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The Catholic Historical Review 88.1 (2002) 154-155



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Book Review

Rhetorical Campaigns of the 19th-Century Anti-Catholics and Catholics in America


Rhetorical Campaigns of the 19th-Century Anti-Catholics and Catholics in America. By Jody M. Roy. [Studies in American Religion, Volume 71.] (Lewiston, New York: The Edwin Mellen Press. 2000. Pp. xiii, 211. $89.95.)

Protestant anti-Catholicism in America is a familiar, if sad, subject. In the past, nearly every study focused on Protestant propaganda and party platforms, implicitly casting Catholics in the role of victims. Jody M. Roy departs from these models. Not only does she add Catholic speakers to verbal contests, but she explains disagreements among Catholics about how best to fight prejudice. Although the church hierarchy of the antebellum decades, Roy's period of inquiry, would most likely not be pleased by her exposure of Catholic disunity, she sees these early Catholics as experimenting with "what it meant to be 'American'"--"to disagree without disenfranchising, to speak without silencing" (p. 198). The goal of the "rhetorical campaigns" of the book's title was to etch the contours of American nationalism by setting bounds for Catholicism's [End Page 154] presence. The exchanges proceeded in a mood of bitterness and produced no consensus. Yet the practical outcome was a kind of America where a variety of Catholic viewpoints resisted intolerant forms of Protestantism. Roy's achievement is to establish the complexity of this picture.

A professor of speech communications, Roy excels at interpreting language and its possible social effects. Her approach is well suited to the explosive literary marketplace before the Civil War; more Americans than ever could read, and they eagerly consumed all manner of texts. Why did Protestants believe lurid tales about the exploitation of women in convents? These were internally consistent, graphic accounts, Roy explains, that both titillated moralistic readers and confirmed myths about Catholics. How odd, she rightly continues, that the Know-Nothings imagined a massive Catholic conspiracy, yet outlined few practical steps beyond immigration restriction and the use of Protestant Bibles in schools. The distance between rhetoric and policies must have hurt them politically. Archbishop John Hughes of New York and Orestes Brownson, Roy's key Catholic advocates, may have fueled anti-Catholicism. They were very different men: Hughes wished to safeguard Catholic beliefs by creating parochial schools, while Brownson hoped to use assimilated immigrants as a catalyst to win America for Catholicism. Hughes perhaps deepened suspicions of Catholic insularity; Brownson stirred Protestant worries about Catholic expansionism.

Roy backs up her insights on rhetoric, dialogues, and audiences with historical information on anti-Catholic movements and the American Catholic Church. Still, her book does not fully capture the texture of social and theological contexts. Elusive, though real, aspects of the Catholic situation shaped the Protestant-Catholic encounter. Catholicism was a struggling religion in antebellum America. The poverty of immigrant families was matched by the poverty of parishes. Genteel Protestant converts to Catholicism contributed fervor and education; but their untraditional viewpoints made them a mixed blessing for the hierarchy. In this troubled setting, the Church carried on what it saw as its chief work: the salvation of souls. Its success depended on distinguishing (Catholic) truth from (Protestant) error, warning against Protestant contacts (in intermarriage, for example), and strengthening the Church as an institution, as opposed to being drawn into polemical wars. Either offending or ignoring Protestants was sometimes worth risking for the higher goal of personal redemption. Consideration of Catholicism as a religion with supernatural interests might have explained peculiarities in the debates that Roy frames in national terms.

Roy nonetheless breaks fresh ground by casting anti-Catholicism as part of a dialogue: a genuinely two-sided exchange between Catholics and Protestants in which words had social, political, and religious consequences. To see antebellum American Catholics answering uncharitable Protestants substantiates her underlying assumption: that free discussion, even if acrimonious, is essential to the health of American religion.

 



Anne C. Rose
The Pennsylvania State University

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