Much has been written about a Roman Catholic ‘devotional revolution’, a vigorous religious renewal in the aftermath of the mid-nineteenth century political upheavals that supplanted in Ireland and elsewhere in Europe the secularising and morally-lax tendencies of previous decades. In this thoughtful, measured and informative book, however, Urs Altermatt moves beyond that familiar historiographical construct and avoids its conventional preoccupation with the way in which the renewal was made and sustained. He shifts his concerns instead to the long duration of that renewal itself, especially as it unfolded in Switzerland from the mid-nineteenth century down to its unravelling during what he calls the ‘long 1960s’ (roughly the years between 1958 and 1974). Basing his conclusions on a vast array of printed sources, Altermatt explores the Church's ambivalence toward modern society, the gradual decline of Catholic hyper-identity, and the process by which nationalism replaced religion as the key to a Swiss Catholic's identity. As understood by its Protestant and national-liberal detractors, the reinvigorated, ultramontane Roman Church that emerged during the decades immediately following the Swiss civil war of 1847 represented an adversarial, transnational faith that rejected what Catholics viewed as other, lesser allegiances. According to Altermatt, this alienated parallel society was in part the response to discriminatory governmental policies similar to those of the Kulturkampf in neighbouring Germany, in part the outcome of attitudes and preferences within the Catholic community itself, and in part the consequence of disadvantaged or disruptive socio-economic factors peculiar to Catholic districts. The decades stretching from the death of Pope Pius ix in 1878 down to the ‘long 1960s’, on the other hand, witnessed a gradual Catholic political and cultural accommodation with mainstream society that eroded competing concepts of nation between Catholics and their critics and then ended with the complete political assimilation or integration of Catholics into the modern Swiss nation-state. Led by both clerical and lay elites, this more accommodating approach replaced the obstreperous, self-segregating posture of the mid-century Swiss Catholic milieu with a more practical, cooperative stance encouraged by a formidable network of Catholic political organisations, cultural associations and religious newspapers and the Catholic refusal to exclude themselves from all forms of political activity. That process was also facilitated by a more relaxed compliance with church norms regulating religious practice that came in the wake of reforms initiated by the Second Vatican Council of 1962–5, popular scepticism to papal pronouncements that ran counter to changing attitudes toward sexuality and the emancipation of women, and shame or outrage in the face of public controversies regarding papal behaviour during the Second World War and the Holocaust that undermined Swiss Catholic respect for the papacy. Taken together, Altermatt concludes, these political and cultural developments created a new religious environment that blurred sectarian lines, shaped and moulded a common national sentiment, and in the end helped to bridge Switzerland's religious divide and its linguistic differences. While Altermatt's account is specific to the Swiss experience, his lucid, persuasive analysis is applicable to the similar experiences of Germany, the Netherlands, even Belgium, and deserves wide consideration.