Catholics in the American Century is an excellent and timely contribution to the ever-emerging field of Catholic Studies. Kathleen Sprows Cummings and R. Scott Appleby have assembled an impressive group of scholars who reflect on the role U.S. Catholics in the mid to late twentieth century played in their own parishes and communities and more broadly, as part of the American historical landscape. An organizing theme of the essays is the limitations and possibilities of assimilation for mid-twentieth-century American Catholics. Moreover, the risks and rewards of assimilating into a broader American civic context for U.S. Catholics are explored by Robert A. Orsi, Lizabeth Cohen, Thomas J. Sugrue, R. Marie Griffith, David G. Gutiérrez, and Wilfred M. McClay. John T. McGreevy sets the tone for unpacking the tensions between Catholics' assimilation to mainstream culture as they maintain an ethno-religious distinctiveness. In his introductory essay, he writes, “how these Catholic ideas and institutions at once inhabited and facilitated assimilation into U.S. society is the central drama of twentieth-century U.S. Catholic history” (4). McGreevy's introductory piece, the six main essays, and R. Scott Appleby's concluding essay are all excellent examples of thoughtful, revisionist Catholic Studies scholarship. Taken individually as well as collectively, they seek to excavate this historic and ongoing drama of assimilating, maintaining distinctiveness, and crafting American Catholic realities.

In chapter 1, “U.S. Catholics Between Memory and Modernity,” Robert Orsi revisits and challenges any assumption that American Catholics were indistinguishable from other Americans in the 1960s and 1970s. While it was true that Catholics were throwing out “in great trash heaps the old statues that filled their churches, and special instruments needed for various rituals,” U.S. Catholics “waited with great excitement for news of the intervention of the nonhuman in the zone of the human” (14). As Orsi points out, American Catholics were eagerly modern but at the same time embraced a “divergent ontology” which set them apart from mainstream American culture (15). American Catholics, Orsi argues, were at once assimilationists as well as staunchly anti-assimilationalist and occupied an in-between realm of uneasy existence with dominant U.S. culture. Orsi ends his provocative essay by insisting that “it is necessary to hold together in creative tension the fact that Catholics have and have not been like their fellow citizens before the American Century” (42).

Picking up on this focus on American Catholics being simultaneously in tune with modernity and the mysterious, Lizabeth Cohen reflects on the current trend of globalizing American Catholic Studies. In chapter 2, “Re-viewing the Twentieth Century through an American Catholic Lens” she writes that American Catholic history is at once local, national, transnational, and global and should be interpreted as such. As much as Orsi shares his concerns with scholars' interpretation of American Catholics as modern pro-assimilationists, Cohen points out the limitations of a strictly globalizing focus within U.S. history more broadly. Specifically, she is concerned with what is lost when historians insist on reading American Catholic history as strictly transnational and global. Historians can and should, she argues, “move back and forth across registers of local, national, and international history” (53). She advocates in a thorough and convincing way for a “broadband transnational history,” one that “moves agilely among the local, the national, and the global” and proposes that this comprehensive historical focus is the greatest challenge that awaits twentieth-century U.S. historians (54).

In chapter 3, “The Catholic Encounter with the 1960s,” Thomas J. Sugrue argues that like most Americans at the time, U.S. Catholics were not “swept up directly in the counterculture, the New Left, or the civil rights and black power movements” (66). Catholics were distinctively “American” in the 1960s, Sugrue posits, neither assimilationists nor resistors, but merely focusing on living their lives—working, paying the bills, raising their children, watching television (66). He takes compelling examples from social and political history to show that “ordinary Catholics,” those Catholics who defined American Catholic life and culture in the 1960s and 1970s, were increasingly open to a “lived ecumenicism” (like many of their mainline Protestant neighbors and co-workers) that reflected their immersion in an increasingly pluralistic United States and world (74).

R. Marie Griffith picks up on this theme of “lived ecumenicism” in chapter 4, “Crossing the Catholic Divide: Gender, Sexuality, and Historiography,” in which she explores the limitations as well as possibilities of ecumenicism. Griffith shows how Mary Steichen Calderone, a Quaker and prominent and influential mid-twentieth-century sex educator experienced first-hand the constraints as well as breakthroughs of ecumenical dialogue when it revolved around issues of contraception, marital love, and the sexual body. Griffith offers a case study of Calderone's work with orthodox Catholic and Protestant precepts of sex, love and heterosexual marriage, to show that while there were certainly constraints within ecumenical dialogue that respect and understanding could prevail. That the non-Catholic Calderone was able to attain a reputation of “openness and generosity” among her conservative Catholic peers was precisely because, Griffith notes, she was aware of the diversity of perspectives among her Catholic friends and colleagues and lived within the spaces created by this ecumenicism.

David G. Gutiérrez's chapter 4, “The New Turn in Chicano/Mexicano History: Integrating Religious Belief and Practice” provides an excellent overview of Latino Studies and its reluctance, until recently, “to engage systematically with religious belief and practice” (112). This hesitation seems to be part of the same insistence on the part of Catholics to show their modern sensibilities (that is, throwing out distinctively Catholic iconography). As Gutiérrez shows, 1970s and 1980s Chicano scholarship emphasized political and social sensibilities and downplayed the religious in its focus on political action and agency. Revisionist Chicano/Mexicano/Latino Studies scholarship of the 1990s to the present seeks to show that “the symbolic universe these beliefs and practices manifest is a key component in an ever-evolving series of tactics and strategies designed to confront and ‘manage the crisis of everyday life’” (121). Many of these revisionist studies, Gutiérrez shows, come from religious studies scholars interested in Latino Catholics' lived experiences and who bring an interdisciplinarity that strengthens Latino Studies and Catholic Studies alike. Many of these studies attend to Cohen's “broadband” approach and examine local, national, and global trends simultaneously.

Wilfred M. McClay's chapter 6, “The Catholic Moment in American Social Thought” rounds out the essays and their collective focus on assimilation, resistance to assimilation, and inclusion by re-examining anti-Catholicism in America throughout the mid-twentieth century. McClay wants us to recognize the Protestant-Catholic dynamic “in a fresh way, as a key element in the larger drama of American history” (156) and like McGreevy, Orsi, Griffith, and Gutiérrez, he wants us to ponder and reflect on the limitations of assimilation and ecumenicism between and among Catholics and Protestants. McClay asks us to think deeply about the “Catholic moment” of the mid-twentieth century and what was lost, forgotten, and gained for that moment to occur. R. Scott Appleby's conclusion “The Forgotten Americans?” rounds out the volume and cements the volume's place in revisionist, cutting edge scholarship today. These excellent essays lend themselves well to upper-level undergraduate courses and graduate-level seminars.