As the first quarter of the century ends, multidisciplinary practitioners of American Catholic Studies realize that their field needs a new narrative. The old story of an immigrant church, a Catholic e pluribus unum, melded from various assimilated European-descended ethnic groups, badly needs reimagining. Not only did the immigrant church story, like the larger American narrative it mirrored, fail to include significant groups of non-white Europeans in its imagined unum, but its consensus-normed vision of pluralism tended to ignore or minimize abiding racial, ethnic, and regional complexities.

The immigrant church narrative's painful inadequacies lead some to doubt that a single story of something called American Catholicism could even be told. During his 2015 visit to the United States, Pope Francis, following Pope John Paul II's lead in 1999's Ecclesia in America, reimagined American Catholicism as a single hemispheric story. His Address to Congress concluded with the familiar “God bless Americá,” but Americá had an accent on the second a.

Social historian Michael J. Pfeifer takes another approach. The considerable importance of The Making of American Catholicism lies in its thoroughly documented intervention into this ongoing discussion of how to tell the story of American Catholics in a new century. Pfeifer narrates American Catholicism regionally and ethnically. Not that regional and ethnic studies have been lacking. This book's innovation, however, lies in framing its analysis with them. Pfeifer still has an American Catholicism, but he enriches it with considerably more difference and complexity than the received narrative allows. In addition to published scholarship, Pfeifer's sources include archdiocesan archives in New Orleans and New York City, local newspapers, correspondence, and personal interviews with members of the local communities he studies.

Pfeifer organizes his regionally inflected account of U.S. Catholicism into five chapters, focused on five disparate locations and communities of Catholic people over time: New Orleans, Iowa City, Upper Wisconsin, Los Angeles, and New York City. As his local knowledge and personal interviews suggest, at least four of these are sites where he has lived or worked. Louisiana was a major location for his extensive fieldwork and publications on lynching in the U.S. He went to graduate school in Iowa City, grew up in Wisconsin, and presently teaches at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City.

Pfeifer leads with arguably his richest chapter, focusing on New Orleans’ Our Lady of Lourdes Parish, from its 1905 founding to its closing in 2006 after Hurricane Katrina. His “analytical microhistory” of Lourdes illuminates the “American Catholic encounter with race and racism.” Lourdes’ history moves through a certain inclusion to segregation to integration, as African American Catholics, in what was, for much of its history, a majority Catholic city, struggled to realize “universalistic claims of a common Catholic culture embracing all believers” and “shaped a black Catholic culture as they have resisted white supremacy within the Church” (14). He acknowledges the unique role of “free women of color” in this struggle (21).

Chapter 2 moves to Iowa City in the Lower Midwest, focusing on the transnational, multiethnic cultures of its first Catholics. From their countries of origin, Irish, German, and Bohemian (Czech) immigrants brought different ways of being Catholic. Over time, they moved from the “uneasy pluralism” (73) of the original St. Mary's Parish (1841) to ethnic parishes, to mid-twentieth-century Catholic assimilation and “participation as an individual believer” (76), with little connection to an ethnic community or place of origin.

Pfeifer sets Chapter 3 in the woods of the Green Bay peninsula as a neglected site of the nineteenth-century transnational Marian revival. He credits Adèle Brise and her late 1850s vision with “refashioning … Catholic femininity and Marian piety within Upper Midwestern Catholic culture” (90). In 2010 Green Bay's bishop made Brise's vision the first officially recognized Marian apparition in the U.S. Pfeifer contrasts Brise with Mary Ann Van Hoof, whose Cold War era visions at Necedah were declared inauthentic by the Bishop of La Crosse in 1955. In both cases, a male hierarch negotiated the prophetic authority of a female Marian seer. While Brise's Marian devotion is now mainstreamed but considerably domesticated, Van Hoff's devotion remains alive on the fringes.

Chapter 4 follows the life of Los Angeles's oldest Catholic church, La Iglesia de Nuestra Señora La Reina de los Ángeles, or simply La Placita. From its beginning in the city's founding plaza in 1814 to the present, through Spanish, Mexican, and American eras, La Placita has remained the site of a “Mexican-inflected Catholicism … continually reconstructed by its parishioners and clergy” (93) and the “focal point of Catholic culture” in the city (7). La Placita's continuing connection to Mexico highlights the inadequacy of the received narrative of a European-American immigrant church.

In Chapter 5, Pfeifer turns to acknowledge the central importance, if not the dominance, of diverse Northeastern Catholics. With Holy Cross parish on West 42^nd Street, founded by Bishop John Hughes in 1852, he focuses on the transformation of Irish Americans in New York City. Central to this story is “Fighting Father [Francis P.] Duffy,” renowned World War I chaplain, whose statue stands in Times Square. As a symbol of Irish American patriotism and the positive engagement of Catholics with American culture and politics, Duffy represents a brief, tenuous moment between the pugnacious immigrants who preceded him, unsure about America, and the eventual ethnic conservative critique of changing social mores at twentieth-century's end.

Pfeifer has disrupted monochrome accounts of American Catholicism and made Catholics part of larger histories. Maps and photos might have enriched this work even more, but perhaps the author had little control over this. In any case, Michael Pfeifer has made an indispensable contribution to the history of American Catholicism.