Thomas Tweed, an astute student of the spatial dimensions of the sacred, places the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception, or “America's Church” as Catholics boasted, at the intersection of identity formation, institution building, and social and political interest among Catholics during the twentieth century. He does so by locating the church in the context of Catholics’ need to assert a presence in the nation's capital in order to claim a seat as its spiritual capital and to answer Protestant critics as to the authority and authenticity of Catholic belief, especially its devotion to the Virgin Mary. More than that, he shows that the particulars in building a national shrine and worshipping in it defined American Catholicism for all to see over the past century.

Tweed invites readers on a walk through various “thresholds” as a way to see how “America's Church” acquired different, and even contested, meanings over time and for diverse peoples. The building itself spoke to the Catholic Church's interest in asserting centralized authority, ecclesiastical unity, and historical traditions. Also, by claiming civic space in Washington, D.C., with a magisterial structure that in its architecture and iconography at once bespoke the Church's medieval heritage and a triumphant Americanism, the Church provided a point of reference and site of pilgrimage for Marian devotees and others among a rapidly changing American Catholic population. Tweed enters deeply into the ways the physical space informed and re-formed Catholic belief and practice, especially from the planning of the Shrine in 1913 to its dedication in 1959, when Catholics shared a worldview committed to authority, tradition, and universality and only warily approached modernism. Such beliefs echoed in the sermons, advice in confessions, and instructions in catechism heard in the church. Equally important, as Tweed shows so well, the people gave the Shrine meaning and purpose through their devotions and donations—the habits of “going and giving” as he puts it. The Shrine spoke to and for them. After 1960 both the nation and the Church felt the trembling of the “rights” revolutions that challenged older assumptions about women's roles, established authority, civil rights, and so much more. At the same time, renewed immigration, especially from Latin American and Asian sources, Vatican II, and Humane Vitae were transforming the Church. The Shrine welcomed the increasing ethnic diversity and devotional variety of Catholics through its interior ornamentation and spaces for devotions to patron saints, but it could not wholly recover the unity and harmony its planners and formative generations of worshippers and supporters had realized for almost half a century. As Tweed suggests, in the end as in beginning, the place of the Shrine will be what people make of it.

Tweed's genius in describing and assaying the Catholic presence in, and through, the Shrine derives from his careful attention to the particulars of the Shrine as a sacred building and a spiritual site. He knows that it is the truth, not the devil, that is in the details. And he looks hard for and at them. He brilliantly and copiously examines a variety of sources to find how the mundane and the miraculous gave the Shrine its meaning to different people. Such sources include material culture and layout—for example, the Mary Altar, the Crypt Church, the Great Dome, an ethnic chapel, the foundation stone; printed works describing the Shrine and the spirituality it invoked—for instance, memoirs, guidebooks, official publications, and even coffee-table books; and archival sources—such as, photographs, correspondence, director's notes, donor books, and visitor logs (a source of much revelation on people's intentions and experiences). Such sources revealed the very soul of the Shrine and those who went there. Always conscious of historical context, Tweed also combed federal census returns, newspaper accounts, parish records, maps, city directories, and other “external” sources to understand how the Shrine was “seen” by contemporaries at particular times and over time and to locate the Shrine in a changing social, demographic, cultural, and political landscape in Washington and beyond. The result is the most probing excavation of an American Catholic place to date and a model for scholars wanting to discover, uncover, and recover the “place” and purpose of other sacred sites.

The story of the National Shrine—“America's Church”—is really the story of American Catholicism. Crossing through the thresholds of stone and story with Tweed brings us to the center of American Catholicism and to the realization that sacred space matters in finding one's faith and one's place. Let Tweed be your guide to such revelations.