The history of Catholicism in the early American Republic is a history of people and ideas moving from Europe to the nascent United States and deep into the backcountry of the trans-Appalachian West. Though a handful of historians have discovered the richness of this subject in recent decades, only John Dichtl, executive director of the National Council on Public History at IUPUI, has devoted an entire book to the complex network of Catholic priests and laypeople stretching from Maryland and Pennsylvania through the Ohio River Valley to the edges of Kentucky and Indiana. Dichtl's Frontiers of Faith, born out of a dissertation conducted at Indiana University, combines a broad array of methodological and historiographical perspectives to produce a unique glimpse into the lives of Catholic frontiersmen (and some women) in a way that enhances the overall narrative of American religion in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Dichtl carefully situates the history of Catholicism within the context of the American frontier in his introduction to Frontiers of Faith. He builds on the concept of “contact points,” a theme popular in the study of frontier societies, by incorporating Catholics into the crucible of encounter that was the West in the early republic. He also takes notice of the fact that despite the pivotal works of Nathan Hatch, Jon Butler, and Christine Heyrman on frontier religions, there has been very little consideration given to the role of Catholicism in the evangelization of western and southern regions in the United States. Perhaps less pioneering, though no less insightful, Dichtl accepts the standard narrative of American Catholicism as articulated by Jay P. Dolan and others that “although the frontier was a cultural meeting ground open to adaptation, innovation, and deviance, it also strengthened traditional features of Catholicism” (4). In other words, what was initially a more open and fluid form of missionary Catholicism ultimately transformed into “a defensive and insular immigrant church” by the end of the 1830s (7).

The first three chapters of Frontiers of Faith examine the ecclesiastical politics of evangelizing the West in the early republic. Dichtl begins by illustrating how the first generation of Catholic priests in the United States viewed the West as a place dominated by Protestants who were inhospitable to a foreign clergy. John Carroll, the first bishop and later archbishop of Baltimore, encouraged the likes of Stephen Badin, Demetrius Gallitzin, Edward Fenwick, Charles Nerinckx, and Benedict Flaget to establish a Catholic institutional presence in regions rarely visited by the clergy. Dichtl describes their endeavor as an “errand into the wilderness” (10). Chapter 2 goes into the role of priests as “men who worked to make themselves crucial to the Catholic march inland and to become the central points of interaction with non-Catholics” (20). The fragility of ecclesiastical authority was a persistent concern of priests in the trans-Appalachian West, as demonstrated in chapter 3's emphasis on the measures taken to control the religious behavior of both the clergy and the laity.

The last three chapters provide a glimpse into the methods by which the clergy sought to convert Protestants and create a lasting Catholic foothold in the trans-Appalachian West. First, Dichtl explains how the clergy “sacralized” the frontier landscape with churches and religious objects, in effect “re-creating a Catholic world within a Protestant context” (87). The process of making sacred places in the West, according to Dichtl, reinforced ecclesiastical authority and produced “contact points” where Protestants and Catholics interacted (111). In chapter 5, Dichtl weighs the risks and benefits associated with such close proximity to non-Catholics. By the 1820s, the accumulation of so many close encounters convinced many priests that “an imagined window of opportunity seemed to be closing” on their missionary experiment (143). Finally, Dichtl uses chapter 6 to highlight the effects of catechesis, religious processions, preaching, and polemics in frontier settings, all of which convinced priests to be “more confident about standing out and more willing to display their Catholic identity” (146). By the 1830s, Dichtl concludes that “Catholicism was firmly ensconced in the trans-Appalachian West, and the clergy had the means, and the need, to formally display, explain, and defend it” against a growing level of anti-Catholic sentiment in the United States (175).

The takeaway from Dichtl's Frontiers of Faith is at least twofold. First, the growth of Catholicism in the trans-Appalachian West was as much a consequence of contact with Protestants and non-Catholics as it was a matter of sheer ecclesiastical will. Second, the frontier experiences of priests did not have a substantial “Americanizing” effect on the Catholic Church as a whole. Rather, life in the West “reinforced and invigorated the distinctiveness of the Roman confession” (181), thus preparing the Catholic clergy for the “era of nativism” (184) that followed the 1830s. It is somewhat unclear, however, why Dichtl confidently finishes Frontiers of Faith with the statement “Catholic and Protestant would live side by side but draw no closer” (184), as if to suggest that they would no longer interact with each other. Surely it was also the case that many priests would go on to strongly support slavery and to a lesser extent abolitionism with Protestants later in the antebellum period. Moreover, priests in what were once frontier environments usually sided with either the Confederate or Union causes during the Civil War, again reiterating the close interaction that continued to exist between Catholics and non-Catholics. More might also be made of the trans-Atlantic connections between the American clergy and their European benefactors that were so essential to the development of the Catholic Church in the early republic. These cautions aside, Dichtl's Frontiers of Faith remains a significant contribution to the history of Catholicism in the trans-Appalachian West and an example of what good scholarship can do to reshape the way historians conceive of the relationship between region and religion.