These two new volumes, in their own ways, highlight the continued importance of Catholicism in the lives of Irish Americans through the twentieth century. The traditional view of the Irish in America is that those who came during the Great Famine era (1845–55) were the most ethnic of the Irish to arrive. They came in large numbers, most were fleeing poverty, and they carried with them a strong Catholic anti-modern ethos. The generations after them, however, became more American, integrated, even assimilated, quickly into the American mainstream. This process was not without its difficulties, but it was ultimately successful. Both Damien Murray and Mary Ellen O'Donnell find a strong persistence of Irish identity through their retention of a strong Catholicism.

O'Donnell's work is part scholarly analysis, part memoir, though mostly the latter. What drives her is the fact that her children did not have the same Catholic experience that she had. She then draws on the memoirs and reminiscences of other prominent, some more than others, American Catholics, who came of age in the mid-twentieth century. Their American world became more secular as they moved away from the old neighbourhoods to the suburbs and beyond, but they often still retained the ‘old habits’ (p. 5) of growing up Catholic. O'Donnell uses the writer Alice McDermott, for example, to show ‘the centrality of religion to her family's identity, quoting the Brooklyn-born McDermott: ‘“We were Catholic as inevitably as we were ourselves”’ (p. 107). The ethnic neighbourhood, the parochial school and the parish church were the centre of life, but O'Donnell concludes that ‘as dependence on the local parish for identity and community dissipates, . . . the insular embrace of Catholic life that characterises these mid-twentieth century narratives fades deeper into collective memory’. In some ways her effort is to preserve those and analyse those collective memories and she does a good job of that in the short space that she has here. With the honourable exception of examining the reminiscences of Donna Brazile, the current chair of the Democratic National Committee, who is an African American Catholic from Louisiana, most of the story here is a north-eastern/mid-western urban one. It would be interesting to see if the experiences of those like O'Donnell were replicated in small towns across the country, where Catholics were a distinct minority, rather than a dominant majority.

Damien Murray's work very much focuses on Irish America as minority. Though the Irish of Massachusetts were numerous they remained a distinct minority, even in Boston, well into the twentieth century, facing an often-hostile Protestant population during the period. Murray is thus interested in understanding how Irish nationalist movements grew and thrived in this somewhat unique atmosphere. What he finds overall is that Catholicism was a common thread that held the various efforts together between 1900 and 1928.

In the first decade or so of the twentieth century Irish Bostonian support for Home Rule in Ireland seemed respectable, because of the Irish Home Rule party's constitutional methods and its own belief in the respectability of Irish nationalism. As the Irish in Boston, however, flirted with more Socialist and republican (i.e. violent) efforts to achieve Irish freedom from Britain, native opposition could undermine their work in the cause of Ireland. The Catholic Church, however, could give cover. Irish nationalists who embraced Socialism as well as nationalism as the cure to Ireland's ills, for example, could draw on Catholic social teaching to avoid charges of ‘Godless’ Socialism. Similarly, the Church's condemnation of the British execution of the 1916 Easter Rising rebels made it safe for Irish Bostonians to endorse the armed struggle for independence that the Rising precipitated. Thus, the local Freedom for Ireland Fund (FOIF), founded to raise money for Irish separatists and their Irish Republican Army as it fought a War of Independence in Ireland, was dominated by men ‘who embraced Catholic Americanism’ (p. 69). This embrace indicated ‘that assimilation was best achieved through the espousal of an American patriotism reinforced by an assertive and independent Catholic identity’ (p. 69). In the birthplace of the American Revolution, one important way to display that independent identity was by comparing the Irish freedom struggle to America's similar experience.

Whatever the changes in the Irish national movements, this Catholic Americanism made Irish Bostonians quite flexible in moving with the times, so to speak. Many, for example, moved seamlessly to supporting an FOIF rival, set up by the visiting ‘President of the Irish Republic’, Eamon De Valera, so that he could have more control over the funds raised. And, just as easily, many of those supporting De Valera could switch sides to support the pro-Treaty forces led by Michael Collins when the Irish Civil War broke out in 1922. Some of the flexibility was lost, however, during the post-World War I ‘Red Scare’ when the Church came out strongly against ‘Bolshevism’. Where once there had been room for Irish radicals in the broader movement, it was no longer the case. That narrowing, as well as the foundation of the Irish Free State, and its survival into the 1920s, meant that general Irish nationalist activity declined in the city. Irish Bostonians focused inward to support social programmes for the poor and to oppose national efforts to restrict immigration. Murray concludes that this decline ‘demonstrated the maturation of an Irish ethnicity in Boston that extolled an inclusive and modern Catholic vision of the rights of both native-born citizens and immigrants’ (p. 257).

Both of these works, then, highlight the persistence of a Catholic identity among immigrant Americans and their descendants, but show that those identities were not necessarily detrimental to their integration into the American mainstream. Indeed, in the process of integrating they amended that mainstream to include their identities and provided a role model for other immigrants to follow.