Among other things, the Cold War was a global religious conflict. One of the principal actors in this conflict was the Roman Catholic Church. Cold War Mary: Ideologies, Politics, and Marian Devotional Culture sidesteps the overly simplistic binary of atheism versus Christianity by focusing on how Catholics from around the world imagined and instrumentalized the Virgin Mary into a force against the Soviet Union and global communism. Our Lady of Fatima looms large in this volume of fifteen chapters, but so too do dozens of other Marian visions and apparitions from Italy to the United States and from Belgium to the Philippines. Far from a monolithic notion of Mary the cold warrior, a “plurality of Catholic anticommunisms” emerge out of the volume's attention to the peculiarities of local contexts, national politics, and international movements (37). The chronological range of the volume is also impressive, beginning with the secret messages of Our Lady of Fatima in 1917, concentrating on the tumultuous decades of the 1940s and 1950s, and ending with the Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014.

Under the editorial guidance of Peter Jan Margry, Cold War Mary marshals the expertise of a truly international lineup of scholars with backgrounds in history, religious studies, anthropology, and folklore studies. Each chapter includes a bibliography, making for a nearly exhaustive list of scholarly works on Marian devotionalism in the twentieth century. A timeline also helps readers situate Marian activities alongside the major political, military, and diplomatic milestones of the Cold War. The cumulative effect of the volume's case studies is a recognition of what Margry describes as “Mary's theater of war,” a multifaceted, multi-oriented, and multi-imagined conflict that defined the Cold War for millions of Catholics around the world. Chief among the book's many merits is its attention to the role of religion, and specifically Catholicism, in the Cold War, resulting in a collection of essays that should be read by those who study religion and war in the twentieth century.