Over the past twenty-plus years, scholars have been discovering and presenting stories of Catholics in the American South, especially during the American Civil War, and in various degrees assessing the extent to which, if at all, matters of faith and fealty to the Church affected their participation in and support for southern ways and interests and eventually the Confederacy. Much of this work has focused on the clergy, and much of that work has involved publishing, annotating, and commenting on the correspondence, memoirs, and other writings of church leaders and chaplains during the war period. The gist of much of this work has been that Catholic clergy in the South accommodated to prevailing southern beliefs about slavery and supported the Confederacy. One recent work, Gracjan Kraszewski's Catholic Confederates: Faith and Duty in the Civil War South (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2020), even goes so far as to assert, in its sampling of Catholic clergy, that Catholics became completely “Confederatized” in their support for secession, slavery, and the Confederacy. Although Katherine Bentley Jeffrey does not explicitly subscribe to that conclusion in her book, she does cast the Jesuit chaplain Father Darius Hubert, S.J., as a committed supporter of the Confederate war effort and as an important clerical voice extolling Confederate soldiers’ character after the war. As such, Bentley's study of Fr. Hubert fits the current profile of Catholic clergy in the South as at least complicit in encouraging and sustaining the world the slaveholders made and fought to keep.

Having but a smattering of Hubert's own writings and also lacking much primary source material about him, Jeffrey relies on official military and Church records, newspaper accounts, and memorials to give readers the public man—a French-born priest who came to Louisiana as a young man, served the Church and the Society of Jesus in several capacities there, and when war came joined and stayed through the war's last days with what became a storied Louisiana regiment in Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia as its chaplain, earning the gratitude of many southerners after the war for his eulogies and prayers remembering the fallen “heroes” of the Confederacy. Much of Jeffrey's short book relates Hubert's time as a chaplain. Jeffrey does not venture far from her limited sources to speculate on Hubert's private thoughts or life. For her, his behavior, as related by others, reveals the man. In Jeffrey's telling, Hubert's ministry during the war was pastoral and practical. He won favor among his men by attending to their personal as well as spiritual needs, by showing grit and courage, and by committing to the cause, sometimes to excess as when he gave up his priestly vestments for a soldier's uniform. By war's end, his body was almost broken from deprivations and his uniform was in tatters, but his wartime service and suffering earned him standing as a true southerner. In Hubert's example, as Jeffrey suggests, Catholics won at least grudging respect from non-Catholics, as happened in other circumstances during the war, especially from the nursing service of Catholic nuns.

But much of Hubert's significance on a wider stage came after the war. Although, in Jeffrey's estimation, Hubert never espoused the Lost Cause ideology explicitly, he did give its essence credibility and validity in his public prayers. Indeed, after the war, he became a much sought-after priest to provide benedictions and prayers at monument raisings for and burials of Confederate generals and even Confederate president Jefferson Davis. The Jesuit Catholic priest provided sanctifying comfort in a still-Protestant land. Jeffrey does not contemplate the meaning of that in a larger sense regarding Catholic-Protestant relations and the place of Catholics generally after the war, but the implication is clear from her description of Hubert's prominence and the response to his public prayers.

Jeffrey shows much skill in extracting material from limited, and limiting, sources to bring Hubert and his public service to light. But she exercises perhaps undue caution in terms of placing Hubert's experience in a larger context. For example, by drawing on scholarship about masculinity among clergy (Protestant and Catholic), especially in the southern context, she might have at least suggested how the need to “be a man”—so important in a South, as elsewhere, that regarded clergy, and especially the celibate, cassocked Catholic clergy, as suspect because of their seeming feminine, passive, and pacific ways—affected or informed Hubert's ministry and public posture. So, too, Jeffrey might have explored what it meant to be a Jesuit in a church still suspicious of them, and how, if at all, that suspicion affected or informed Hubert's ministry and relations in and out of the Church. One wonders too if Hubert was sui generis or representative of other Catholic clergy or of men of his generation in his day. On the latter, for example, recent scholarship on southern men coming of age during the antebellum era suggests a need for them to prove themselves as men of honor and courage. They welcomed war. Was that true for clergy as well? Finally, one wonders what influences Hubert's French background, mixed with the still Frenchified New Orleans and lower Louisiana where he served, had on his ministry and adaptation to local cultural and political interests. Amid lay trustee troubles and a Catholic Church increasingly run by “Irish” clergy, where did Hubert and his Louisiana flock fit in? Did their public selves speak to their private cultural and religious identities and interests?

Such questions should not detract from what Jeffrey has wrought. Her well-written and admiring study of Father Darius Hubert, S.J., adds much to our understanding of the duties and dynamics of chaplaincy during the Civil War and the place of Catholics in and after that war.