SOMETHING HAPPENED.

Catholics and
American Culture
Fulton Sheen, Dorothy Day, and the Notre Dame
Football Team
Mark S. Massa
Crossroad, $24.95, 278 pp.

Students of twentieth-century American Catholicism have been known to congratulate one another on the sly for choosing a field replete with colorful and fascinating characters and dramatic, compelling events. Many of these memorable figures and singular happenings are treated in Mark Massa's thoroughly engaging study of Catholics and American Culture.

Massa, a Jesuit who teaches church history and American studies at Fordham University, has produced a sweeping and dramatic account of American Catholicism's headlong tumble into cultural legitimacy between 1945 and 1970. From Leonard Feeney, the Cambridge Jesuit who fulminated against the infidels at nearby Harvard in the late 1940s, to the women of the Immaculate Heart of Mary congregation in Los Angeles, whose reformist zeal rocked the church and captivated the secular media in the late 1960s, Massa deftly shows how "public" Catholics "moved from the margins to the center stage of American culture in the years after World War II, with mixed results from a theological point of view." Along the way Massa provides fresh interpretations of the cultural and theological work of such old favorites as Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, and Fulton J. Sheen. He even explains the spiritual significance of the epochal 10-10 tie between the Fighting Irish of Notre Dame and the Michigan State Spartans in their 1966 "Game of the Century."

Given this array of material, Massa wisely eschews the quest for a "master narrative" in favor of a nicely integrated collection of "'soundings' of representative figures and events that offer an important glimpse of 'how we started there and ended up here.'" "There" is the immediate postwar era of Paul Blanshard's best-selling, Ivy League-endorsed attacks on the Catholic church, while "here" finds Catholics enjoying such thorough mastery of American culture by the late 1990s that they "appeared to have inherited the millennial kingdom" once the exclusive province of their erstwhile Protestant adversaries.

In the spirit of James Joyce's dictum that Catholicism means "here comes everybody," Catholics and American Culture features an eclectic methodology that might be dubbed "here come all the social theorists," as each chapter is animated by works of one or more seminal thinkers, often to great effect. In his chapter on Leonard Feeney, for example, Massa adapts the "deviance" theories of sociologist Emile Durkheim and anthropologist Mary Douglas to bolster his argument that Feeney's manic insistence on "no salvation outside the church" was doctrinally sound in the church of 1948, but "the experience of postwar American Catholicism itself" in a pluralistic society had rendered this teaching perilous to the life of the community. Feeney, as Massa notes, was disciplined for disobedience rather than heresy (two decades after the controversy Avery Dulles could still describe Feeney's "doctrine" as "solid." Evelyn Waugh, on the other hand, called the Jesuit "stark raving mad...a case of demonic possession and jolly frightening" after witnessing Feeney preach at the Saint Benedict's Center in Cambridge).

Anthropologist Clifford Geertz's model of "religion as a cultural system" is enlisted to bolster Massa's claim that Senator Joseph R. McCarthy "recognized the congruence between his political concerns and the symbol system that many American Catholics already shared," in building a loyal constituency of coreligionists. By the 1950s, however, a smaller but influential group of Catholics had emerged who were committed to a very different cultural system "in which religious symbols no longer functioned in primarily tribal or class terms." Massa argues that this cohort, who was critical of McCarthy and found its values reflected in the pages of America and Commonweal, was driven-no less than the senator's vociferous Catholic supporters-by a profoundly religious world view with a distinctive "cultural cast to it."

Massa's wit and generosity leaven a work that might otherwise have sunk under the freight of its prolific "modeling." The deeply Niebuhrian sense of Christian irony Massa weaves throughout his story proves highly efficacious as well, especially in his treatment of Dorothy Day, whose purported separatism was actually deeply rooted in her mastery of certain American cultural traditions that in turn made her by far the most effective Catholic radical in American history (this reviewer was once invested in a similar interpretive posture toward the Catholic Worker movement, as duly noted by Massa). A stirring account of the battle between Cardinal Francis McIntyre and the Immaculate Heart of Mary community in Los Angeles in 1967-68 extends Massa's sense of irony to the outskirts of tragedy. The IHM insurgents-led by Mother Mary Humilata Caspary and the noted pop artist Corita Kent-were thwarted in their efforts to institute sweeping "liberal changes" in the order's rule and the lifestyle of its members, but since an ecumenical council of "the highest body" of the church "had itself authorized and mandated" a spirit of change, the legitimacy of the sisters' reform imperative "at least rivaled the legitimacy of the concerns of the archbishop of Los Angeles." Massa views both McIntyre and the IHM nuns as "ironic pawns of that same Holy Spirit who had inspired conservative Pope John to call Vatican II in the first place, with results that no one could have foreseen, predicted, or approved."

Only rarely does Massa's intrepid quest to link cultural change with theological innovation result in a slight overreach. While the 1966 Notre Dame-Michigan State gridiron contest is a rich subject, it is not always clear how the tilt-and its inconclusive outcome-apotheosized the "new" Notre Dame at the height of the Hesburgh era (and though Massa claims the tie did not jeopardize Notre Dame's hope for a bowl bid in 1966, the Irish actually eschewed postseason contests altogether between 1925 and 1970, a trivial point but for those who-in Massa's own spirit-view Notre Dame football history as a subfield of historical theology). These minor quibbles aside, Mark Massa has constructed his own compelling model for a new form of American Catholic studies.

Massa's eclectic approach is in fact so effective that-his disclaimer notwithstanding-Catholics and American Culture even embodies a new "master narrative" gradually emerging within American Catholic studies, characterized by a command of secular social theory and a sober appraisal of the theological losses incurred through cultural accommodation. (Massa's contention that the contributions of Merton and Sheen-for all their spiritual rigor-were diluted into "commodities" for mass consumption echoes a growing theme in the work of young scholars.) Massa's work stands out, however, for its gracious tone, located in the vast if often unexplored midrange between the jeremiad and the triumphal.

While Catholics and American Culture brilliantly limns "the background era to contemporary American Catholicism," we should not entirely overlook the claims of a counternarrative. Does anyone doubt that it was much easier for a Catholic to gain the presidential nomination of a major political party in 1960 than it will be in 2000, or in any subsequent election so long as the politics of abortion pits some Catholic politicians against the church while others are marginalized by the logic of "pluralism"?

Mario Cuomo is one public theologian who would certainly have to figure prominently in a sequel to Catholics and American Culture. Something has clearly changed in the past two decades, and we will be fortunate indeed if a historian of the next generation animates this period for us with the lucidity Massa applies to an era now clearly part of our past.

James T. Fisher, author of Dr. America: The Lives of Thomas A. Dooley, 1927-61, teaches in the Theological Studies Department at Saint Louis University.