Catholics and American Culture: Fulton Sheen, Dorothy Day, and the Notre Dame Football Team.

Catholics and American Culture: Fulton Sheen, Dorothy Day, and the Notre Dame Football Team. By Mark S. Massa (New York: Crossroad Publishing Company, 1999. x plus 278pp.).

Until very recently, historians of American Catholicism in the post World War II period looked very favorably upon the liberalizing changes that the church underwent in the latter half of the twentieth century. They generally praised the developments of the 1960s, and especially the Second Vatican Council reforms that represented the heart of the Catholic Sixties experience. These works highlighted the Catholic exodus from its cultural ghetto as they focused on protagonists who struggled against institutional indifference or outright hostility to shape a new church more responsive to, and reflective of, ordinary parishioners and the marginalized in society (whether Catholic or not). They celebrated people like Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, the Berrigan brothers, liturgical reformers and others who moved the institution to better reflect the Second Vatican Council's definition of the church as "The People of God." The predominant story seems to have shifted in the past handful of years to criticize this transfor mation rather than praise it. Instead of celebrating the church's opening, authors of recent studies more often lament a kind of Catholic declension from the certainty and distinctiveness that the ghetto represented. Mark Massa's recent book on Catholics and American culture stands astride the fault line of these two stories with one foot on each side, though his weight more often seems shifted to the declension analysis.

Massa conveys in his conclusion that he feels sympathy for both stories, that the tension they create leaves him "conflicted," and that perhaps for this reason he writes a largely ambivalent book about the trajectory of American Catholicism in the post-war period. His main argument in this lively and highly interpretive cultural history is that 1950s and 60s Catholic history, no less than that of Protestantism, can best be understood as an ironic tale. Catholics had long been eager to exercise cultural power in America so that they could transform society to be more like the Catholic ghetto. They finally achieved this position in the middle of the twentieth century, but at that exact moment they lost the distinctive Catholic vision that would have made their ascension meaningful. In fact, it was likely their willingness to shed their distinctiveness that allowed Catholics to reach the cultural center stage. In short, they sold out--or in Massa's terms, their success brought "mixed results from a theological point of view." [1]

Massa develops his argument by focusing on nine American Catholic cultural epiphenomina in the 1950s and 1960s that involve Catholic movement toward cultural power within, and accommodation to, American society. Three of these appear in the book's subtitle, which should not be construed to mean that Fulton Sheen, Dorothy Day, and the Notre Dame football team ever huddled over gridiron strategy, met together, or even saw themselves as part of a common endeavor. Rather, they appear as the focus of distinct chapters, as do Leonard Feeney, Thomas Merton, Joe McCarthy, John F. Kennedy, the IHM Nuns, and the first Sunday of Advent 1964. Massa has combined each of these chapter subjects with a methodological focus as well, so that the study of Joe McCarthy, for example, is seen through the lens of Clifford Geertz's theory of "cultural systems," and the story of the IHM nuns and their conflict with Cardinal McIntyre of Los Angeles is informed by Max Weber's understanding of charisma. Massa has constructed each chapt er on three levels, then. The first conveys the specific story of Dorothy Day, Fulton Sheen, or Thomas Merton, etc. The second explicitly engages a major social scientific theorist or practitioner's method, and the third subtly weaves the larger story of irony. This complex approach could prove confusing, but Massa pulls it off well by writing in an engaging, often provocative manner that asserts and then retreats from the powerful argument of Catholic accommodation to American culture. Finally, Massa joins a growing number of scholars who locate the significant transformation in post-war American Catholic history in the 1950s rather than the 1960s (when the Second Vatican Council took place).

Readers will have an easy time understanding each of Massa's chapters, though they may have more difficulty pinning him down on his broader argument. His focus on well-known cultural figures proves a masterful way of engaging readers in the important debate that has emerged among students of American Catholic history and more broadly within the church.

Social historians will no doubt be pleased that Massa is ultimately concerned with the lives of ordinary people-ordinary Catholics in his case. Though Massa set out to write a cultural history with an eye on theological implications, readers will detect implicit social historical arguments throughout. The book is ultimately not about Catholic literature or art--or high culture in any sense, but rather about American Catholics and their sense of themselves, their community, their cohesiveness as an American subculture.

But social historians may find the indeterminate nature of the cultural evidence to be frustrating, and this detracts from Massa's persuasiveness. Because cultural critics analyze evidence in a myriad of ways, sources can support a wide range of often contradictory interpretations, each apparently equally valid. Thus Massa can present Notre Dame students in the 1960s to be less religious than their 1930s and 1940s counterparts with no corroborating evidence measuring actual student behavior or levels of belief in the two periods. And even evidence that would seem to contradict Massa's argument is sometimes used as the very foundation for his story--hence the prevalence of "irony." Dorothy Day, who understood herself to be counter-cultural and proved such a cultural threat that society imprisoned her, becomes a means by which Catholics accommodate to American culture. Thomas Merton's self-conscious and widely publicized rejection of materialism and the capitalist society that depends upon it becomes the very avenue that American Catholics use to leave their ghetto and become more enmeshed within the materialist culture. The very Catholics who asserted a distinctive Catholic vision therefore become the accommodationists that destroy the ghetto walls. Presumably, those Catholics who had long asserted the obligation to acquiesce to the state--to serve in the nation's wars, to obey authority, to be aspiring capitalists--become the defenders of a distinct Catholic identity. Irony reigns supreme.

Mark Massa will stimulate and provoke readers because he addresses such popular cultural figures in such an approachable and engaging style. He will settle no arguments, even in his own mind, but will certainly move the discussion along in a lively and positive way.

Saint Vincent College 

ENDNOTE 

(1.) Massa, p. 230. Massa is a Jesuit priest who teaches Church History and directs the American Studies program at Fordham University. His cultural history is always concerned about theological implications.