Founding Father: John J. Wynne, S.J. and the Inculturation of American Catholicism in the Progressive Era by Michael F. Lombardo (review)

Mercurial even for those who carry the label "polyglot," Jesuit Father John Wynne (1859-1948) taught, edited, served as a shrine director, chaplain, vice-postulator or promotor of saints' causes, and founder or organizer of numerous American Catholic organizations (including the American Catholic Historical Association) between 1882 and 1948. Not since 1926, when he was feted for his fiftieth jubilee as a Jesuit, has there been any sustained attention given to the legacy left by this enterprising Catholic.

The present study is Lombardo's 2014 University of Dayton dissertation (now an open-access document), presented with only minor revision. it places Wynne in the thick of debates raging in the Progressive Era, but we see little of him in the years that follow. The book's biographical element trails off by the end of the 1920s. The focus is instead on Wynne's major projects: development of Catholic literacy as a hedge against unbridled liberalism; editorship of America magazine as a religious antidote to secular society; and the co-editorship of the Catholic Encyclopedia. Rather than capitulate to the age, during which many progressives were openly hostile to the Catholic Church, Wynne sought to make a space for Catholic engagement in public affairs even while promoting a well-defined separation between Church and state.

The author's somewhat meandering first chapters detail the very concept of progressivism and its implementation and relation to the Church between 1890 and the 1920s. A phenomenon in which Wynne lent his intellectual prowess, he defied its antireligious sentiments in print, especially its pragmatism and its wholesale embrace of modernity, as well as the muting of Catholic interests on questions of public policy. Among the latter was the American government's control of the Philippines and the problem of revising laws that adversely affected the Church. On the other hand, Lombardo urges, Wynne did not remain "isolated in an American Catholic 'ghetto'" (p. 14). By extension, he argues that "American Catholic intellectual life was not dormant during the first two decades of the twentieth century" (p. 14). Here he is in fundamental agreement with people like Thomas Woods, who have suggested that the Progressive Era stands as both a fertile and somewhat unexplored field of research in American Catholic history. On Lombardo's reading, Wynne is a leading figure among Catholic intellectuals in the United States. That is true enough, but one can hardly call him a band leader for the simple fact that there was hardly a band to conduct. American Catholic intellectuals, broadly defined as influential thinkers in their respective fields, were a lamentably small group, made up mainly of notable clergy, and largely removed from national or international significance. Given these lackluster circumstances, it is not hard to see how Wynne stands out as head and shoulders above his peers. indeed, as my own work has tried to show, it is one reason that postwar Catholic intellectuals looked askance at the Progressive era's arid landscape.

Perhaps the best contribution made by this book is Lombardo's history of the founding of America magazine. On this he leans on a licentiate thesis of the deceased Jesuit John Ciani (d. 1994), but also the America archives at Georgetown university. As Wynne ushered its transition from the Messenger of the Sacred Heart, and the shorter-lived Messenger, America was launched after careful planning, but principally on Wynne's terms and vision. It was "pedagogical" and meant to help readers in both "Catholic discernment and action in the world" (p. 257). Lombardo makes an appealing conclusion: the magazine was "a creative adaptation of Ignatian spirituality to the context of Progressive Era US Catholicism" (p. 257).

Lombardo's footnotes have a somewhat unconventional bearing. For many of the individuals he mentions or cites, whether living or dead, whether contemporaneous...