After seven years of labor in Louisiana, the French missionary priest Michel Portier doubted that he possessed the qualities he needed to succeed in strengthening Catholicism on the American frontier. He reflected simply, and with apparent pain, about “what I have done for the glory of religion” (65). Michael Pasquier shows that such lamentations were common among the men who arrived from France to expand Catholic Church institutions in the trans-Appalachian West between the French Revolution and the end of the American Civil War. They experienced physical and spiritual hardships in isolated frontier dioceses in places like Kentucky, Louisiana, Missouri, and Texas. Some priests found joy in the exquisite suffering, while others finally succumbed to their feelings of failure. These stories of privation are a common feature of missionary writing in many times and places, serving as a way to celebrate piety and to paint flattering portraits in the hagiographic tradition. Pasquier does not dwell on them to reconstruct heroic tales of missionary labor, but rather to provide an intimate view into the tension between the ideals and objectives of the French missionaries and the difficult realities of daily life.

Pasquier stresses that this is a book about religious practice in the priesthood and cites as a major influence recent works on the study of lived religion. His analysis is based largely on the private writings of individual priests, on the letters, journals, and diaries that reveal “the unsettled, unscripted, and unofficial thoughts and actions of French missionary priests” (7). His research in this rich material is impressive.

There are five main chapters in the book. The first examines missionary formation in the first two generations of French missionaries. Pasquier stresses the role of the Order of St. Sulpice in training a number of priests during the turbulent era of the French Revolution and the first decades of the nineteenth century. While he traces the influence of the order on efforts to establish seminaries and provide diocesan priests to a large and growing nation, he also considers the ways Sulpician spirituality shaped the emergence of friendships and a sense of brotherhood and common purpose. The private writings of priests are essential to this kind of insight.

The second chapter is very much about suffering in the service of the church. Here, Pasquier adds complexity and nuance to the popular image of powerful and confident men constructing an increasingly stable church. For many priests, spiritual self-doubts and embarrassing scandals tempered the enthusiasm they brought to their jobs and made them wonder, like Portier, if they would ever be successful.

The next chapter connects the growing missionary literary culture of the nineteenth century to the emergence of transnational Catholicism. Pasquier describes the formation of the Oeuvre de la propagation de la foi in 1822 to support missions around the world. The Annales de la propagation de la foi, first published in 1826, provided a venue for sharing tales of exotic missions and priestly labors. These accounts were a continuation of the long tradition of missionary travel literature that goes back in France to the Jesuit Relations of the seventeenth century. Pasquier argues that the writings helped provide an ideological framework for the missions that encouraged participation from French priests and linked their work to a glorious missionary past of Jesuit martyrs.

The fourth chapter examines the complicated politics of ultramontane Catholicism. Pasquier finds that conditions in southern and western dioceses limited the ability of missionaries to enforce the Romanization of the Catholic Church. Local tradition, indifference, and diverse Catholic populations made efforts to increase ecclesiastical authority difficult at best. The effects of these challenges are nowhere more apparent than in the response to slavery and the Civil War, the subject of the last major chapter in the book. Many priests believed abolitionism was a sign of social disorder, and they came to identify with the slave culture of the American South. Pasquier notes, “the conservative, reactionary posture of most French missionaries contrasted with the outspoken cadre of liberal Catholic leaders in France” (188). This division weakened the transnational connections that had been forged over previous decades.

Pasquier has without question provided an important new study of Catholicism in the United States. In particular, he has addressed a notable void in the historical literature on Catholicism in the South and the trans-Appalachian West. While well known church builders appear often in the pages of this book, this is not an institutional history in the traditional sense. Pasquier dwells much more on the lived experience of missionaries than he does on the details of ecclesiastical growth and development. Importantly, he includes the voices of unfamiliar priests like Portier, men who had much to say about life in the small towns and frontier villages of the United States. If anything, I would have enjoyed even more of these stories. Pasquier offers an important historiographical intervention and his deliberate discussion of related literature shows his deep respect for other authors, but the words and experiences of the French priests are so compelling that it would have been possible to build the entire text around them and let the historiographical commentary sit in the notes. In any case, the book is a success. Scholars of American Catholicism and religion in the South and West will find much to ponder, as will those searching for alternatives to the standard narrative of nineteenth-century evangelical Christianity.