This is a smart book that takes on significantly larger issues than its title leads one to believe. The largest such issue is that of Catholicism and modernity itself in the twentieth century, an issue about which whole forests of tress have disappeared. The intellectual challenges posed by “modernity” (a weasel word, I know) to Roman Catholicism began with the 16th century reformations, grew more acrimonious in the 17th century in the wake of the successive movements collectively known as the Enlightenment, and were then abetted by the rise of historical consciousness in the 19th. As the author notes at the very opening of her work, “By 1917 Roman Catholicism was into its fifth century of opposition to many elements constitutive of political and cultural modernity in the West.”

The BIG question that intellectual and cultural historians of American Catholicism have attempted to answer regarding this ancient stand-off between the Catholic tradition and modern culture has been: how this stand-off was bridged, and when did the Catholic community become full participants in modern U.S. culture? Various answers have been offered over the decades to this question: the GI Bill of 1945 (which allowed Catholic service men and women to attend college); the presidency of John Kennedy (which served as a trope of “Catholic arrival” into middle class acceptance and affluence); the most common such answer (of course) has been the Second Vatican Council, which called for the faithful to listen to the “signs of the times” in order to serve human culture—especially modern culture—more effectively.

Cadegan offers a new (and quite intriguing) interpretive spin about how and when U.S. Catholics engaged modern culture, and indeed modernity itself: she argues that in the half century between the end of the Great War and the immediate aftermath of the Second Vatican Council, North American Catholics performed “cultural work” with regard to modernity in the ways in which they thought, wrote, and talked about literature. In a somewhat breathtaking revisionist thesis about how Catholics contended with modernity—in the process laying a firm groundwork for the windows opened onto the modern world by Vatican II—Cadegan argues that it was through Catholic literary endeavors that U.S. Catholics made their peace with contemporary culture: Catholics who wrote and thought about what literature was, and what literature should be, played a key role in dramatizing the conflict between Catholicism and modernity, and also began the work of mediating between the two.

As she carefully notes, this was an extremely delicate task, because in 1907 the Vatican had clearly and unequivocally condemned a set of beliefs that it had labeled “Modernism.” Cadegan allows that while this condemned theology was something very different from literary and artistic modernism, “there was enough overlap in themes and attitudes that Catholics who thought and wrote about the latter were inescapably also somehow thinking and writing about the former. The path, the collective track, these works cut through time reveals the creation of a set of intellectual resources by means of which Catholics could not simply reject or acquiesce to modernity but accommodate it on their own terms . . . That this had happened in key ways by the time of the Second Vatican Council is a commonplace of twentieth-century intellectual history; that literature and literary culture played a key role is not” (6).

Cadegan argues that participants in this cultural work undertook the task quite consciously, so that Catholic literary and print culture in the years between 1919 and 1965 sought to address an entire range of issues with an eye toward establishing a “right relationship” between Catholicism and American modernity. Four such issues were paramount in establishing such a relationship: first, it was imperative to establish that it was possible to be thoroughly Catholic, inarguably American, and identifiably modern. Secondly, it was important that this possibility be addressed to an internal audience (Catholics worried about the corrosive effect of American culture on “the Faith”) as well as to an external one (non-Catholics who worried about the non-democratic tendencies in the Catholic tradition). Thirdly, they understood their mission to involve guarding both the Church and American society against the greatest dangers of the age (the chief being socialism). And fourthly, the participants understood their mission to involve an underlying imperative to transform society toward the social “unity in Christ” articulated by the popes.

The actors who play major roles in the story that Cadegan narrates involve both the usual suspects and some unlikely ones as well: Flannery O'Connor, Daniel Lord, and Walter Ong are towering figures in twentieth century American Catholic culture, and are, unsurprisingly major players in the story. Other figures—overlooked or under-appreciated by previous scholars—emerge seamlessly from Cadegan's narrative as surprising lead characters: Jesuits John Bonn at Boston College and Calvert Alexander in St. Louis; writer Blakewell Morrison; and the cast of characters involved in “NODL” (the National Organization for Decent Literature) leap off the page as historical figures rediscovered by the author.

This is an important revisionist work that addresses a number of key issues in American and Catholic history: Roman Catholicism and “modernism” in its various forms; the relationship of “great” literature to popular culture; how the Catholic history of censorship both hindered and abetted the American Catholic engagement with modernity. Scholars will find this monograph a treasure-trove of stories, as well as a very important revisionist work of historiography.