The past three decades have witnessed the appearance of numerous texts and articles dealing with Latino Catholicism. Such works tend to be either the treatises of American Latino theologians or pastoral studies of the practices of specific congregations. In turn, mainstream studies of Latino politics have given little examination to the impact of spiritual ideas in general on Latino political participation; surveys may canvass divides based on income, party, gender, country of origin, etc., but they do not probe the impact of religious ideas on Latino political participation. Admittedly, a significant literature has developed on the differences between Latino Catholic and Protestant congregations in terms of socialization into the American political process, but such studies have not examined whether the spiritual or theological imaginations underlying these traditions explain how one participates.

Enter Timothy Matovina's Latino Catholicism. The overall merit of Matovina's work is that it synthesizes the findings of American Latino theologians, the American Catholic bishops' documents, and congregational case studies. In the space of 250 pages, one gets a comprehensive view of Latino Catholicism. The shortcoming of the text, for scholars of religion and politics, is that at most, only three out of the eight chapters are relevant, and only one of these articulates in detail what he terms a “public Catholicism” (190). The bulk of the text addresses internal Catholic congregational issues such as Latino ministry, apostolic movements, church leadership, and devotional practices.

The initial chapter makes a major contribution by getting us to see the settlement of the United States with new lenses. In particular, he accents the sparse treatment of Latino Catholics by American Catholic historians, whose outlook is too rooted in the “Americanization paradigm” that European Catholic immigrants to the United States leave the “old world” behind and become full-fledged Americans within three generations. Matovina, through careful historical analysis, illustrates a Latino presence in the American Southwest and Florida simultaneous with, and in some instances preceding, the settlement of the rest of the eastern seaboard. As opposed to being recent newcomers, Latino Catholics have been here all along, albeit with different historical origins from other American Catholics. Matovina then carefully illustrates how the specific, distinct practices of the principal Latino national groups are integral components of the history of American Catholicism over the past two centuries. Contrary to the Americanization thesis, however, he concludes Catholicism in America has been the faith of “migratory, conquered, and enslaved peoples” (40) run predominantly by middle-class European Americans. Although his second chapter wrestles with the dynamics of integrating diverse groups within American Catholicism, he does not develop extensively either that these distinctive perspectives still mutually constitute a counter-narrative to the Puritan narrative that inscribes much of American life, nor that much of Latin migration over the past two centuries is tied directly to American neocolonial foreign and economic policies.

The chapter on “Public Catholicism” thoroughly reviews the impact of faith-based community organizing, debates within American Catholicism on the dynamics of contemporary migration, the spiritual sensibilities of some key Latino Democrat and Republican politicians who are Catholic, Latino voting tendencies and stances on public policy issues, and the controversy over whether the Catholic Campaign for Human Development is supporting some groups whose moral positions are contrary to Catholic teaching or have been involved in excessive partisanship or less than transparent accountability. Matovina argues that the situation is much more complex than stereotypes suggesting that Latinos lean Democratic for economic reasons or that they lean Republican due to moral issues such as abortion. In turn, he ultimately concludes that the immigration issue has led to the most salient political involvement by Latino Catholic leaders. But again, one does not come away from the chapter with an in-depth portrait of a Latino Catholic political world view that would be of interest to qualitative political theorists, and behavioral political scientists would find that Matovina synthesizes rather than adds to existing data on Latinos.

Indeed, Matovina employs a historical and journalistic approach which is helpful for both integrating previous studies and exposing their incomplete character or ideological stances. But after creatively recasting United States Catholic history from the standpoint of the Latino legacy at the outset, the remainder of the text provides little in terms of the author's point-of-view, with the exception of his well-illustrated contention that the American Catholic Church is cutting back on its commitment of resources to Latino ministry as the very moment in which Latinos are becoming the lifeblood of this institution. In addition, as much as Matovina accents how crucial United States Latinas have become both to internal faith life and external public expression, he does not acknowledge that these outcomes have been enabled by structures of opportunities in American political culture that were not available to these women in their countries of origin.

In the final chapter, Matovina criticizes effectively the limitation of Latino ministerial perspectives that seek to resist Americanization, a resistance ironically echoed by the conservative theologian Avery Dulles. Again though, Matovina does not deliberate further on (1) what an alternative that moves between the Americanization and resistance paradigms would look like; and (2) what Latino Catholicism either as articulated by the religious practices of Latinos or their reframing by American Latino theologians has to offer for the future of American politics. His text is much stronger at suggesting the implication of Latino theology and devotional practices for pastoral ministry and the character of United States Catholicism.

Overall, this text is superb for anyone seeking to grasp and engage the key internal pastoral and institutional church issues involving the longstanding yet ever growing number of Latino Catholics. However, scholars of religion and politics will find the text less valuable, apart from including the chapter on public Catholicism in courses on Latino politics so as to accent the religious dimension of Latino political engagement.