This book is an ambitious study of the history of the Roman Catholic Church in North America during the age of European exploration and settlement. It was written by a man who is clearly no great fan of Vatican II. Although he draws no obvious connection between that council and his topic, Starr tells readers in his preface that the “flood of expectations” that were “unleashed” by Vatican II were “erroneous and unwarranted,” and he declares that the “decades of experimentation that followed” the Catholic Church's most recent ecumenical council ran the gamut “from presumptuous to naïve to tasteless” (x–xi). Starr's nostalgia for the era before Vatican II may be why Continental Ambitions asks readers to consider an idea that has become rather old-fashioned (even if it does still have its merits)—namely, the idea that European exploration in North America reflected a religious impulse as much as it did an economic, ethnocentric, or racist one.

“The arrival of Roman Catholic peoples in North America . . . brought with it terrible figures as well as admirable ones,” Kevin Starr writes. “But the worldly ambitions of Spain, France, and England, being carried out in the name of religion, also brought to the North American continent European Catholics in search of a better life, along with indigenous peoples converted to Catholicism and Catholics of mixed racial heritage who came into being.” In the end, Starr tells us, “great men and women—both lay and clerical” who were “motivated by Catholic values and according to their faith and culture . . . did their best to improve conditions for the indigenous peoples of the continent” (ix).

It is a premise that, while not entirely incorrect, is unlikely to resonate with many modern-day students of history.

Still, the dated tone of Starr's volume should not detract from the extensive primary and secondary source research that the author did for this book. It also does not obscure Starr's lively writing style. The author unabashedly sets out with this book to “present the American Catholic experience as Perry Miller presented the Puritan experience and Irving Howe presented the American Jewish experience” (xii). While it is doubtful that Continental Ambitions will go on to inspire a whole new field of study—the way The New England Mind in the Seventeenth Century (1939) did with American Studies—Starr does pepper his book with an intriguing cast of characters, recognizing, as Miller and Howe did, the power of narrative to capture the forces of reverence, fear, duty, glory, ambition, pride, and conviction that have inspired the people who helped to make American culture what it is today.

Readers, for example, learn about the tussles that the Society of Jesus had with secular authorities in Spain through the character of José de Gálvez, the Inspector General of New Spain under King Carlos III. Starr tells us that Gálvez struggled with mental illness and claimed to have been visited by Francis of Assisi in 1769, while he was in the midst of a royally ordered campaign to expel the Jesuits from Lower California. Saint Francis's now-famous respect for all of God's creatures apparently revealed itself in the conversation he had with Gálvez, when the thirteenth-century Italian friar instructed the Inspector General of New Spain to replace any soldiers who felt squeamish about the Jesuits' expulsion with an army of “six hundred apes from Guatemala” (207).

Starr also uses the character of Marc Lescarbot to explore how the New World supported the nascent ecumenism that had begun in France when King Henry IV signed the Edict of Nantes in 1598. Lescarbot published his three-volume Histoire de la Nouvelle-France in 1609, two years after he had returned from spending more than a year in Arcadia with Jean de Biencourt de Poutrincourt, Samuel de Champlain, and Pier Du Gua de Monts. Lescarbot was a Catholic and a canonically trained lawyer; Monts was a Huguenot married to a Catholic; Champlain and his wife were both converts to Catholicism from the Reformed Church of France; and Poutrincourt was an ardent Catholic who had lost two brothers during the Wars of Religion. In France, Catholics and Huguenots lived in what were, effectively, “two states,” according to Starr. But Lescarbot “saw in the North American continent the chance for a new France that had put aside old quarrels in favor of a fresh beginning” (289). The history he wrote of Canada, therefore—which Starr compares to the colonial promotional literature that Richard Hakluyt wrote for English-speaking audiences—conveyed the “theme of mutual acceptance between Catholic and Huguenot” (295). That message took on new meaning following the assassination of Henry IV one year after Lescarbot published his history.

But while Continental Ambitions rightly challenges the dominance that the Puritans have enjoyed in our understanding of the religious history of those colonial territories that ultimately became the United States, one is left to wonder what Kevin Starr is trying to argue in this book —other than the fact that the Puritans were not the first or the only religious players in colonial America. Each of the five parts that he divides the volume into—three are devoted to New Spain, one to New France, and one to the Catholic story in British North America—begins and ends abruptly. There is no real effort to connect the various parts together with an overarching theme about the meaning or import of Catholic belief, culture, or ecclesiastical structure to the communities that took root in these colonial territories. Starr's quest for narrative, in many respects, seems to have trumped an obligation to provide analysis.

His decision not to provide footnotes or endnotes—instead choosing to provide an “Essay on Sources” at the end of the book—is also a curious one in this academic age. While the essay does give readers a nice list of secondary sources as well as primary sources that have been published and often translated into English, it would have been far more useful to researchers (and more reflective of the academic standards utilized by professional historians today, rather than when Perry Miller was writing) if Starr had cited his sources for the stories he tells.