Eric Morier-Genoud is a leading historian of Mozambique and a groundbreaking theorist of religion and politics. His latest book is a major contribution to scholarship on African Catholicism and on Mozambican history pre- and post-independence. It unfolds as a richly detailed chronology of the Catholic Church in central Mozambique from 1940 to 1986. Morier-Genoud's driving aim is to make clear the wide-ranging variations and hard-fought contestations internal to the institution. There is in this book enough fine-grained detail to satisfy specialists in the book's somewhat narrow subject matter and yet enough attention to larger theoretical matters to satisfy those less centrally tied to the book's empirical focus.

Though mentioning as background the multiple fits and starts, beginning in the sixteenth century, of the Catholic Church in Mozambique, Morier-Genoud's account takes off in 1940, the year the Portuguese colonial state and the Catholic Church entered into a formal alliance that harmonized church-state relations by, above all, stipulating that bishops be Portuguese. From that point, Catholicism in Mozambique expanded and its influence deepened. The Portuguese Empire invested massively in missionary activities, expecting in return that Catholic clergy support the aims of empire by “civilizing” the indigenous population. Yet the impact of the alliance was neither uniform nor consistent, at least not in the central Mozambican Diocese of Beira, on which Morier-Genoud's account focuses. Variations owe to the exceptional multiplicity of religious institutes—also called congregations or orders—in this diocese. Each order came to the region with its own features—national provenance, charism, approach to conversion, and authority structure—and those features spawned divergences in everything from theology to politics.

Multiple bishops held sway over the near half century of this book's scope. We learn most about the first, Dom Sebastião Soares de Resende. He was, of course, Portuguese, but he openly contested the colonial state's policy that only Portuguese orders and personnel serve in Mozambique. Dom Sebastião prioritized getting useful religious men and women into his diocese, regardless of their country of origin, and this inclusiveness led to an expansion in Catholic infrastructure and a proliferation of both missionaries and converts. Later bishops were less inclusive and more closely aligned with the Portuguese regime, but the different religious orders already on the ground thanks to Dom Sebastião made any top-down uniformity difficult to achieve.

Diversity was manifest especially during this period's two monumental transitions—of Mozambique from a colonial to an independent state and of the Catholic institution from an imperial to an African church. It was not just diversity, in fact, but something more like divisiveness and disunity. In the 1960s, with the confluence of African nationalist movements and the Second Vatican Council, tensions came to a boiling point—with some congregations embracing renewal and others resisting change—leading to what Morier-Genoud calls an implosion within the diocese of Beira. Missionaries fought each other, bishops stepped down, clergy entered politics on both sides with the White Fathers, for example, embracing the nationalist cause and adopting local customs, and subsequently leaving the country as a result of clashes with Beira's mostly Portuguese Jesuit and Franciscan missionary personnel. The book ends with the early post-independence period, during which an African bishop, Dom Jaime Pedro Gonçalves, was appointed in Beira. The significance of his leadership lies in its reversal of the Concordat's mandate that the church be allied with Portugal, that the bishop be Portuguese (and certainly not African), and that the role of the church be that of civilizing the natives. It also lies in the ravages of the post-independence experiment with socialist modernization and civil war, both of which spurred the church to a more prophetic stance toward politics. It came to assert itself as a moral force above the state rather than a collaborative partner beside it.

In addition to its rich and detailed account of a key Mozambican region, this book is also notable for its numerous theoretical interventions. First is its attempt to escape what Morier-Genoud calls the “political paradigm” that has dominated scholarship on religion and politics in Africa. This paradigm focuses narrowly on the question of whether Christianity has taken the side of European colonialism or of African nationalism. Clearly, there is too much ambiguity in both the colonial period and the postcolonial period for any clear-cut answer. This nuance is especially needed in Mozambican historiography, which typically treats Protestant churches as the vanguard of nationalist liberation and Catholicism as unambiguously imperial. Clearly, things are more complex, and that complexity comes to the fore because of this book's unit of analysis—the religious order. This focus marks the book's other major intervention. Distinct from studies of Catholicism that reduce the institution to its hierarchical dimension, focusing on the declarations of popes, bishops, and episcopal conferences, this book takes a “horizontal” approach, with congregations exhibiting a degree of autonomy and influencing the overall institution even while operating within constraints. Morier-Genoud makes a strong case for how important, and yet unappreciated, a role congregations play in shaping Catholic history and politics.

While the diversity among religious orders is clear, the question can be asked: what about diversity within each of the orders? The difference made by generation, nationality, and gender—to say nothing of individual religious men and women's idiosyncratic backgrounds—is sometimes mentioned, but sustained attention to such differentiations is lacking in this study. Its unit of analysis is the religious congregation, and in showing its significance Morier-Genoud greatly succeeds. In pushing the question further, future scholarship can use this book as a model for appreciating variety beneath surface-level singularities. In exploding any notion of Catholic uniformity with respect to colonial and nationalist politics, this book illustrates the importance of attending to nuance, tension, and division, all while answering the significant empirical question of how and why Catholicism embedded itself in Mozambique so quickly and so thoroughly in the late colonial and early independence periods. It is an important and informative book that deserves a wide audience.