The Italian geopolitical scholar Manlio Graziano has written this tightly constructed monograph to explain two seemingly surprising trends that characterize contemporary American and Vatican statecraft. First, Graziano claims that Roman Catholics, despite having endured a well-documented history of governmental suspicion and hostility, now play an outsize role in United States politics. During the Obama years especially, Catholics achieved a majority on the Supreme Court, boasted some of the nation's most prominent elected officials, and dominated significant appointments throughout the administration, particularly in the military and intelligence communities. Second, the author claims that American Catholics now exercise unprecedented influence within Vatican circles. Historically, of course, the universal Catholic Church and the United States have clashed on a variety of religious and political issues, ranging from the abolition of slavery to Leo XIII's condemnation of “Americanism” in the 1890s to the Gulf wars of 1991 and 2003. Now, however, the United States boasts the second largest national group in the college of cardinals, trailing only the Italians. American prelates successfully promoted religious freedom as a defining principle of the Second Vatican Council, and their progressive influences undergirded the election of Pope Francis, whom Graziano views as “the expounder of a pastoral teaching in which life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness seem to have become the new mantras” (2).

Graziano's conceptual framework places these two developments within long-term political and social transformations that, he believes, hold the key to understanding these trends. First, he asserts that the United States constitutes a superpower in distress. Economic decline and a loss of global hegemony, which began to become apparent at least by the late 1970s, have produced a national cultural and emotional crisis. A gloomy sense of despair pervades the land as Americans try to explain their declining fortunes. Graziano believes that the Roman Catholic Church, as the oldest and most widely established authoritative institution in the world, offers a solid anchor for Americans seeking certitude in a troublesome environment. Graziano claims that Catholics typically possess the authoritative mindset, organizational acumen, activist mentality, and mobilization skills to successfully assume leadership roles. These same virtues make the Catholic Church an attractive model and partner for a nation seeking to regain its cohesive sense of purpose and restore internal order in an increasingly uncertain world.

Second, Graziano argues that America's decline coincided with a process of desecularization. As religion aggressively returns to the public sphere, he views the universal Catholic Church as especially well positioned to play an important role on the world stage. Perhaps the most controversial chapter in this book discusses recent evangelical efforts to influence American politics, an endeavor that the author denigrates as “much ado about nothing” (111). Graziano believes that the religious right constituted a decentralized, fragmented, intellectually incoherent, and internally divided group with no clear philosophical agenda or authoritative structure. Ultimately, their political interventions produced no policy gains, achieved no lasting influence, and demonstrated no ability to govern. Although specific politicians managed to harness evangelical enthusiasm and achieve electoral success, they ultimately disillusioned and disappointed their supporters. The Catholic Church, on the other hand, has benefited in the author's mind from its strong institutional network, centralized and disciplined organizational structure, and clearly defined identity. While evangelical activists have contributed sound and fury to media debates, Catholics have assumed major policy-making roles within the federal bureaucracy.

Graziano's sweeping global and temporal arguments—and his outsider perspective—occasionally offer interesting insights but generally weaken his book. His historical overview does present a solid periodization for relations between American Catholics and the state: theological and political ostracism during the colonial period; legal quarantine during the early Republic; expansion of the Catholic community from the onset of Irish Famine immigration through the nativist movements of the 1920s; and a laborious integration into national life over the course of the last century. He also convincingly demonstrates that Franklin Roosevelt, Richard Nixon, and Ronald Reagan played greater roles than John F. Kennedy in integrating Catholics into American political culture, while not discounting the symbolic significance of the 1960 election. Graziano further offers a useful corrective to observers who focus solely on Catholic institutional declension in recent years, arguing that since the 1980s the church has demonstrated a unique ability “to mobilize people—not only people willing to listen but people willing to leave their homes, whatever the distance and the weather, to go listen” in parishes, even after the clergy sexual abuse crisis (158).

Some caveats deserve mention. First, Graziano relies heavily on a relatively small number of secondary sources for most of his generalizations concerning American religious culture. Charles Morris's journalistic overview, American Catholics (Times Books, 1997), appears a particular favorite of his. He largely ignores the vast and robust scholarship on American evangelicalism, excepting an article by Mark Noll in the New Republic. Second, this history lacks flesh and blood people. Merely because senior staff in a governmental administration self-identify as “Catholic” on their biographical profiles ultimately says little concerning their religious beliefs, institutional affiliations, ideological perspectives, and political actions. Graziano likely would dismiss this as irrelevant to his broader concerns, but, in reality, it does matter. Similarly, Catholic educational institutions, healthcare facilities, and social welfare organizations might have a mission and style that closely ties them to the universal church, or they may operate as largely secular entities with a vague religious affiliation. Finally, the author sometimes attributes too much import to symbolic events. Arguing that one indication of the new vitality and influence of the Catholic Church can be seen in the manner in which the pope “is greeted simultaneously as a head of state, a prophet, a tutelary deity, and a rock star,” Graziano points to the “solemnity” that greeted Pope Francis's appearance before Congress in September 2015 as an example of “influence” (172–173). Americans and their elected representatives did indeed greet the pope with solemnity and affection. They then proceeded to return home, largely ignore his message, and anoint Donald Trump as their forty-fifth president.