669); waves of new construction projects; students in Catholic schools (113,000) – hailed the Archdiocese’s considerable institutional presence. Over the next five years, the archdiocese, as Avella lucidly charts with several numeric tables, witnessed institutional growth. By 1977, the year Avella closes his study, contraction had occurred on all institutional fronts: schools consolidated, the ranks of ordained declined sharply, and donations slowed.

What happened? The Catholic Church in Milwaukee was remade by a convergence. The aftershocks of civil rights disputes; the decline of urban industry and well-paying union jobs; and departures for the suburbs all attenuated the institutionalized church, especially its urban presence. But Crisis and Confidence shows that while Catholicism in southeastern Wisconsin changed substantially, a Catholicism less institutionally fortified but still spiritually creative took shape and remains today. Catholic education, for example, shifted from quantity to quality: in 1959, Catholic schools had a student-to-teacher ratio of 43:1. By 1969, that ratio was 28:1. A hunger for Scripture emerged as a vibrant form of piety. The archdiocese had 300 permanent deacons laboring in its vineyards as of 1972. And institutions have persisted: an impressive array of Catholic colleges and universities, survivors of the institutional contraction, dot the archdiocesan landscape.

Crisis and Confidence is a social history, or as Avella calls it, “a confession of faith in diocesan history,” that juggles many narratives and, in so doing, provides the field of American Catholic history with several worthwhile contributions. Avella offers historians an important case study of the impact the Second Vatican Council had on a particular place. Vatican II had a lasting effect on Milwaukee-area Catholics. Archbishop William Cousins pondered the universality of the church; collegiality gained traction; seminarians sported long hair; and Catholic children took Holy Communion before making a first confession. Many things previously taboo became standard fare.

Most importantly, Crisis and Confidence recovers the Catholic roots of Milwaukee’s famous priest-activist James Groppi. Avella understands Groppi, ordained in 1959, to be a product of institutional Catholicism. His first interactions with African Americans, which Avella sees as crucial to Groppi’s initial break from an otherwise semi-racist Catholic milieu, came at Father Stephen’s Day Camp, a summer camp for African American boys. Work at the camp and other institutions, part of a broader mid-century Catholic strategy of integration through education, foregrounded and shaped Groppi’s prophetic protesting. Groppi, like other priestly products of late 1950s institutional Catholicism, had a mission to teach the truth, as revealed by God to the Catholic Church: Groppi’s original forays into the Civil Rights Movement, extending from this mission, were efforts to “convert African Americans.” Avella shows how his march from Selma to Montgomery radicalized Groppi’s pre-existing, Catholic-inflected activism, convincing Groppi to undertake direct action in Milwaukee. Avella is persuasive in recovering the influence of institutional Catholicism on Groppi’s activism, smartly reading Groppi’s later critiques of the church against the grain. Groppi, for better or worse, was the product of a confident institutional Catholicism.

Avella gracefully weaves the biography of Archbishop William Cousins throughout Crisis and Confidence. Placing Cousins in the turbulent context of the times, Avella describes the archbishop’s leadership style as “on the one hand/on the other hand.” Cousins, an apt administrator and a fine manager, achieved only an ambiguous public presence. Cousins did not ask Groppi to cease his many marches but neither did Cousins draw upon the marches to denounce Catholic racism. Avella faults Cousins for “letting the racial attitudes of his flock go unchallenged” and he briefly speculates on how Cousins’s “temperamental dispositions to go easy on priests” allowed the archbishop to maintain a sunny disposition even in the face of revelations about sexual abuse.

Crisis and Confidence is a superlative...