The papers reproduced in this volume formed the basis of a conference held in Washington, DC in March 2003. From varying historical, sociological and anthropological perspectives they collectively rehearse the story of a once great institution so vibrant in the 1950s now in a state of decline or collapse. In their respective pieces on Catholicism in Quebec Kevin J. Christiano and Michael Gauvreau raise penetrating questions about institutional Catholicism's own responsibility for the collapse of Catholic practice in French Canada. Was secularisation a result of a too supercilious and intellectually trendy attitude to popular manifestations of religion? Did the lay Catholic elite, itself a product of Catholic educational effort, place too much emphasis on ‘intellectual religion’ and denigrate too readily traditional forms of Catholicism as somehow irrelevant to the ‘needs of modern man’. Their essays, whether intentionally or otherwise, represent a damning critique of Vatican II-era ecclesial and lay leadership in Quebec, whose ideology in effect represented ‘a fundamentally anachronistic … type of Gallican political Christianity’ allied with ‘an inflexible cult of personalist elitism’ (p. 89). At a public level the problem for Catholicism in the United States was quite different. Given its minority status, and the history of anti-Catholicism in the country, much emphasis was placed on the need for Catholics to ‘integrate’ into American mainstream culture. Scholars and bishops united in complaining about the Catholic ‘ghetto’ mentality of much ecclesiastical life in the United States. Integration has been so successful that the problem now is that Catholicism no longer seems to have a distinct identity and across a whole range of social, religious and ethical issues US Catholics are indistinguishable from even their completely secularised fellow citizens. This leaves Scott Appleby limply to declare that ‘I do not see secularization as necessarily inimical to religious practice’ (p. 209). The tyranny of the facts, however, forces him to concede the hardly surprising conclusion that secularisation has had largely negative consequences on US Catholicism. Lawrence Taylor, in his less than convincing anthropological account of St Patrick's College, Maynooth, and south-west Donegal, puts too much value on the testimony of ‘Dolores’, a domestic help at Maynooth. She testifies that ‘quite a few [of the seminarians] took their own lives’ (p. 152). In fact there are only three recorded instances of student suicide in the two-hundred year history of the institution. Dermot Keogh's essay, also on Ireland, has a surprising number of minor factual errors. For example, Archbishop Benelli was not ‘the Vatican equivalent of Prime minister’ in 1977 (p. 117) nor indeed at any other time, nor was Archbishop Casaroli a cardinal in 1973 much less secretary-of-state, nor is Ireland ‘divided into four archdioceses and twenty-six dioceses’ (p. 95). Most astonishingly, in his discussion of the abortion issue in Ireland, he makes no mention of the third referendum on the matter held in 2002. Gregory Baum's paper, which completes the collection, has great difficulty in focusing on the central issues and at times declines into little more than a post-Vatican II liberal rant, as he surveys the horrors of a neo-conservative Roman hierarchy. On the whole, however, the questions examined in this collection are of the utmost importance for a contemporary understanding of the place of Catholicism in the countries concerned. With regard to the decline in Catholicism, which involves a complex set of factors including clerical sexual abuse, perhaps the most sensible judgement is that offered by Michele Dillon when she comments that the relative collapse in Catholic practice may turn out to be a ‘transitional fracture’ in the long history of Catholicism's ‘continuities and discontinuities’ (p. 265). Finally, there is a good deal of repetitiveness in the essays, perhaps inevitably so, but some of this might have been reduced by more vigorous editorial direction from the conference organisers.