Indelibly linked in the American mind with the “Fighting Irish” of Notre Dame, the Congregation of Holy Cross was in fact of French origin. Founded by a priest of the Diocese of LeMans in 1820 as a society of pious laymen, the nascent congregation—known initially as the Brothers of St. Joseph—devoted itself to Catholic primary education, then in a parlous state in the wake of the French Revolution. In 1835, the brothers came under the leadership of Father Basile Moreau, honored today as the Holy Cross founder, and joined by Moreau to a band of priests who were then preaching parish missions under Moreau's direction. A women's community was added in 1841, fulfilling Moreau's then-radical vision of a tripartite religious family of priests, sisters, and lay male members. The vision, not surprisingly, proved too radical for Rome: when the Congregation of Holy Cross finally received papal approval in 1858, the women were forced to form a separate congregation.

Despite its French origins, the Congregation of Holy Cross never flourished in France—the consequence, in good part, of successive waves of anticlerical legislation. Even in the nineteenth century, the congregation's growth occurred principally in North America, with frontier Indiana providing especially fertile soil. Arriving in the Diocese of Vincennes in 1840, an initial band of Holy Cross priests and brothers set about founding primary schools and, as was the case with nearly every religious order in the nineteenth century, caring for an abundant supply of orphans. The group settled permanently near the village of South Bend in 1842, where they planned to establish a secondary school—the remote ancestor of today's University of Notre Dame. The South Bend foundation was soon a center of regional Catholic life, especially after the arrival of four Holy Cross sisters, who attracted notably more vocations than their male counterparts. But the men's community also grew and, like the sisters, quickly emerged as a multiethnic enterprise, with Irish and German as well as French members. (What did this mean for communal life? The author does not say.) Within twenty years of its arrival on the Indiana frontier, the Congregation of Holy Cross had established additional foundations in New Orleans, Cincinnati, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Baltimore.

The Holy Cross story in North America continued to be a story of growth into the 1960s. The Canadian and American provinces of the order were sufficiently strong by the 1940s to establish missions in Chile, Brazil, and Haiti, as well as assuming full responsibility for the struggling Holy Cross mission founded, for reasons of ecclesiastical politics, in Bengal in 1853. Subsequent decades brought new ventures in Peru and several African nations. Like every other religious order, however, the congregation lost numerous members in the wake of the Second Vatican Council and saw new vocations dwindle to a trickle. The damage was especially grave in the North American provinces, none of which has recovered—at least in a numerical sense—from this time of crisis. New members since the 1960s have come disproportionately from the overseas missions that the North Americans were instrumental in founding, although even these new vocations have not been sufficient to restore the order to a state of vigorous growth or prevent its significant aging.

This saga of growth and decline constitutes the substance of James T. Connelly's History of the Congregation of Holy Cross. Connelly, himself a Holy Cross priest and the order's long-time archivist, chose to focus “on the ministry of the Congregation of Holy Cross rather than on its ministers” (x). The result is a wealth of information about institutional growth and development that will prove invaluable to his Holy Cross confreres, who Connolly presumably envisions as his book's principal audience, and useful as well to historians of vowed religious life among Catholics. But his choices leave many questions unasked—even, on occasion, questions that bear directly on ministry. The order's principal focus has always been education. Did Holy Cross develop a distinctive pedagogy? What was its approach to student spiritual development? As for the “ministers” themselves, we learn almost nothing about their social origins, which presumably changed over time, or the spiritual practices that defined community life. The author is also oddly averse to the subject of conflict within the congregation, shying away from judgments when the topic must necessarily be raised and on other occasions simply ignoring it. This is especially true of the turbulent years since the Second Vatican Council. After a passing mention of the clerical sex abuse crisis, for example, the author is silent on the subject. Nor does he mention divisions in Holy Cross over Catholic sexual teaching—divisions of the sort, especially around homosexuality, that have riled many religious orders in recent decades.

But let me close on a positive note. Connelly's book is thoroughly researched, and his subject is rich in human drama. Religious orders have helped to build the education, health, and social service infrastructures of many nations and account for nearly all of the experiments in communal living to survive long-term. These are achievements worth our attention.