James P. McCartin, associate professor of history at Seton Hall University, traces the trajectory of twentieth-century American Catholic life by analyzing evolving ways of praying among the faithful. In its broadest strokes, his work argues a movement away from priest-centered prayer to personal prayer concurrent with the American Catholics' movement away from Church laws and restrictions to a newfound sense of independence.
McCartin's book opens with two scenes. One depicts late nineteenth-century priest-led devotions to St. Anne at the simple gothic church of St. Jean Baptiste on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. The other depicts a sweatshirt-clad former Catholic woman praying in the morning mist beneath northern California redwoods. These are the bookends of the century-long journey he presents of American Catholics breaking free of priest-ridden ceremonies and hierarchical directives from faraway Rome. What McCartin does not report is that crowded weekly devotions and an annual novena to St. Anne are still held at St. Jean Baptiste, and some of the attendees wear sweatshirts.
McCartin's thesis, that Catholics have moved away from formal liturgical services to individual private prayer, is one among many attempting to explain the apparent growing disregard among Catholics for Church authority since the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965). Unfortunately, McCartin does not track other, competing phenomena of the twentieth century that led to the demise of clerical power and influence. Specifically, he does not fully account for the effects of the exponential rise in the number of priests up until 1950, and the sharp decline in the priest–people ratio since then. According to the Official Catholic Directory, between 1900 and 1950 the Catholic population increased by 165 percent, while the number of Catholic priests increased by 266 percent. As the Catholic population continued to grow, the number of priests dropped. From 1950 to 2000 the Catholic population rose by 106 percent as the priest cohort gained a mere 6 percent, according to the Official Catholic Directory. Similarly, according to various reports, there were approximately 50,000 Catholic sisters in the United States in 1900, nearly 175,000 in 1950, and fewer than 63,000 today.
As McCartin tracks the immigrant Church of the early twentieth century, he accurately portrays a Catholic population hungry for spiritual nourishment to assuage their oft-harsh living and working conditions. The “neighborhood church” he writes, was a “safe haven,” even for those whose prior spiritual practices were bare or non-existent (9). McCartin writes, “The immigrant church provided a familiar and secure context for newly arrived Catholics in a strange and foreign land” (9). Most tellingly, McCartin places his finger on the pulse of the problem: “Praying in the immigrant church thus meant placing oneself within a spiritual context that both empowered and subordinated the individual” because “prayer reinforced a hierarchy that placed ordinary laity . . . at the bottom of a pyramid of power” (12).
One difficulty with McCartin's writing—although not with his general thesis—is his multiple and interchangeable uses of the term “prayer.” Catholic prayer takes many forms. Formal liturgical prayer is often, but not always, led by an ordained priest. Certainly, the Mass can only be celebrated by a priest or bishop, but others of the Church's roster of formal liturgies, particularly the Liturgy of the Hours, can be led by a lay person. Informal liturgies, such as the devotions to St. Anne that open the book, were often led by a priest where priests were available, but may be led by lay persons. Private prayer, to which McCartin credits a breaking-free of sorts among American Catholics, is not new, although the explosion of interest in spirituality and a concurrent call for non-clerical spiritual directors resulted in the personal practices expanding beyond the edges of parish-centered liturgical prayer and even replacing it.
In recognizing the phenomenon of increased personal prayer unburdened by hierarchical restrictions, McCartin accurately tracks the increasing spiritual literacy among the faithful, educated and encouraged to practice ancient forms of private prayer by the large numbers of priests and women religious who staffed urban and suburban parishes in mid-century, until their numbers suffered a precipitous post–Vatican II decline. As the faithful blinked in the light of the post–Vatican II Church, they picked up on the themes the Council suggested: increased participation of the laity in Church affairs, simplified official liturgy in vernacular languages, and recognition and respect for personal prayer. As McCartin tells us, “the Second Vatican Council would quickly become the quintessential symbol of spiritual versatility in the post–World War II world” (103).
Midway through his tour of Catholic America, McCartin introduces us to Father Patrick Peyton, whose Family Rosary Crusade rode the crest of clerical expansion in the late 1940s and ended in 1962. Peyton's crusade, McCartin writes, exemplified a popular theme: “that attention to an ongoing, interior spiritual relationship with God would both enhance a person's relationships with others and inform his or her actions in the public sphere” (72). What Peyton did, McCartin contends, is seed a popular spirituality of the media age that helped collapse the clerical core of the immigrant Church (97–98). Other sections of the book describe similar evaporation of clerical control in specific areas: San Francisco and Boston, which welcomed the “promise of even more striking spiritual transformation for Catholics” (112).
The post–Vatican II era opened itself to more and more prayerful divergences, including charismatic prayer, which McCartin says “signaled a dispersal of spiritual authority as charismatics embraced alternatives to traditional spirituality” (148). Here, too, Latinos embraced particularly Hispanic devotions, even as various groups linked prayer to their political causes.
Overall, McCartin well demonstrates how the newfound independence of American Catholics was both supported and caused by their breaking away from priest-led liturgical prayer, replacing it with more personalized expressions of spirituality that often diverged from official Church positions, and which promise to continue in the wake of scandal.
