This volume by Urs Altermatt, the distinguished Swiss historian of Roman Catholicism and professor emeritus at the University of Fribourg best known for his pioneering work from 1989, Katholizismus und Moderne, defies easy categorization into the standard genres of historical writing. Summing up the author's intellectual journey from the late 1960s to the present, some of its twelve individual chapters take on the trappings of an autobiography and a retrospective. Other chapters, however, are redolent of those in a garden-variety collection of essays. Still others evoke those commentaries delivered at the close of conferences that roll out long lists of names and expound upon the major topics and unresolved questions in the field.

Flowing together in this volume are two themes central to the contemporary history of Roman Catholicism in both Switzerland and western Europe—the integration of Roman Catholics into the political and cultural mainstream of their societies and the interlocking relationship between national and religious identity. How did Swiss Catholics go from being regarded as second-class citizens, who had been defeated in the Sonderbundkrieg of 1847, marginalized in the liberal constitution of 1848, and discriminated against by the Kulturkampf legislation of the 1870s, to become the guardians of Swiss stability and the guardians of national identity by the postwar era? Altermatt makes it clear that this process was never perfectly straightforward. A national referendum to repeal the anti-Jesuit laws from a century earlier was only narrowly approved in 1973 with 54.9 percent of the vote.

As in his earlier work, Altermatt argues that the way into the ghetto proved to be the way out. Though Swiss Catholics retreated into insularity, the political parties and ancillary organizations they created to defend their interests ironically facilitated the integration into the mainstream. But in this volume, he taps into the well of cultural history and the history of memory to bolster this thesis. Altermatt examines Catholic participation in the sexennial of the Swiss confederation in 1891, noting that even Protestants granted the Catholic cantons of central Switzerland that had been on the losing end of the civil war from 1847 a central place in Swiss history. In their commemorations, both Catholic and Protestant mythmakers and storytellers chose to downplay the sectarian strife of the preceding century.

In another chapter, Altermatt examines the ongoing historical reinvention of Nicolas of Flüe, a fifteenth-century soldier, village elder, hermit, mystic, peacemaker, and savior of the Swiss Confederation more commonly known as Brother Klaus. Long a heroic figure for Swiss Catholics, Brother Klaus became a symbol of faith and devotion to the fatherland between the 1920s and 1940s, as dictatorial regimes established themselves to the north, south, and east. Brother Klaus's canonization did arouse some grumbling among Swiss Protestants in the late 1940s, just as many socialists had been none too happy to see this patron of the ruling classes became a national symbol in the preceding decades. But such uneasiness was not enough to stop Brother Klaus from becoming an iconic figure for the nation. In the coming decades, Brother Klaus was appropriated by those who saw in this hermit the embodiment of antimaterialism and pacifism. Historical memory, Altermatt argues, had become pluralized, as “communication society like the nation and Catholicism broke apart as major societal forces” (p. 189).

Any comprehensive reckoning with Swiss history has to address the question of how Switzerland held together as a nation in spite of its deep regional, linguistic, and confessional fissures. For Altermatt, the explanation is simple: the confessional cleavages did not lie along the rifts of language and region. Roman Catholics were well represented among all three major linguistic groups, as were Protestants—except in the Italian-speaking region of Ticino. Altermatt devotes an entire chapter to this region, asking why a powerful separatist movement never took shape there. He observes that the ties to Switzerland had grown in importance before the unification of Italy even began. The Gotthard Tunnel also linked this region to the German-speaking regions to the north. Over time, those in professions such as law and medicine chose to study in French- or German-speaking Swiss universities. But the real reason, Altermatt suggests, was that the Roman Catholic Church helped to instill a national Swiss identity. Diocesan borders were redrawn to correspond to national boundaries. The representatives of political Catholicism ensured that the voices from the region were heard at the national level.

How does Altermatt account for the falloff in participation in Catholic institutions since the 1960s, a decline that some historians and sociologists describe as erosion and others as transformation? The long era from 1946 to 1958, the death of Pope Pius XII, characterized by an outpouring of religious fervor, itself may have been the anomaly; the era since the 1960s may simply entail the return to historical norms. The baby boom generation was no longer preoccupied with the need to maintain a confessional bulwark against a hostile world.

This volume bears a hallmark of Altermatt's earlier works: limpid prose, even when the vocabulary of recent cultural history and the history of memory infuses his account. Those looking for a systematic and chronological presentation will be disappointed, as this volume repeatedly jumps between past to present and between Switzerland and western Europe. But it is precisely from this apparent lack of outward coherence that the reader receives the richest rewards. Altermatt is able to draw extremely illuminating parallels and contrasts between the Swiss experience and those of Roman Catholics elsewhere in Europe, comparisons that would not have made their way into more conventional accounts. Though the book lacks a formal bibliography, the nearly 120 pages of extremely detailed endnotes provide a valuable historiographical reference to any work in the field of contemporary European religious history. For those historians, this insightful work will be an indispensable companion.