A professor of history at Georgia Southern University, James M. Woods has authored several essays and monographs regarding American Catholicism, especially in Arkansas. He has now penned a synthetic study of the Catholic Church in the South through four centuries, drawing upon previously published sources, both primary and secondary.
As Woods acknowledges, his is a “traditional, institutional narrative” (xiii) containing nothing “jarring or provocative” (xiii), focusing rather, he avows, upon a Southern Catholic “tapestry of faith with many differing colors and hues” (377), from Spanish missions among Native Americans from Florida to Texas, through Maryland's colonial experiment in religious toleration, francophone Louisiana's black codes, the establishment of minority Catholic enclaves throughout the deep South, to the Civil War and beyond.
Correcting historiography that has “virtually ignored” (xiii) Catholicism in the South, Woods demonstrates the supreme importance of the See at Baltimore—from Archbishop John Carroll to James Cardinal Gibbon, and by means of the three Plenary Councils of 1852, 1866, and 1884 held in that city—in overseeing the growth of Catholicism nationwide in the 1800s. Although by 1900 Southern Catholics constituted only ten percent of the ten million Catholics in the United States (over half a million in the New Orleans and Baltimore archdioceses)—Catholic immigrants from Ireland, Italy, Poland, and elsewhere favored the Northeast and Midwest, where the jobs were—Southern Catholics could boast the earliest U.S. Catholic seminary, college, and religious orders of men and women.
Woods shows how colonial hostilities, especially among Spain, France, and England, exacerbated by the sectarianism of the Reformation and Counter Reformation, shaped Southern Catholicism, its church-state frissons, its aggressive missionizing ethos, and its ongoing encounters with anti-Catholicism. Internal rivalries, for instance between Jesuits and other religious orders and with diocesan powers, indicated competing agendas within the Catholic body politic. Women, especially nuns like the Ursulines, the Sisters of Charity, the Sisters of Loretto, and others, often provided the force of civilization on the frontier: staffing schools, hospitals, and orphanages. In the absence of priests they sometimes served as “unofficial ‘deaconesses’ for the sacraments” (225).
“Not all of the facets of this history are bright and edifying,” Woods writes, “indeed, some are quite dark” (377). None darker than Southern Catholicism's complicity in the enslavement of African Americans and the institutional racism endemic to the American South (and to America as a whole). Catholicism provided little ethical transcendence to the issues of slavery or race. Like most whites, Catholic authorities presumed blacks to be natural slaves according to self-serving Aristotelian theory and “accepted slavery as long as those in bondage were well cared for and were presented with the Catholic gospel” (103). Jesuits owned slaves and “maintained biblical and theological arguments for the moral legitimacy of slavery” (133), even as Pope Gregory XVI decreed against the slave trade in 1839. The first Catholic to sit on the U.S. Supreme Court, Roger Brook Taney of Maryland, authored the 1857 Dred Scott decision, which provided constitutional protection for slave owners to secure their chattel from the Underground Railroad movement.
While Bishop John England of Charleston tried to provide education for some slaves in his diocese, Bishop Patrick N. Lynch—his successor once removed—rallied for the secessionist, pro-slavery cause and tried in vain to gain Pope Pius IX's recognition for the Confederacy. The most flamboyant personality in this book is Father Abram Joseph Ryan, whose 1865 poem, “The Conquered Banner,” and other writings “encapsulated the basic doctrines of the Lost Cause” (337), with its undying support for slavery as the lynchpin of “southern culture” (339). Woods suggests that Ryan and other Southern Catholics tried to overcome their minority status in Dixie by trumpeting its racist values, even as the Church supported Catholic evangelization of blacks, both slave and free.
The peculiar place of race in the South meant that part black Catholic men like the Healy brothers, Augustus Tolton, and Charles Randolph Uncles, sensing priestly vocations, had to leave the South (and even the U.S.) to receive their seminary training. Uncles was the first black man ordained in the U.S., in Baltimore in 1891. It is telling that Father Uncles resisted a Southern clerical appointment, refusing to “submit to the indignities and discrimination there” (367).
In his treatment of race, as throughout his book, Woods emphasizes hierarchical personages and attitudes. Although he states that “Catholicism, both then and now, is more than prelates and priests” (333), the reader would hardly know this from reading Woods's tome, which is largely an account of apostolic succession, diocese by diocese, supplemented by population statistics. The volume's weakness derives from the dearth of detail about personal sanctity or sacramental experiences of grace, the private expressions of faith so central to religious life. Woods's account is strong on public matters—the vote (533–2) in favor of papal infallibility in 1870 at the First Vatican Council and Little Rock Bishop Edward M. Fitzgerald's “‘non placet,’” followed immediately by his kneeling submission to Pope Pius IX, “‘Now I believe, Holy Father’” (297); Pope Leo XIII's epistle of 1899 against the “heresy of Americanism” (333), to which Cardinal Gibbons and his fellow American prelates acceded—but is silent regarding inner Catholic spirituality, Southern or otherwise.
