America's oldest Catholic newspaper, the United States Catholic Miscellany, changed its masthead in the last days of December 1860. In dropping “United States” from the title, editor Fr. James Corcoran signified love lost; the image of the burned-out ruins of the Cathedral of St. John and St. Finbar that adorns the cover of this handsomely produced volume signifies the loss of something more. For the preceding half-century, South Carolina's “clerical leadership deliberately cultivated an affinity with non-Catholic southerners as a means to resolve the pesky problem of cultural accommodation,” to notable success, by finding ways “to engage, rather than capitulate to, southern culture” (3). But the fruits of that strategic engagement—institutional, political, and cultural—went up in smoke.

In this well-written book about affinities, Adam L. Tate makes his plain: John England, first Bishop of Charleston, is not only the first but most nuanced and successful of these clerical strategists. As Bishop from 1820 to 1842, England figures prominently in each of the six thematically organized chapters. England cut his political teeth in Cork, Ireland, where his editorship of a patriotic and pro-Catholic Emancipation newspaper drew the attention of Daniel O'Connell. The same boisterous defenses of republicanism and religious liberty that convinced the hierarchy to move John England out of Ireland redounded to his credit in Charleston. There, his politics enabled him to navigate what Tate identifies as the core of southern identity: a dualistic, alternatingly national and southern bond of common sentiment, mediated through honor culture. When Catholics successfully accessed and redeployed bonds of fellow feeling, they succeeded in being “southerners and Catholics with little cognitive dissonance;” but missteps and mischance irked rivals and “revealed weaknesses in Catholic assertions of affinity between their faith” and other South Carolinians (6).

For Tate to say that when the strategies worked, they worked, might strike some readers as more limp than limpid: but he successfully grapples with what Peter Kolchin identified as the dual historiographic problems of the “un-South,” identities formed by contrast against outsiders, and the “many Souths,” internal variations and solidarities which were southern so long as they were not un-southern (Peter Kolchin, A Sphinx on the American Land: The Nineteenth-Century South in Comparative Perspective [Louisiana State University Press, 2003], 4). England cast the die: Catholics could be simultaneously American and southern, distinctive and belong. The bishops who followed England, Ignatius Reynolds and Patrick Lynch, replicated the form as best they could. But as national bonds eroded, they clung tighter to the regional and ideological peculiarities that wrought the Civil War.

Their small population and low wealth ensured Catholics “remained impotent as an independent political force” and “depended on the secular culture to credential them” (20, 23). As did the Methodists and Baptists before them, Catholics faced the same “dearth of clergy and resources, intellectual hostility, cultural prejudice, and the geographic expanse of the South” (30). Institution building was the solution, uneven were the successes. England was discerning about foreign priests and foreign money, for the foreignness they bore. Protestant children attended England's “Philosophical and Classical Seminary of Charleston,” but he scrimped to fund his real goal, a seminary for native priests, leading parents to found their own school (36). Editorials in the United States Catholic Miscellany aimed at “‘vindication’ for Catholicism,” which united the flock and reinforced their faith but limited outreach to Protestant readers (44). Yet in venues like Bishop Reynolds's 1844 visitation—his yearly itineration around his diocese—he preached to crowds containing Catholics and Protestants, and his direct engagement of controversy “played to the southern sense of honor” (59). Catholics’ greatest success came through works of charity, namely the self-sacrificing service of the Sisters of Our Lady of Mercy, particularly in the near-seasonal outbreaks of yellow fever in the region.

The power of these kinds of acts of belonging become clearest when set in contrast to the fraught world of apologetics. Although “tedious for the modern reader to follow,” the protracted disputes between all three bishops and John Bachman, pastor of St. John's Lutheran, revealed the limits of affinity (68). High theology was not a space for accommodation and acceptance. But civic culture was. St. Patrick's days celebrations and toasts unified Catholic and Protestant Irish around republican and South Carolinian identity. With the construction of the Cathedral, this reader was convinced that “their cultural strategies had placed them squarely within the life of the city;” but why kick the hornet's nest of religious debate, oft stung as they were. Honor?

Political belonging was similarly tricky. Fear—of fallen man's ambition and of the rising radicalism of the modern moment—drove clerical conservatism. While England advised against taking sides during the nullification crisis, the clergy had no such qualms in the 1850s. The “red-republicanism” of the Revolutions of 1848 and brewing northern radicalism, with its abolitionists and nativist Know-Nothings, amplified the Catholic-southern affinity (149). Similarly, England's penchant for cutting a via media left a complicated legacy Tate chronicles carefully. England publicized his dislike of slavery, evangelized to enslaved persons, ran a school for free people of color, and refused to support slavery in the abstract. But he also criticized abolitionists as a threat to order and argued away Pope Gregory XVI's broad condemnations of slavery, focusing narrowly on Gregory's explicit attack on the international slave trade—which the United States forbade in 1808. Bishop Patrick Lynch displayed less of England's nuance. Yes, each person in bondage was “equally a child of Adam,” but race slavery would “have to continue indefinitely,” and he had no qualms with making “essentialist arguments about black people” to justify a paternalist-patriarchal enslavement (196, 200, 198).

The contrast points to the risk in Tate's approach: the focus on clerical strategists loses some coherence when a singular opinion becomes a proxy for the variegated opinions of the many. It is an acceptable risk, given the payoff: Catholics’ Lost Cause sheds new light on the uniquely southern approaches which established the faith in the antebellum South. Bringing in the laity is the next step.