In Missouri’s Wilds: St. Mary’s of the Barrens and the American Catholic Church, 1818 to 2016 by Richard J. Janet (review)

Richard Janet takes the main issue head on at the beginning of In Missouri’s Wilds: how does one write an in-depth specific history of an institution with enormous importance to a limited number of scholars while still producing something useful to colleagues across the broader fields and subfields of Catholic history?

His subject, St. Mary’s of the Barrens, is in truth suffuse with importance and potential for any historian of American Catholicism. The fourth Catholic seminary founded in the American Catholic church, St. Mary’s served as the mother house of American members of the Congregation of the Mission from its formation in 1818 until various difficulties forced the move of the Vincentian formation program to St. Louis in 1862. Reopened in 1888, the seminary continued in support of the Western Province of the order following the division of the American Province that year. Formation activities ceased in 1985, but St. Mary’s continues today as the National Shrine of Our Lady of the Miraculous Medal, a status held since 1929. The institution occupies a space straddling the history of Catholicism in the American South and the early West, the structuring of early Catholic communities, and the shifting fortunes of American Catholicism within the Catholic world and Catholicism within American society.

Janet seeks to specifically place St. Mary’s within an historiographical context that situates the seminary within a larger discussion of the evolution of American Catholicism. This results in an interesting shift in the book’s structure partway through, as Janet transitions from discussing the role the seminary played as a frontier vanguard of American Catholicism in the nineteenth century to the changing realities of the American role in the global church in the decades leading up to Vatican II. Key questions are addressed: What does an American Catholic institution look like in the early nineteenth century, and how soon does such an attempt at categorization fail in the face of diverse and challenging local experiences? How did the rising tide of American influence within the church throughout the twentieth century manifest in the fortunes of this institution, and what led to steep changes shortly afterwards?

Answers provided tend to dwell on the immediate, focusing on leadership decisions and reactions to changing local conditions in Missouri and within the Vincentian order. The result is a trove of valuable information, including context on the finances of St. Mary’s at various given times and extensive coverage of internal discussions on the management of the seminary, that offers valuable material for Janet’s fellow scholars to digest. Thematically, the author ultimately offers us the importance of examining community: the community within St. Mary’s and the community around it. This work is at its best when the author manages to tie these various interests together without causing too much narrative strain, as seen in the treatment of the long discussion within the order leading to the closing of the seminary in 1985 and its removal from consideration as a site of apostolic work a decade later.

Janet could perhaps have engaged in further detail with American Vincentian missionary work that for much of the twentieth century looked to St. Mary’s as a logistical and spiritual home, but the historical work here is for the most part diligent and exhaustive. The greatest strength of Janet’s work lies in the depth of his interrogation of St. Mary’s importance and historical presence as an American Catholic institution in changing times. This can occasionally drift into detailed discussion of historical minutiae, but perhaps my favorite element of the study undertaken here is the author’s success in evoking a culture distinct to St. Mary’s while situating it clearly within broader historical dynamics of global Catholicism and American Catholicism in particular. In Missouri’s Wilds is well...