CATHOLICS AND AMERICAN CULTURE: FULTON SHEEN, DOROTHY DAY, AND THE NOTRE DAME FOOTBALL TEAM.

BUCKLEY, THOMAS E.

CATHOLICS AND AMERICAN CULTURE: FULTON SHEEN, DOROTHY DAY, AND THE NOTRE DAME FOOTBALL TEAM. By Mark S. Massa. New York: Crossroad, 1999. Pp. x + 278. $24.95.

American Catholics came of age after World War II. Emerging from the ghetto, they embraced mainstream American culture and values as thoroughly compatible with their faith. The century's end, however, found Catholic identity religiously compromised. How this happened and the rich irony it entailed, in the sense of religious irony advanced by Reinhold Niebuhr, forms the central motif of Massa's superb study of the transformation of American Catholicism between 1945 and 1968.

M. selects nine episodes involving major figures and groups to propose the countervailing forces tugging at the postwar Church. His whimsical title names some. The reader also encounters Leonard Feeney, Thomas Merton, Joseph McCarthy, John Kennedy, the Immaculate Heart nuns battling Cardinal James Francis McIntyre, and ordinary Catholics attending Mass in the wake of Vatican II. Each chapter is enriched by methodologies drawn from the social sciences. For example, Merton's appeal for the postwar generation is analyzed in terms of Erikson's "great individual" hypothesis. Geertz's theory of religion as a cultural system is used to explain McCarthy's attraction for many Catholics as well as the repudiation of his anticommunism campaign by other Catholics. Turner's models of social organization clarifies the challenge that Dorothy Day's vision of Christian community posited for Catholics.

M. proposes Day as "the most American of all Catholics" (111), but he opens with the story of Feeney, the Jesuit poet, preacher, and convert-maker in Cambridge, Mass. Feeney set boundaries for Catholic identity. The doctrine he taught, with increasing stridency, condemned those outside the Church to hell. By 1949 Boston's Archbishop Richard Cushing had had enough. Rome ultimately excommunicated Feeney, chiefly on disciplinary grounds; but, M. argues, the resolution of his celebrated case signalled that American Catholics had already adjusted to religious pluralism. Merton's spirituality and Sheen's television presence smoothed Protestant acceptance of Catholics. His weekly program subtly emphasized the congruence between Catholic Thomistic philosophy and the values espoused by the founding fathers. M.'s analysis of Catholic reaction to Sheen deftly utilizes H. Richard Niebuhr's models of the relationship between Christianity and culture to argue that 1950s Catholics moved from a "Christ above culture" to a "Christ of culture" model, "an essentially accomodationist, therapeutic understanding of Christianity" (87) that Sheen himself would have repudiated.

Kennedy's election completed Catholic acceptance. M. focuses on his campaign talk to Protestant ministers in Houston. Echoing contemporary criticisms, he complains that Kennedy privatized his faith by declaring it irrelevant to the conduct of his office. Thus, in order to get elected, the first Catholic president secularized the presidency. M. tells the Houston story well, but unfortunately he omits the sequel that challenges his conclusion. As Robert Bellah has argued, Kennedy's inaugural address brilliantly asserted his and the nation's ultimate responsibility to God. Far from secularizing the bully pulpit, Kennedy demonstrated that a Catholic president could articulate America's civil religion better than most of his predecessors.

The final three chapters treat the aftermath of Vatican II. Altering the way Catholics worshiped God changed their theology and self-understanding as Church in ways the council never expected. Nor did the bishops anticipate the havoc let loose in religious orders intent on following the directives to reclaim their founders' charisms. Though dependent largely on newspaper accounts, the chapter on Los Angeles's Immaculate Heart community is the best treatment available of that crisis. Max Weber's analysis of charisma as potentially anti-authoritarian and destructuralizing supplies a useful interpretive model; but M. might also have explored the impact of psychologist Carl Rogers's workshops in assertiveness training for the IHMs. I would also challenge M.'s characterization of McIntyre as "no more conservative than many or even most of" (194) the bishops at the council.

Drawing upon Andrew Greeley's perspective that Catholics form an ethnic group within American society, M. uses Notre Dame's football team to exemplify Catholic ethnicity in the 1960s. John O'Hara and Knute Rockne, All American laid the foundation earlier in Mary's grotto and the stadium. Theodore Hesburgh completed the work with his vision of a university that would be academically excellent, thoroughly Catholic, and still play football. M.'s sympathies lie here, in maintaining a distinct religious identity. In his conclusion, he returns to Niebuhrian irony to explain this "story of grace" (232), the passage of America's Catholics from enthusiastic accommodation to a more realistic, tentative appraisal of their place in American culture.

Scholars in the last decade have produced some admirable studies of our recent past. Massa's book is among the best. It deserves wide readership and would make a fine assignment for students of contemporary Catholicism.

THOMAS E. BUCKLEY, S.J.

Jesuit School of Theology, Berkeley