Upper West Side Catholics: Liberal Catholicism in a Conservative Archdiocese by Thomas J. Shelley (review)

Monsignor Thomas J. Shelley, Professor Emeritus of Church History at Fordham University, has written Upper West Side Catholics: Liberal Catholicism in a Conservative Archdiocese in honor of the 125th anniversary of the Church of the Ascension in New York City. In addition to editing The Encyclopedia of American Catholic History, Shelley has previously written institutional histories of the Archdiocese of New York, Fordham University, and the parishes of St. Joseph in Greenwich Village and Most Holy Trinity in Yonkers. Here, Shelley weaves together the history of Ascension parish, the story of the Upper West Side, and as indicated by the book’s subtitle, an encomium to the liberalism that he says makes both the neighborhood and its Catholic residents unique.

The most conventional aspect of this slim volume is its history of Ascension parish, which is said to be a “microcosm of the history of the archdiocese” because it is principally shaped by immigration and neighborhood change (112). Shelley traces the broad outline of the parish’s evolution beginning with its foundation in 1895 to serve the Upper West Side’s German Catholics. Financial and sacramental records indicate that by 1904, Ascension was a typical ethnic parish boasting 5,200 parishioners and 530 school students, who participated enthusiastically in a panoply of lay associations, liturgies, and public devotions. By its heyday in 1932, Ascension’s 9,668 parishioners were predominantly Irish and Shelley describes the lengthy pastorate of Bishop Joseph P. Donahue, from 1924–1959, as “the confident years” (37).

But the status quo of the 1940s and 1950s gave way to “Armageddon” in the 1960s (46). Religious reform and exploding crime rates drove the Irish from the parish and neighborhood, and although Puerto Rican immigrants replaced them, Ascension’s parish rolls plummeted from 7,500 in 1960 to 2,400 in 1971, and then to 1,439 by 1982. Parish enrollment has remained steady since, but from the late 1980s Dominican immigrants replaced Puerto Ricans and, since the 1990s, the Upper West Side’s remarkable reduction in crime has led to gentrification. Unfortunately, Shelley provides few details about how these waves of Ascension parishioners were able to flee the Upper West Side and where they resettled.

The book rises above the typical celebratory parish history by contextualizing Ascension’s foundation, growth, travails, and rejuvenation within a sprawling history of its neighborhood. In what are some of the book’s best sections, Shelley relies on Joseph Lyford, Father Henry J. Browne, Alfred Kazin, John Podhoretz, and Theodore White’s writings on the Upper West Side, painting it as “a very different world from a typical American Catholic working-class neighborhood” (27). Shelley asserts that the neighborhood’s cosmopolitan mix of ethnicities, religions, and classes, and its progressive political leanings, helped create a “quintessential Upper West Side liberal Catholic identity” (113).

To establish the liberal bonafides of Upper West Side Catholics, Shelley moves beyond the bounds of Ascension, to tell the story of Father George Barry Ford, who led liturgical and educational reform at Corpus Christi parish, and Father Henry J. Browne who supported low income housing projects, sheltered Philip Berrigan from the FBI, and welcomed pro-Castro and LGBT groups at St. Gregory’s parish. But in tracing these priests’ liberal clerical lineage through maverick diocesan priests including Thomas Farrell, Edward McGlynn, and Francis P. Duffy, Shelley moves well beyond the bounds of the Upper West Side, undermining the claim that the neighborhood was unique in its liberal Catholicism. Indeed, a great deal of Ascension parish’s purported liberalism rides on the thirty-one parishioners who wrote Archbishop Terrence Cooke in July 1967 touting their parish’s diversity and proposing Father Henry J. Browne as their new pastor. Although Shelley pitches the entire project as a celebration of liberal Catholicism—quoting Lacordiare’s famous epitaph: “I hope to die a penitent religious and an unrepentant liberal”—this is the weakest aspect of the...