In his book The Irish Diaspora in America, Lawrence J. McCaffery quoted the then-conservative columnist and former Nixon speech-writer Garry Wills as claiming that FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover liked to employ Roman Catholics in the FBI “because of their intensive, almost neurotic loyalty to the United States” ([Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976], 205). While Wills's observation is hyperbolic, it nevertheless points up the narrative of Americanism within which Steven Rosswurm sets his well researched, much-needed, and remarkably illuminating book. Rosswurm's perceptive research skills aid in the creation of a flowing narrative grounded in the best-published and archival sources. For Rosswurm, it was “Hoover's profound admiration and respect for Catholicism and its values,” which provided the basis for an institutional partnership that lasted from the “G-Man” era of the 1930s through the first decades of the Cold War.

While studies of religion and religious organizations are becoming increasingly valued in the academy, Rosswurm's book offers much more than a political history of a church-state relationship. What is chronicled here, for the first time in any substantial way, is the history of a relationship between an American ecclesiastical community and a branch of the U.S. national security apparatus. As Rosswurm points out, this relationship was based not only in the shared institutional values of good social order and emerging Catholic ideas on masculinity, but also in the ability of Catholic theological concepts to easily conform to the dogmatic crime-fighting and anti-communist culture of the Bureau.

Leo XIII was the first pope to theologize the internal safety of the state when he penned his encyclical Diuturnum as a response to a grave criminal act—the assassination of Czar Nicholas II in 1880. A decade later, Leo set the theological tone for the Catholic fight against socialism and communism in his more famous encyclical Rerum Novarum. “It is clear that the main tenet of socialism,” the pope declared, “must be utterly rejected” (15). With these theological dispositions in place, Rosswurm asserts early twentieth-century American Catholics came to understand a friendly “convergence of values” which was emerging within one branch of the U.S. government—a government whose high officialdom was sometimes skeptical if not prejudiced against Roman Catholics (13).

Rosswurm ably chronicles the astonishingly close relationships of the FBI with various bishops, archbishops, and cardinals. Although treated as subtext, the Bureau's relations with these prelates—most from immigrant origins—clearly were driven by the impulse toward Americanization deeply ingrained in the late 19^th century American Catholic dioceses. The urge for patriotic approval may have been as much the product of American Catholic assimilationist aspirations as much as FBI director Hoover's pitches about parallel objectives. But while the Bureau's relationships with top prelates are examined superbly, much less space is dedicated to probing the religious “convergence” of rank-and-file field agents. In the era of Catholic Action, might the impressive Catholic permeation of the FBI be considered a proto-project of lay Catholic activism?

The lay Catholic who held the most clout in the FBI during its years of politicization was, Edward A. Tamm. Tamm, an active Catholic from Montana and a graduate of Georgetown Law School, entered the FBI as a field agent in 1930 and rose be Assistant to the Director by 1942. It was Tamm who would supervise some of the most spectacular cases of the 1930's “War on Crime,” including the Lindbergh kidnapping case. Although the winner of a legal ethics award at Georgetown Law, Tamm by 1940 seemed to participate “in what Athan Theoharis has shown to be the illegal and extralegal activities that came to be the norm at the Bureau” (107). Tamm's moral/legal flexibility was conditioned by a main element of Rosswurm's argument: that when FBI Catholics fought against communism and for social order, extralegalism was morally and casuistically justified.

Tamm's departure from the FBI in 1948, though controversial at the time, goes unaddressed and means that Hoover's Catholic “point-man” was nowhere to be found as the Cold War heated-up. It is hard to say who took up Tamm's mantle as Catholic and FBI anti-communism hardened equally during the 1950s and early 1960s. What did emerge, perhaps as a testament to Tamm's groundwork, were strengthening bonds between the bureau and Catholic clerical operatives and informers.

The heightened anti-communism of Rev. John Cronin, S.S., signified a new uptick in anti-communist fervor. As communists established police states in Eastern Europe, Cronin believed that the wartime strategic distinctions dissipated to show a Soviet communism bent on the destruction of the United States, all of Christianity, and the democratic gains of World War II. Cronin not only informed the Bureau on Catholic matters, but also worked within the U.S. Bishop's conference to bend episcopal policy toward Bureau goals. While Cronin's story is well known, perhaps more significant were other priest-informers who operated outside the realm of strict religious bodies.

Following Cronin's lead, but in a more secular fashion, was Father Edward A. Conway, S.J., an energetic Jesuit who was a specialist on the peace proposals of Pope Pius XII. After World War II, Conway took up the issue of nuclear science and social morality. In 1946, Conway was invited to join a specialist sub-group of the Federation of Atomic Scientists called the National Committee on Atomic Information (NCAI). A think-tank of educators, labor leaders, religious thinkers, and civic leaders dedicated to anti-nuclear education, Conway was named its permanent secretary in late December of 1945. In March of 1946, Father Conway entered into an informant relationship with the FBI—a relationship which would have dire consequences for suspected communists within the NCAI. Rosswurm moves back to his roots as a labor historian when discussing anti-communism in the CIO and the case of Monsignor Charles Owen Rice. One of Pittsburgh's fames labor priests, Rice faced the same questions as Conway—how to reconcile the rapidly unfolding theological impetus of Catholic anti-communism with the legitimate union goals of social justice. The reality of communist infiltration of the CIO became not just a sociological or administrative issue for Rice, but a grandiose one, since it ostensibly aligned New Deal-consensus Roman Catholics with active atheistic communists.

Rosswurm's work scientifically fills a gap in the historiography, which was previously often commented on yet mostly treated anecdotally. His work situates the rise and influence of Catholics in the FBI within the larger narrative of Americanism. In this framework, an immigrant church struggled, and achieved, an alignment with the U.S. government, which granted new status and ideological security to many American Catholics. While Rosswurm's book is extraordinary and fascinating, the concept of the FBI as a counterintelligence unit gets left behind. Inasmuch as the Bureau advanced and was advanced by Catholic interests, it also kept up a lively surveillance on Archbishops, priests, and legitimate Catholic organizations—operations largely unknown to the lay Catholics and high prelates who were being watched or wire-tapped. The counterintelligence cases against Catholics do not undercut the narrative of Americanism, but rather underscore the interlocking reasons and layered motivations of the producers of intelligence.