Commonwealth Catholicism: A History of the Catholic Church in Virginia.

By Gerald P. Fogarty, S.J. (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, c. 2001. Pp. [xxx], 687. $34.95, ISBN 0-268-02264-X.)

Slowly, American Catholic historiography is penetrating the states of the old Confederacy. The region has not been totally overlooked, yet studies on Florida, Texas, and Mississippi have failed to cover the church throughout each state's history. A fine series of essays on Louisiana Catholicism appeared recently, yet the one-volume account of that state's church is over six decades old. Gerald P. Fogarty's book on Virginia Catholicism is a most welcome addition to the scholarship. Writing on Catholicism in a southern state is a different topic for this Jesuit historian, who has authored several previous books on the tensions between the American church and the Vatican. Although Fogarty does not have a wide knowledge of the literature, he has mined manuscript sources from relevant dioceses along with material from Rome.

This is not the first book on Virginia Catholicism--James Henry Bailey published a history of the diocese of Richmond up to 1872 in 1956--but Fogarty updates the interpretive narrative and carries it forward another century. The book is organized as a traditional narrative of Catholicism, emphasizing the role of bishops and clergy yet paying close attention to prominent laypersons, activities of religious orders, and the development of schools and hospitals. Fogarty puts the Virginia church within the context of southern history, as Catholics both dealt with, and conformed to, the racial status quo. Catholics, however, were hardly part of the elite. After 1840 they were mainly Irish immigrants operating as a beleaguered minority in an overwhelmingly Protestant state. Catholicism was suppressed in Virginia until after the American Revolution, and the Old Dominion failed to attract many foreign Catholic immigrants to augment the church's membership. Only during the Know Nothing uproar and the nativistic surge of the 1920s did Catholics in Virginia again face real political persecution.

Virginia's Catholic history does not just concern its relationship with Protestants; inside the church there was a fair amount of confusion, conflict, and controversy. The diocese of Richmond was created in 1820, yet the first bishop arrived and promptly left without even visiting the Virginia capital. The diocese would not see another resident bishop for two decades, and that prelate left for Wheeling after ten years. Unlike, for example, the Little Rock diocese, which always corresponded to Arkansas's boundaries, Virginia's dioceses never did likewise until 1974. Fogarty reveals much about the consultation of Virginia's bishops with other prelates around the country. Some of Richmond's bishops figured prominently in the national church, particularly James Gibbons, the future archbishop of Baltimore, and Catholic priests from Virginia were appointed to bishoprics in several other southern states during the twentieth century.

Fogarty ends his account in 1974 with two events: the establishment of the diocese of Arlington, and the appointment of Walter F. Sullivan, the bishop of Richmond who commissioned this history and wrote the book's introduction. Although this is understandable, this reviewer was disappointed that Fogarty wrote so little about the last quarter of the twentieth century. While the book is amply augmented with pictures and illustrations, the maps provided do not give enough detail to help readers locate obscure areas. These caveats aside, this is a massive, monumental work on American Catholicism. Not only well written and researched, it blazes the trail of Catholic historiography into a new frontier, the American South.

JAMES M. WOODS

Georgia Southern University