This history of the Church of the Ascension on Manhattan's Upper West Side has the feel of the jubilee books written for the anniversaries of Catholic parishes, which is what Upper West Side Catholics essentially is. The church's current pastor, Father Daniel S. Kearney, writes in the foreword to the book that he had asked Monsignor Shelley “to write the history of Ascension Church as it comes to mark its 125th anniversary,” to which Shelly responded “with a resounding ‘Yes’” (ix). On the book's last page, Shelley concludes, “The 125th anniversary of the Church of the Ascension is an occasion to celebrate both its past and its present” (113). Even as he adheres to the limits of the genre, however, Shelley, Emeritus Professor of Church History at Fordham University, raises important questions for the study of New York Catholicism as well as for modern and postmodern urban religion more generally.

Shelley's approach is straightforward and rigorously clerical. He traces the history of the Church of the Ascension apostolically, from pastor to pastor, beginning with its first, German-American Father Nicholas M. Reinhart, appointed by Archbishop Michael Augustine Corrigan in 1895, down to Father Kearney in the present. Because this is the Archdiocese of New York, after Reinhart Ascension is Irish all the way down—Sweeney to Donohue to Quinn to Curtin to Wilson to Sullivan to Johnson to Duffell to Kearney—even as the neighborhood goes from Irish to Puerto Rican to Dominican to upper-class white neoliberal. The volume includes many photographs, almost all of them of priests (the rest are of buildings). Laymen come late into the story and then only when, as Shelley writes, “Father Kearney compensated for the decline of full-time parish priests by fostering a wider involvement of the laity in the pastoral life of the parish” (99). One of the few women mentioned, Mary S. Sanz, is quoted making an “impassioned but respectful plea to the archdiocese to increase the number of priests at Ascension” in 1976; that “but respectful” says more about women in New York Catholic officialdom than Ms. Sanz's position as chairperson of the Ascension parish council (84). Shelley's history of the Church of the Ascension is primarily the history of its priests.

U.S. Catholic historiography has largely ignored priests in the past fifty years; Upper West Side Catholics is a welcome corrective. But it is also a caution: clericalist historiography short-circuits the challenge of historical understanding. Broad social and intellectual context becomes irrelevant because, in this perspective, priests are sovereign, beyond explanation or query. For all of Shelley's tight focus on Ascension's pastors, we learn little about them, about their formation, about the wider circles in which they move, about their everyday lives, or about their politics beyond some Catholic boilerplate about the homeless and the poor. They remain mysterious as human beings and so also as historical figures. The result is that it begins to seem that these priests do, think, and build what they do, think, and build because this is what they do, think, and build. Priesthood becomes its own sufficient explanation.

Shelley writes, for example, that Father John P. Duffell (1994–2012) “welcomed to Ascension every Sunday . . . lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender Catholics” (95). Movingly, he quotes a gay parishioner who finds assurance at Ascension that “there is just no question that everyone is included in the message of Christ” (95). But just how does Duffell manage to get away with this in an archdiocese as closeted as the Archdiocese of New York and as virulently and publicly anti-LGBTQ (however gay its priests and prelates may be in their private lives)? Why is Duffell never called down to the chancery to explain himself? On what theological or ecclesiological grounds does the pastor act, and how did he come to think like this? Or, less naively, who at the chancery was protecting Duffell and why? There is a knot here: work it open, and some interesting and perhaps unexpected possibilities for understanding Catholicism in New York City in the mid-twentieth and early twenty-first centuries present themselves. But these questions are left unexamined, even unasked, in Upper West Side Catholics.

It is not clear from the book what gives West Side Catholicism its uniqueness. I found myself thinking of Cosmo Kramer's famous rebuke of his neighbor, Jerry Seinfeld, in an episode of the eponymous television series: “If you're not going to be a part of a civil society, then just get in your car and drive on over to the East Side.” Shelley likewise simply assumes the West Side's liberalism vis-à-vis the East Side. But the Catholic West Side, as historian James Terrence Fisher so powerfully and convincingly describes it in his On the Irish Waterfront: The Crusader, the Movie, and the Soul of the Port of New York (Cornell University Press, 2009), is where the unholy trinity of New York Catholicism—priests and prelates, politicians, and police—rose up and where the persons of this trinity, looking out for each other's interests, ruled not only the city's ports but much of its everyday life until the 1960s (and in some cases beyond) in a social order rigidly maintained by secrecy, piety, and coercion. The vein of violence that runs through New York Catholicism—its ferocious anti-Black racism, sexual anxieties, ethnic hostilities, guarded territorialism, anti-urbanism—all belong to the history of West Side Catholics, too. Is there even such a singular and coherent entity as “West Side Catholicism”?

In his conclusion, Shelly makes an intriguing suggestion that the historical dynamics of New York Catholicism are driven by the intersection of the vicissitudes of the real estate market with the successive waves of Catholic immigrants. (Shelley is not interested in the African American Great Migration, arguably the most important factor in the mid-late twentieth century in shaping the history of New York's West Side, which was home, after all, to the nation's most prominent Black neighborhood.) This puts New York Catholics right in the middle of the ongoing convulsions of the city's built environment 125th with all its political corruption, union malfeasance, racism and violence, and street level warfare for power and position 125th and in the middle of the dialectical ambiguities of modernism, to evoke Marshall Berman's argument. But it also puts priests in the middle of all this, too, which requires an approach that sees these men in all the equivocalness of their lived experience. It is long past time for such a historiography.