Catholics in the Mainstream.

Mark S. Massa, Catholics and American Culture, Fulton Sheen, Dorothy Day, and the Notre Dame Football Team. New York: Crossroad Publishing Co., 1999. 278pp. $24.95 (cloth).

A theological morality tale! That's what Mark Massa calls his reflectively post-subculture history of Catholics in the United States at mid-century. Between 1945 and 1970, many American Catholics rode the "sociological escalator" (51, 64, 100) "out of the working class into suburban, middle-class affluence" and "cultural acceptance." Massa captures this transition in the image of the escalator and brings it to life in the stories that make up the book's nine chapters. This cultural history becomes a morality tale with Massa's invocation of Reinhold Niebuhr's "theological irony" (13) to interpret the unanticipated effects of the Catholic passage into the American mainstream. Readers can find the book's main characters and events in the secondary literature Massa uses. His book's originality lies in the appeal to irony and the explication of it through a chapter-by-chapter engagement with social theory. He makes the requisite disclaimers. He does not speak for all Catholics; nor does he offer a new master narr ative.

Leonard Feeney. S.J. raises the issue of boundaries. A stirring and popular speaker, Feeney became chaplain to St. Benedict's Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1943. By the late 1940s, set resolutely against the momentum of postwar pluralism, Feeney began promoting a rigorist ecclesiology in which only Catholics could be saved. After a period of conflict with Church authorities, Feeney was eventually excommunicated in 1953. Mary Douglas's concept of "cultural deviance" helps Massa to interpret Feeney as a "cultural deviant" rather than a "comic opera" heretic. Catholics used him to relocate themselves with respect to central democratic values. Ironically, the victors failed to draw clear new boundaries even as they celebrated the removal of the old.

Focusing on Thomas Merton's The Seven Storey Mountain (1948), chapter 2 presents the identity crisis of "young man Merton," in Erik Erikson's terms, as culturally paradigmatic for middle-class Catholics of the 1950s. Although Merton's tradition-based spirituality offered a post-immigrant, post-working-class alternative to current therapeutic "peace of mind" religion, he would eventually become one among many commodities on the spirituality market. In chapter 3, Massa uses Clifford Geertz's idea of religion as a cultural system to elucidate the question of Senator Joseph McCarthy's relation to 1950s Catholics.

McCarthy's anti-communism elicited from Catholics two different sets of affective responses. The Brooklyn Tablet represented an older, more tribal, immigrant Catholicism. America represented a newly emerging Catholic mainstream. This twofold response anticipates contemporary divisions and signals a Catholicism moving between two different sets of symbols.

"Life Is Worth Living," one of early TV's most popular shows, was hosted by a scholastic philosopher. Clad in full episcopal robes, Bishop Fulton Sheen charmed Eisenhower's America between 1952 and 1957. Massa uses H. Richard Niebuhr's Christ and Culture to interpret Sheen. Though his TV persona rendered Catholicism friendly in the face of pluralism and "American" in the face of communism, Sheen remained, Massa argues, ever the Thomistic apologist of Niebuhr's "Christ above culture." He provided an ironic bridge to an unintended Catholic location more like Niebuhr's "Christ of culture." Into this immigrant Catholic passage to Niebuhrian culture religion came Dorothy Day. Following James Fisher, Massa sees the Catholic Workers as the "most American" (109) of mid-century Catholics. According to Victor Turner, societies in transition often give rise to "anti-structure" visionary impulses. Like Feeney, Day recognized an accommodationist vision in the coming Catholicism. She offered a more radical alternative in the American tradition of the antinomian outsider. Rather than a Catholic Worker, however, an Irish-American Catholic president would come to symbolize Catholic coming of age. John F. Kennedy's September 1960 Houston speech proclaimed an "absolute" separation of church and state. Refusing to denounce Kennedy as a thoroughgoing secularist, Massa draws upon Peter Berger to read the Houston speech as reflecting the almost inevitable privatization of religion that ironically follows upon religious pluralism.

In chapter 7, Emile Durkheim's notion of the primacy of ritual in religious experience elucidates the irony of Vatican II's liturgical reform. Massa joins Durkheim to the traditional lex orandi (as you pray, so you believe). From both perspectives, it is clear that changes in worship could not simply be a matter of updating. Corresponding changes in theology and religious experience would follow. Chapter 8 enlists Max Weber on religious authority to understand some of those changes. In terms of the routinization of charism, Massa interprets the conflict between IHM nuns and Cardinal Francis McIntyre of Los Angeles, from 1965 to 1970, as a charismatic disturbance, initiated ironically by Vatican II's call for religious to return to their founding charisms. Perhaps no figure embodied the tragic-comic wedding of the religiously earnest and the outrageously wacky that characterized this period of "renewal" than Sr. Corita Kent. Truly spirited, occasionally profound, it was she who counseled us to "Damn everythin g but the circus!" This chapter should have belonged to Sr. Corita. Massa finds promise for the future in Andrew Greeley's notion of American Catholics as an "ethnic group" and features it in chapter 9's look at Theodore Hesburgh's Notre Dame. Hesburgh embraced the irony that Notre Dame's rise to academic prominence required the "fighting Irish" to remain "ethnically" Catholic.

Catholicism between World War II and Vietnam is our own "background era." Amidst conflicting sentiments of relief and loss, confidence and ironic distance, this meditation on Catholics making it in America raises questions about how to be Catholic in the United States without an immigrant subculture. Massa's raids on social theory converge on the conclusion that the new Catholic mainstream is in a certain captivity to American culture. His appeal to theological irony implies that he finds American Catholics overconfident and forgetful of God's place. His morality tale calls them to reassess their new location no longer without but not entirely within American culture. But the social theory tends to work against the theology by making Massa too distant. Pluralism almost requires the Catholic ambivalence he describes. If Catholics are in captivity, they can blame neither conservative intransigence nor liberal excess. But even as it mutes present rancor, Massa's theoretical distance joins with irony's natural m odesty to make this critique of American Catholic culture religion too gentle. We hear nothing of consumerism, militarism, chronic inhospitality to children, or even "Starbucks Catholicism." Perhaps readers can be grateful for that. For it is hard to read this generous and expansive book without responding to Massa's invitation to think with him and for ourselves about the theological problems attendant upon Catholic entry into mainstream America.