It is truly a delight to read this book and be reminded of what a top-notch historian Robert Emmett Curran is—and of the debt that is owed to him by countless scholars who have researched and written about American Catholicism at some point during the last thirty years. Curran's command of the relevant sources—be they mission, diocesan, or secular; here, in England, or in Rome—is exhaustive.

Shaping American Catholicism: Maryland and New York, 1805–1915 is primarily a collection of essays that Curran published in journals and anthologies between 1980 and 2008. The opening chapter, “Ambrose Maréchal, the Jesuits, and the Demise of Ecclesiastical Republicanism in Maryland, 1818–1838,” is the most recently published essay; it came out in the U.S. Catholic Historian in 2008. Yet, as Curran notes, this chapter “has the longest history of all the chapters in this volume” (13). It began as a research paper when he was in graduate school at the Shrub Oak Seminary in the early 1960s. He was prevented from publishing it then, however, as the provincial censor for the Society of Jesus that Curran belongs to felt the article “might stir up old grievances that were better left unstirred” (13). Those “old grievances” would have been more than 125 years old by that point; the topic of the essay is Archbishop Maréchal's efforts in the 1820s and 1830s to break the autonomy the Jesuits had been enjoying in Maryland since the early days of their mission to the British colonies. The reaction of the Society's provincial censor in the 1960s is an important reminder of just how long the Catholic Church's memory is—and just how important it is to have scholars like Curran who are able to patiently, but relentlessly navigate the political waters that any research about the history of the Catholic Church necessarily lives in.

The twelve essays in this book chart the American Church's institutional and intellectual development—and the experiences of the priests and lay leaders who were responsible for that development—throughout the nineteenth century. During this important period, the epicenter of American Catholicism moved from Maryland, home to the country's first diocese, founded in 1789, to New York, home to the largest number of priests, parishes, and lay Catholics in the United States by the dawn of the twentieth century, thanks to immigration.

Curran tells us about the Church's difficult history with race-based slavery; the origins and early development of the Catholic educational system (a system that was founded as a reaction to—and in some respects against—the reality of religious pluralism in the United States); the growing political strength of the Church in America and the corruption that that strength perhaps unavoidably engendered; and the dissent within the clerical community, as Catholic leaders in the United States and Rome struggled to clarify the Church's position on capitalism and its effects on a lay Catholic community that was, by the late nineteenth century, a strange “mixture of immigrants, old Catholic gentry, and converts,” each of whom had their own stake—or bore their own burden—in the country's economic system (249).

Catholics were a “disproportionate number” of the people in “prisons, orphanages, and other public institutions” throughout the second half of the nineteenth century. This fact was “both an embarrassment and a concern to Catholic leaders” (252). Some leaders, such as the German-born Anton Walburg, blamed the “syndicates, trusts, corporations, pools, and . . . huge monopolies” that were controlled by native-born Protestants who excelled at “grinding down the poor and fattening in immense wealth” (253n21). Others, such as the New England convert Orestes Brownson, seemed to suggest that the government had an obligation to protect the poor in a capitalist system, calling upon the country to abandon “the maxim, ‘Let government take care of the rich, and the rich will take care of the poor,’” in favor of “the far safer maxim, ‘Let government take care of the weak, the strong can take care of themselves’” (255).

Yet, in spite of these prominent Catholic challenges to capitalist hegemony, many clergy in the United States (particularly the episcopal ones) refused to criticize the foundation of the capitalist system—namely, private property—or to endorse the labor union movement, even as their parishioners disproportionately populated the movement's ranks. In 1884, Curran tells us, a committee of bishops convened by New York's Archbishop Michael Corrigan suggested that Catholics should be forbidden from joining labor unions because, in the committee's words, they prevented “workers from exercising their industry or labor for others, or contracting on their own” (260).

In the wake of the 2012 presidential election, during which Americans witnessed the “dueling Catholicisms” of Paul Ryan and his economic theories of “subsidiarity,” and Joe Biden and his “social justice” support for healthcare reform, part 3 of Curran's book seems particularly relevant. The section is devoted to the author's exploration of “Social Justice and the Intellectual Life” of the American Catholic Church (243). Curran leaves little doubt as to which version of Catholic social thought he endorses; his essay, “Confronting ‘The Social Question’: American Catholic Thought and the Socio-Economic Order in the Nineteenth Century,” was written in the mid-1980s, after America's bishops released the draft of a pastoral letter that called employment a “right” and insisted that because “the market alone will not automatically produce full employment . . . the government must act to ensure that this goal is achieved” (245; Economic Justice for All, 153–54).

The letter probably did not warm a then-teenaged Paul Ryan's heart. Nevertheless, Curran's essay seeks to understand—and, it could be argued, to justify—the history behind the bishops' thinking in 1984, when the majority of the men belonging to the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops still had not been appointed by the author of Centesimus Annus, Pope John Paul II.

Given that two-thirds of the essays in this volume were previously published, it does seem unfortunate that Catholic University Press decided to release the book in hardback and charge nearly $70.00 for it. It is doubtful, however, that Robert Emmett Curran had anything to do with that decision.