In his life of John Wynne, Michael Lombardo has taken the intriguing approach of employing the analytical framework of inculturation to demonstrate how American Catholics successfully accommodated themselves to Progressive America while at the same time offering a blueprint for the renewal of American society that was grounded in a neo-scholastic worldview. This process was informed by a process of Catholic scholarly ‘re-narration’ of American history that emphasised such phenomena as the legalisation of religious toleration by the Catholic Maryland colony or the contributions of Catholic pioneers and missionaries to the building of American civilisation. To this literature Wynne made his own contribution in a 1917 lecture (‘The guardian of liberty’) that repudiated the notion of the Reformation as the seedbed of modern American freedom, and located its origins in the Western Catholic Church's promotion of human freedom as embodied in the medieval universities and the guilds.

Lombardo's account of Wynne's career, most notably his editorial contributions to the Catholic Encyclopedia and the periodical America, offers the portrait of an American Jesuit who, over almost half a century, sought to promote the development of literary resources to serve a Catholic immigrant population that had yet to make significant inroads into the bourgeoisie. Insofar as these resources were informed by neo-scholasticism, Wynne could be considered a Catholic traditionalist. His loyalty to the legacy of Pope Pius x was unqualified and he remained committed to a form of Catholic transnationalism that served as a corrective both to those who wholeheartedly embraced their new American citizenship and those who continued doggedly to adhere to Old World attachments.

As Lombardo makes clear, however, Wynne also proved remarkably tolerant of the American public education system and of the separation of Church and State, while displaying an openness to Progressive Era developments in education, journalism and the sciences that suggested a more liberal cast of mind. His acceptance of American religious pluralism as a positive good for American Catholics meant that, rather than assert a commitment to the mass conversion of the population of the United States, he desired that the Church be acknowledged as ‘one voice among many for the betterment of society’ (p. 165). He thus anticipated the work of fellow Jesuit John Courtney Murray on religious freedom, which would ultimately be realised in the adoption by the Second Vatican Council of Dignitatis humanae in 1965. In the same vein, Wynne's dedication to the encouragement of the Catholic laity to assume greater responsibility in national affairs foreshadowed the rise of Catholic Action in the 1930s and the development of the Christian Family Movement in the 1940s.

Lombardo's monograph is a timely reminder of the delicate balancing act in which the American Catholic Church indulged in the years when its identity was still defined by mass immigration and of the role that churchmen like Wynne played in its development. It also serves as a corrective to accounts that continue to locate the origins of modern America Catholicism no earlier than the years immediately following the First World War.