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A Browser's Guide to American Catholicism,
1950-1980
By Philip Gleason

LAST summer I taught a two-week minicourse on American Catholicism since the Second Vatican Council. Readings are always a problem in such short courses, and, there being no adequate secondary account covering this very recent epoch, I decided to draw up a reading list of works produced during the period and let students choose from it whatever they wished. My bibliographical approach was quite informal: I simply began listing books that stood out in my recollection or that I had heard about or read about in the course of living through the years in question. The presentation started out to be as casual as the method of compilation. All I planned to do was list the titles under a few general headings. But so many of them seemed to require some comment that I soon found myself embarked, without intending it, on a bibliographical essay.

That is the background of the present article. Recollection has been supplemented by some catalogue checking, and I have expanded the introductory section, but this remains an informal essay inspired by classroom needs. It is a browser's guide, not a comprehensive bibliography. It makes no attempt to include periodical material and is highly selective in discussing books. But a great deal has happened in American Catholicism in the past thirty years, and I found that trying to sort out the principal writings of the period gave me a somewhat better glimmering of what was going on. The following commentary is offered in the hope that others will also find it useful.

I. BACKGROUND: THE 1950s

Retrospectively, two themes stand out in American Catholicism in the immediate preconciliar era. Although labels inevitably distort, we can call them the Catholic mobilization theme and the anti-ghettoism theme. The former was older, but reached a climax in the forties and fifties; anti- ghettoism was in part a reaction against some of the aspects of Catholic mobilization, but the two should not be thought of as flatly

Philip Gleason is Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame. He has written several articles on trends in Catholic thought and has edited an interpretive anthology, Contemporary Catholicism in the United States (1969).

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opposed to each other. Anti-ghettoism will be treated more fully because it feeds directly into developments of the 1960s, but first a few words about Catholic mobilization.

(1) Catholic Mobilization and the Catholic Revival. The most obvious dimension of Catholic mobilization was the tremendous buildup of institutional Catholicism (churches, schools, Catholic organizations, etc.) that took place after 1900 and became especially marked after World War I. The establishment in 1919 of a national organization by the Catholic bishops, with a permanent headquarters and staff in Washington-the National Catholic Welfare Conference-symbolized the dominance that Catholic mobilization was to have in the following decades.¹

Catholic mobilization was clearly inward-looking in the sense that it implied the elaboration of intra-group structures, the formation of new Catholic associations, and so on. But it was also outward-looking because the purpose of all of this organization was not only-or even primarily-to preserve the faith of Catholics; rather it was to enhance the influence that Catholics might exert on the larger society and culture. This was the goal enunciated by Pope Pius X as "To redeem all things in Christ"; Pope Pius XI systematized it in the program known as Catholic Action, which envisioned the collaboration of all the faithful, under episcopal guidance, in the work of Christianizing the social order.

This evangelical, outward-directed impulse in Catholic mobilization was usually designated as "apostolic," and the term "apostolate" was applied to the various specialized areas in which apostolic zeal found its focus-as in social apostolate, apostolate of the press, etc. The apostolic orientation developed within the context of the great Catholic intellectual and cultural revival of the interwar period. This was primarily a European phenomenon and was closely linked with the revival of neo- scholastic philosophy and theology. American Catholics looked to Europe for inspiration, however, and gloried in the achievements of philosophers like Jacques Maritain and Etienne Gilson; theologians like Romano Guardini and Karl Adam; writers like Sigrid Undset, Paul Claude], Francois Mauriac, Graham Greene, and Evelyn Waugh; cultural critics like G.K. Chesterton and Christopher Dawson; artists like Georges Rouault and Ivan Mestrovic, and other lesser figures in a variety of fields. Against this background it is understandable that apostolically- inspired American Catholics began to speak of a Catholic renaissance, of creating a Catholic civilization, of building a Catholic culture integrated around faith and radiating outward into all the realms of life and thought.

This whole phenomenon is only beginning to attract scholarly attention, and it would be hopeless to try to list even the most representative

¹ This organization is now known as the United States Catholic Conference. The name was changed in 1967.

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titles from the movement itself.² Aside from stressing that it was the dominant theme until mid-century, let me note three further points about it. The first, is that several movements later regarded as progressive, and therefore putatively at odds with the preconciliar mentality, actually originated within the matrix of Catholic mobilization and reflected its inspiration. This is most notably the case with the liturgical movement as is shown in a work written in the 1950s-Paul Marx's Virgil Michel and the Liturgical Movement (1957). The same is true of the movement for catechetical reform, but we are without a satisfactory general account of its early stages in this country.

Secondly, the Catholic Revival accustomed American Catholics to taking their intellectual cues from Europe. Hence when new impulses began to flicker across the European Catholic scene after 1945 they soon attracted attention in this country. Only a handful of specialists really knew much about these matters, but general works by prominent progressive theologians-like Henri de Lubac's Catholicism (1950) and the same author's The Splendor of the Church (1956)-were made available to English- language readers. Translations such as Yves Congar's Lay People in the Church (1957) and Karl Rahner's Free Speech in the Church (1959) were harbingers of what was to come in flood a few years later. At the close of the fifties, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin's Phenomenon of Man (1959) and Divine Milieu (1960) enjoyed a great vogue.

The third point is that Catholic mobilization was dialectically related to anti-ghettoism because, despite its being theoretically directed toward renewal of society generally, its main effect was to cut Catholics off from the larger world by recruiting them into strictly Catholic organizations, which the critics began calling "ghetto organizations" sometime around 1950. Usually the critics simply overlooked (or were unaware of) the apostolic purpose that Catholic mobilization presumed, and interpreted its goal as the purely defensive one of protecting the faithful from religious perils, which was certainly also present. But they likewise believed that separate Catholic organizations represented the wrong strategic approach if one wished to influence the larger world. They prescribed instead that Catholics as individuals should bring the influence of their religion to bear on society by joining forces with persons of other (or no) religious background in "pluralistic" organizations defined by function or goal rather than by denominational commitment.

This new emphasis, which emerged clearly in the early fifties, was very "American." Those who spoke for anti-ghettoism were interested in liberal Catholic stirrings in Europe-e.g., the French worker

² William M. Halsey, The Survival of American Innocence (Notre Dame, Ind., 1980) is the most comprehensive study of the mentality of American Catholicism from 1920 to 1940. See also Philip Gleason, "In Search of Unity: American Catholic Thought, 1920-1960," Catholic Historical Review, 64 (April, 1979), 185-205; James Hitchcock, "Postmortem on a Rebirth," American Scholar, 49 (Spring, 1980), 211-225; and Garry Wills, Bare Ruined Choirs (Garden City, N.Y.; 1972), chaps. 1-2.

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priests-but this influence was negligible in comparison to the way their thinking was shaped by American social and cultural forces. This was, after all, the epoch of the "American celebration," when even Partisan Review intellectuals looked favorably upon national values and institutions, and when the effort to understand the American character preoccupied social scientists as well as humanistically oriented scholars. In these circumstances, younger Catholic liberals were especially concerned about the relation of their religion to the national culture, and topics like Americanization, pluralism, ghettoism, and the contribution of Catholics to the intellectual life of the nation loomed large in their thinking. We will begin our survey of Catholic writings on these matters with a look at some general studies of the relation of Catholicism to the national culture.

(2) Catholicism and Americanism: General Studies. In the first place, it is noteworthy that the historical recovery of the episode of "Americanism" took place at this time. John Tracy Ellis' magisterial Life of James Cardinal Gibbons (1951), Robert Cross' The Emergence of Liberal Catholicism in the United States (1958), and Thomas T. McAvoy's The Great Crisis in American Catholic History (1957) were the outstanding landmarks in this outpouring of scholarship on the controversies over Americanization of the Catholic Church in the 1880s and 1890s.³ McAvoy had already introduced in the forties the concept of "the Catholic minority," adapted from the social science of the day, which highlighted the relationship of Catholicism to the majority culture. Similar perspectives were employed by other writers in the fifties. In The American Catholic Family (1956), for example, John L. Thomas used the minority concept in analyzing the impact of American cultural norms on an institution central to the Catholic mobilization approach, namely, the family.

Will Herberg's Protestant-Catholic-Jew (1955) was the most influential book on American religion published in the decade. It drew on the Catholic Americanism scholarship and McAvoy's minority thesis in a brilliantly provocative treatment of the so-called revival of religion and in an incisive critique of the role religion was assumed to play in buttressing the "American Way of Life," which Herberg saw as the real religion of Americans.

Two collections of essays by Walter Ong also attracted attention: Frontiers of American Catholicism (1957) and American Catholic Crossroads (1959). Thomas T. McAvoy, ed., Roman Catholicism and the American Way of Life (1960) made available the papers presented

³ This literature and its place in the larger discussion of Americanization as a theme in Catholic history is reviewed in my article, "Coming to Terms with American Catholic History," Societas, 3 (1973), 283-312. A more recent revisionist approach to the Americanist controversy is illustrated in Margaret M. Reher, "Pope Leo XIII and Americanism," Theological Studies, 34 (1973), 679-89. McAvoy's book, incidentally, was re-issued in 1963 under a new title: The Americanist Heresy in Roman Catholicism.

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at two symposia dealing with various aspects of the subject indicated by the title. Two earlier volumes took a more internalist approach, providing information about Catholic population groups and Catholic activities, Louis J. Putz, ed., The Catholic Church, U.S.A. (1956), and Leo R. Ward, Catholic Life, U.S.A. Contemporary Lay Movements (1959). Jacques Maritain's Reflections on America (1958), and Raymond Bruckberger's Image of America (1959), represent very favorable assessments of American civilization by European Catholic observers.

(3) Controversy, Tensions, and Relations with Protestants, Jews, and Liberals. There was a good deal of tension between Catholics and others, especially over the school issue, censorship, and related matters. Paul Blanshard's books, and Catholic replies, made the issues highly visible in the late 1940s. They are reviewed from an enlightened Protestant point of view by George H. Williams, Waldo Beach, and H. Richard Niebuhr in the journal Religion in Life (Vol. 23, Spring 1954), and from a Catholic viewpoint by John J. Kane, Catholic-Protestant Conflicts in America (1955).

The church-state issue was especially crucial. John Courtney Murray's work on this problem attracted favorable attention from liberals and aroused a very critical reaction from Catholic conservatives, including Roman authorities who required Murray to stop writing on the subject. Donald E. Pelotte's John Courtney Murray (1976) covers the controversy well. At least one book-Waldemar Gurian and M. A. Fitzsimons, eds., The Catholic Church in World Affairs (1954)-had to be withdrawn from circulation because it contained a church-state essay by Murray. Most of Murray's work appeared in articles, but Jacques Maritain's Man and the State (1950) represented a liberal Catholic statement early in the decade, and in 1960 Murray's We Hold These Truths brought together a collection of his writings on church-state, secularism, and other subjects. Murray also propounded a forthrightly Catholic, yet irenical, position in the symposium sponsored by the Fund for the Republic and edited by John Cogley as Religion in America (1958). By the end of the decade, the beginnings of a self-consciously "ecumenical" approach could be noted in Gustave Weigel's A Catholic Primer on the Ecumenical Movement (1957) and in the exchange between Weigel and Robert McAfee Brown published under the title An American Dialogue (1960). Jaroslav Pelikan's The Riddle of Roman Catholicism (1959) was described by a Catholic reviewer as "the best fruit of the new American encounter between Protestant and Catholic thought." In the early 1960s both "dialogue" and "encounter" became buzz words.

(4) Anti-Ghettoism and the Catholic Intellectualism Issue. The main thrust of Catholic liberalism in the fifties was unquestionably that Catholics should abandon separatism, outgrow their siege mentality, and break out of their Catholic ghetto. This message was often accom

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panied by praise for American pluralism, which was interpreted as requiring everyone to mix indiscriminately "as Americans." The liberal Catholic journal Commonweal was the principal organ of the breakout-of-the-ghetto school of thought, and the volume, Catholicism in America (1953), consisting of articles from the magazine, is the most convenient collection of pieces embodying that viewpoint. After the mid-fifties, anti-ghettoism came to focus primarily on the question of Catholic intellectual life.

What was sometimes called the great debate about Catholic intellectual life was touched off in 1955 with the publication of John Tracy Ellis' essay, "American Catholics and the Intellectual Life," in the Fordham journal, Thought. Ellis' critique, which was published as a book in 1956, reviewed the meagre record of Catholics as contributors to American science, scholarship, and creative literature, and listed a number of factors that might explain their weak showing. Its appearance prompted an outpouring of articles, the most important of which were excerpted (along with much earlier material) in Frank Christ and Gerard Sherry's American Catholicism and the Intellectual Ideal (1961). Especially important was the only full-scale book, investigating the issue, to come out in the fifties, Thomas O'Dea's American Catholic Dilemma (1958). Ellis emphasized Catholics' self-imposed ghetto attitude as a cause of intellectual backwardness; O'Dea added several other aspects of Catholic life-clericalism, formalism, authoritarianism, moralism, and defensiveness-as explaining the deficiencies of Catholic intellectual life, or what was often simply called Catholic anti-intellectualism. Hence it seemed all the more important for Catholics to break out of the ghetto and enter the mainstream of American life, for by doing so, it was asserted, they would be able to compile a more respectable intellectual record and become a more vital element in American society. In this sense, the controversy fit into the general Americanist emphasis of the 1950s; it also reflected the American environment more directly in that it paralleled the broader concern over "anti-intellectualism" in American life that was touched off by McCarthyism.

II. THE EARLY SIXTIES: KENNEDY, THE COUNCIL,
AND CONTINUING THEMES

John F. Kennedy's election marked a breakthrough and a new stage in the relationship of American Catholics to the life of the nation. It did not, however, produce any really notable publications. Francis J. Lally, The Catholic Church in a Changing America (1962) was organized around the Kennedy breakthrough, and Lawrence H. Fuchs, John F. Kennedy and American Catholicism (1967) provided an academic analysis by a professor of American Civilization at Brandeis University. Andrew M. Greeley suggested in The Catholic Experience (1967) that JFK might be regarded as a "Doctor of the Church," but that opinion

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was looked upon as somewhat extravagant by the time the book came Out in the late sixties.

If John F. Kennedy represented the continuation in a new way of the theme of Catholic participation in American life, Pope John XXIII (whose name was often coupled with that of Kennedy, as in "two men named John") became the symbol of the new spirit in the Church, and brought the influence of European currents of thought to bear on American Catholic developments in an earthshaking way through the Second Vatican Council.

The literature on the Council and its consequences is immense. I will simply mention here a few of the books that were best known even among those who didn't try to keep up with their reading on the Council. Hans Küng's The Council, Reform and Reunion (1961) came out before the first session met and was the most widely-noted volume to discuss the needs the Council might address. It also marked the first appearance on the American Catholic horizon of a man who became one of the leading luminaries of the theological scene. Küng's lecture tour of the U.S. in the spring of 1963 featured the issue of freedom in the Church and dramatized the clash between liberal theologians and the Roman Curia with its conservative theological allies.

Xavier Rynne's Letters from Vatican City (1963), originally serialized in The New Yorker during the first session of the Council, had already brought the liberal-curial split out in the open, as did Robert B. Kaiser's Pope, Council, and World: The Story of Vatican II (1963). Michael Novak's The Open Church (1964) analyzed the second session of the Council; Rynne continued to chronicle the latter sessions as well, and Gary MacEoin, What Happened at Rome? (1966) offered a succinct summing up. Walter Abbott's paperback edition of The Documents of Vatican II (1966) circulated widely; while John H. Miller's Vatican II: An Interfaith Appraisal (1966) made available the proceedings of a conference in which most of the theologians who had been leading advisors or observers at the Council took part. John G. Deedy, ed., Eyes on the Modern World (1965) is a collection of American Catholic reactions to the Council schema dealing with the relationship of the Church to the modern world.

In the meantime, the semi-popular works of the European theologians sold well in the U.S., with Karl Rahner's The Christian Commitment (1963) being, perhaps, the best example of the genre. The frequently issued, topical volumes of the series called Concilium (est. 1965) provided a way of keeping up to date on the rapidly changing theological scene.

(1) The Continuation and Modernization of Earlier Themes. The concerns that emerged in the 1950s continued into the sixties, but were also affected by the newer currents associated with aggiornamento. Donald J. Thorman's The Emerging Layman (1962) seemed to herald a new age, but in looking back into it again, one is struck by how

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old-fashioned it now seems. The apostolic lay action it calls for goes back to the Catholic Action tradition of Pope Pius XI and the 1930s; its family emphasis is distinctly that of the 1950s, and in general it reveals relatively little of the temper that was soon to dominate. By 1967 Thorman was speaking of "Today's Layman: An Uncertain Catholic" (America 1/14/67), and his American Catholics Face the Future (1968) shows how drastically things changed in the half-dozen years since the earlier book had marked the laity's emergence.

Daniel Callahan's Mind of the Catholic Layman (1963) stressed the issue of lay freedom, but it too revealed a strong carry-over of the preoccupations of the fifties. Michael Novak's A New Generation (1964) was self-conscious about youth and newness, but concerned itself primarily with the intellectual and cultural issues that mattered to educated Catholics in the late fifties rather than to the radical questions that were to be raised a few years later. The Generation of the Third Eye (1965), a collection of essays edited by Daniel Callahan, presents the views of a score of younger Catholics at the end of the Council.

Mary Perkins Ryan's Are Parochial Schools the Answer? (1964) represented a blending of the old and new. Her subject (Catholic education) was a perennial, but her prescription (de-emphasize the Catholic schools) was radically new. Her approach was doubtless reinforced by the Council, but she was a veteran of the preconciliar liturgical movement, and she argued that Christians should be formed by the liturgy, not by classroom teaching. Her book raised quite a furor, and was blamed for contributing to the weakening of the parochial schools in the later 1960s. The same author's We're All in This Together (1972) offers an interesting comparison and contrast to her 1964 book, of which she says, for example, that her reliance on the liturgy alone as educator was "astonishingly naive."

(2) Sociologists Take Stock. The Catholic intellectualism contro versy revived momentarily in the early 1960s, having been somewhat complicated in the meantime by the appearance of Gerhard Lenski's The Religious Factor (1961), a sociological analysis of the effects of religious relief and affiliation, not merely on intellectual activity, but on the more general question of "achievement orientation." Lenski found Catholicism a generally negative factor, and his findings reinforced the position of the critics of Catholic intellectual life and thus became an issue in the debate. Andrew M. Greeley's Religion and Career (1963) was a major challenge to the Lenski thesis, and to the critics of Catholic intellectual performance, since he discovered, through a national sample survey, that the Catholics in the collegiate graduating class of 1961 were every bit as intellectual and achievement-oriented as non Catholics. At about the same time, John Donovan brought out another sociological study, The Academic Man in the Catholic College (1964), that agreed with the more pessimistic appraisals of Lenski and the earlier Catholic critics. Exchanges of opinion on these matters seemed

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to generate more heat than light, but they reflected important differences both as to why Catholics had done poorly heretofore and whether they might be expected to do better in the future. The optimistic position (Greeley's) implied that improvements in Catholic social and educational status would take care of the problem more or less automatically. The pessimistic position of the so-called self-critics seemed to be that there were deep-rooted Catholic attitudes and practices that had to be eradicated by purposeful reform before any significant improvement could be expected in "Catholic intellectualism."

III. MID- AND LATE SIXTIES

So many things have happened so fast from 1965 to 1970 that one can offer only a highly selective sampling. Moreover, books were less influential than actions, and some of the most important developments took place without calling forth notable writings; for example, Catholic participation in the Civil Rights movement was more a matter of example and action than of literary influence. But despite the radical changes that occurred, there were certain lines of continuity, and we will begin with one of these, the controversy over education and intellectualism.

(1) Controversies over Catholic Education, Parochial and Higher. Mary Perkins Ryan's book, already noted, had made parochial schools a major focus of controversy. As one of the chief "ghetto" institutions closely identified with the authoritarianism, clericalism, etc., that were regarded as hindrances to intellectualism, the schools were targets for the liberal critics; they had long been viewed as "divisive" by non-Catholics; and as nuns and brothers turned their attention to new forms of apostolic work, the schools lost some of their attractiveness to the group that bad been essential to staffing them in the past.

The growth of lay faculties not only increased costs, but eventually led to problems about freedom and autonomy for teachers, and to the question of unionization. By the late 1960s, Catholic school people were seriously demoralized; many parochial schools were being closed, and the future of the institution seemed highly questionable.

In these circumstances, two social-scientific surveys of the situation attracted great attention. The so-called Notre Dame study, Reginald A. Neuwein, ed., Catholic Schools in Action (1966), was widely regarded as a disappointment from the viewpoint of method and results, but The Education of Catholic Americans (1966), by Andrew M. Greeley and Peter Rossi, was a solid study and had greater impact. The Greeley-Rossi study was positive in the sense that it showed Catholic education did make a difference, not only in respect to loyalty to the Church, but also because those with Catholic education tended to develop better (more liberal, tolerant, open-minded) attitudes on social and political issues. Greeley became the chief champion of the Catholic schools in the

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controversy that followed, and continued to argue in subsequent years that they should be maintained. His Catholic Schools in a Declining Church (1976; written with William McCready and Kathleen McCourt) is a follow- up survey and analysis. Other informative works for the 1960s are: George N. Shuster, Catholic Education in a Changing World (1967), and Neil G. McCluskey, Catholic Education Faces Its Future (1969).

Meanwhile the field of catechetics was undergoing drastic reconsideration. Mary Perkins Ryan's previously mentioned We're All in This Together gives some indication of how far catechists had come (or gone) by 1972. Gabriel Moran, one of the most prominent American leaders, had reached the conclusion by the late 1960s that "the problem of catechetics is that it exists," as he put it in his Design for Religion (1970).

After 1965, the Catholic intellectualism problem was absorbed into the issue of academic freedom in Catholic higher education, and that in turn soon disappeared in the more generalized identity crisis of Catholic institutions, which itself took place against the chaotic background of campus revolution in the nation at large. Edward Manier and John W. Houck, eds., Academic Freedom and the Catholic University (1967), and Robert Hassenger, ed., The Shape of Catholic Higher Education (1967), offer the best entry into these subjects.

(2) Freedom, Authority, Honesty, Secularity, and Sex. Robert Hoyt's Issues that Divide the Church (1966), originally a symposium that appeared in the National Catholic Reporter, reproduces a discussion among representatives of six different positions and gives some notion of the range of issues. The NCR itself began in the fall of 1964 and soon became the principal vehicle of criticism, controversy, and reform .⁴ Its publisher was Donald J. Thorman, whose review of the postconciliar scene, American Catholics Face the Future (1968), has already been noted.

Daniel Callahan's Honesty in the Church (1965) anticipated the widespread concern over "credibility gaps"; the implication that honesty had been lacking in the Church before indicated the degree of alienation from the "institutional Church" that had already taken place by the end of the Council.

Harvey Cox's Secular City (1965) reinforced the Council-inspired turn toward involvement in the world. The book was widely hailed by Catholics, and Callahan edited a collection of reactions (not just Catholic) entitled The Secular City Debate (1966). Cox's secularity was at least a first cousin of the Death-of-God theology; both were premised on a de-mythologized understanding of religion in a "world

⁴ Michael R. Real, "The National Catholic Reporter: Communications and Change in a Turbulent Era" (Ph.D. diss., University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, 1971) is a very valuable study which provides much information on American Catholic developments generally.

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come of age." Themes of immanentism and humanism were also prominent. These and related emphases may be found in Jackson Lee Ice, ed., The Death of God Debate (1967), and Bernard Murchland, ed., The Meaning of the Death of God (1967). John A. T. Robinson's Honest to God (1963) provided a link between the honesty theme and the death of God. Leslie Dewart's The Future of Belief (1966) announced the end of the Hellenic mentality with its essentialist understanding of religious truth, again indicating that if not dead, God certainly could not be understood in the old way. Joseph Fletcher's Situation Ethics (1966) popularized an approach to, morality that seemed more in keeping with the humanized and de-mythologized understanding of religion called for by the radical theologians.

Incomparably the most important moral problem for Catholics was birth control, and the evolution of this question also threw the issues of honesty and authority in the Church into bold relief. The reaction to Charles Curran's handling of this issue, and the Catholic University's handling of him, also created an academic freedom crisis. The literature here is very large, but John Noonan's Contraception: A History of Its Treatment by the Catholic Theologians and Canonists (1965) was a great landmark in the debate; chapter 15 also provides an excellent summary of the discussion up through the early 1960s. Two works edited by the man who became the central figure in the crisis following the publication of Humanae Vitae are Charles Curran, ed., Contraception: Authority and Dissent (1969), and Curran et al., Dissent In and For the Church: Theologians and Humanae Vitae (1969).

(3) Angry Priests, Restless Nuns, Charismatic Layfolk. William Dubay's criticism of Cardinal McIntyre for backwardness on the racial issue gave him relatively early prominence as a dissenting priest. His book The Human Church (1966) shortly preceded his leaving the priesthood. Even more spectacular was the departure from the priesthood of James Kavanaugh, announced before a large audience at Notre Dame. His general critique was presented in A Modern Priest Looks al His Outdated Church (1967). Almost equally sensational, but at a more serious level, was the departure from the priesthood of Charles Davis, a well-known English theological writer and editor of the respected Clergy Review. Davis's apologia, A Question of Conscience (1967), was highly critical of the Church.

These were perhaps the most widely-reported instances of what became a massive exodus from the priesthood. It caused much concern and occsioined the publication of several books. Two books by priestsociologists came out in 1968: Joseph Fichter's America's Forgotten Priests and Andrew Greeley's Uncertain Trumpet: The Priest in the United States. Greeley also published New Horizons for the Priesthood in 1970, and directed the large-scale sociological survey sponsored by the Catholic bishops, which appeared in 1972 as The Catholic Priest in the United States: Sociological Investigations. Greeley's Priests in the

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United States: Reflections on a Survey (1972) gave his own interpretation of the findings. At the same time, John Tracy Ellis edited another volume of the series sponsored by the bishops: The Catholic Priest in the United States: Historical Investigations (1971).

The corresponding exodus of religious women from their communities was less well reported as it occurred, and has received less study. Leo Cardinal Suenens' The Nun in the World (1963) was an early example of a new spirit concerning the work of religious women; according to one authority, it was read by virtually every American nun. Sister Charles Borreomeo Muckenhirn's selection of short pieces entitled The New Nuns (1967) was relatively tame. Chapter 6 of Garry Wills' Bare Ruined Choirs (1972) is a merciless expose of the fatuities of the best known "new nun" of the period, "Sister J." (Jacqueline Grennan), President of Webster College in St. Louis, who resigned her position and left her community to become more actively involved in the secular city. Helen Ebaugh's Out of the Cloister (1977) is an informative sociological study of the changes the sisterhoods have undergone and the dilemmas they face.

The Catholic charismatic movement, which surfaced (to use a sixties word) in 1967, was perhaps the most surprising development in an epoch of surprises. It was primarily a lay movement, although priests, religious, and some bishops have also identified themselves with it. The early stirrings occurred in Pittsburgh, but the movement first gained national visibility at Notre Dame, and two of the most informative early accounts were written by persons who became involved in it there-Kevin and Dorothy Ranaghan's Catholic Pentecostals (1969), and Edward D. O'Connor's The Pentecostal Movement in the Catholic Church (1971). See also Ralph Martin, New Wine, New Skins (1976).

(4) Catholicism and General Cultural Upheaval. The explosion that rocked the Catholic Church attracted wide attention (and caused some alarm) among non- Catholics; it became a contributing cause to the wider cultural turmoil that prevailed in American society in the late 1960s. Of course Catholic developments were also profoundly affected by the upheaval in the wider society. The books mentioned in this section do no mote than suggest the various kinds of connections that existed.

Catholics, or persons of Catholic background, played very prominent roles in several spheres, but Marshall McLuhan was in a class by himself as constituting a one-man cultural revolution, a prophet of the global village and media consciousness. His views defy brief summary, but can be gotten at through his Understanding Media (1964), or more painlessly (if more bewilderingly) through the picture-book with captions, The Medium is the Massage (1967)-and "massage" here is not a misprint for "message."

The background of Timothy Leary, high priest of the psychodelic revolution, was Catholic; and Theodore Roszak's The Making of a

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Counter Culture (1968) argued for an extreme form of romanticism that found many Catholic sympathizers.⁵ This mentality is stringently criticized in Andrew Greeley's Come Blow Your Mind With Me (1971). The title of Michael Novak's A Theology for Radical Politics (1969) suggests greater sympathy for this sort of cultural radicalism. Rosemary Ruether's The Church Against Herself (1967) and The Radical Kingdom (1970) applied eschatological and millennialist perspectives to ecclesiology. James Colaianni's The Catholic Left ( 1968) is a potpourri dealing with "the crisis of radicalism within the Church."

I know of no general survey of Catholic participation on the Civil Rights-Black movement, but there are a few snippets in Colaianni, and journalistic reporting of the activities of Fr. James Groppi of Milwaukee, who first gained national prominence in 1965, gives some notion of its extent and character. In the anti-Vietnam movement, the brothers Daniel and Philip Berrigan were the outstanding figures (and Philip, a Josephite priest, had long been active on the racial front). On the Catholic anti-war movement, see Francine du Plessix Gray, Divine Disobedience: Profiles in Catholic Radicalism (1970), The Berrigans, edited by William VanEtten Casey and Philip Nobile (1971), and two studies of broader scope: Patricia McNeal, The American Catholic Peace Movement (1978), and Charles A. Meconis, With Clumsy Grace: The American Catholic Left (1979). Dorothy Dohen, Nationalism and American Catholicism (1967), is a critique of the Church for allowing itself to become uncritically committed to nationalist political aims and ideology.

IV. NEW INTERESTS IN THE 1970s

While there is no sharp demarcation between phases of the postconciliar upheaval, the turmoil was most intense between about 1965 and 1970. A calmer atmosphere gradually prevailed in the 1970s, but many of the movements of the sixties continued to make themselves felt and there were some new developments.

One such development was the emergence of the so-called new ethnicity. Catholics have been very prominent here.⁶ Michael Novak's The Rise of the Unmeltable Ethnics (1972) was the manifesto of the movement; Andrew Greeley became its leading academic spokesmen with his books, Why Can't They Be Like Us? (1971), That Most Distressful Nation (1972), and Ethnicity in the United States (1974); and Msgr. Geno Baroni (Assistant Secretary for Neighborhoods, Voluntary Associations, and Consumer Protection in the Department of Housing and Urban Development in the Carter administration) was its

⁵ Many examples are given in my article, "Our New Age of Romanticism," America, 117 (Oct. 7, 1967), 372-75.
⁶ Cf. Philip Gleason and David Salvaterra, "Ethnicity, Immigration and American Catholic History," Social Thought, 4 (1978), 3-28.

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most visible activist on the level of practical community-organization work. Silvano Tomasi is another priest associated with the movement as founder to the Center for Migration Studies in New York and editor of the International Migration Review. The emergence of Mexican-Americans as a major element among American minority groups, and the widespread publicity won by Cesar Chavez in the 1960s, also contributed to linking Catholicism with the ethnic movement. Ethnicity had its Catholic critics too, and the movement seemed to be losing momentum by the end of the 1970s.

The commitment to social reform and radical restructuring of society that expressed itself in the sixties in support for the racial and anti-Vietnam movements has carried over in less spectacular form in sympathy for the Third World, in interest in liberation theology, in the promotion of various drives for peace and justice, and in a largely unacknowledged, but quite obvious, gravitation toward some form of Christian socialism as the most desirable political-economic system.

Peace and justice was the major theme of the Bicentennial observance sponsored by the Catholic Bishops. For materials on this meeting, see James Finn's article, "Catholics Called to Action," in the magazine Worldview (March 1977), and the resolutions of the gathering reprinted in the hierarchy's official publication Origins (Volume 6, nos. 20-21). A larger collection of official documents concerning "Peace, Justice and Liberty" is presented in Renewing the Earth (1977), edited by David J. O'Brien and Thomas G. Shannon.

The most influential works on liberation theology are: Gustavo Gutierrez, A Theology of Liberation (1973), and Juan Luis Segundo, Liberation of Theology (1976). Closely related, but impacting particularly on religious educators and activists in touch with the World Council of Churches (with which the author was connected), is Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970). More idiosyncratic and anarchistic is Ivan Illich's Deschooling Society (1971).

Women's liberation has an obvious affinity with the general theme of liberation theology. Illustrating various facets of the women's movement as it affected Catholics are: Mary Daly, The Church and the Second Sex (1968) and Beyond God the Father: Toward a Philosophy of Women's Liberation (1973); Rosemary Ruether, Liberation Theology (1972) and New Woman, New Earth (1975).⁷

Abortion replaced birth control in the 1970s as the most controversial moral issue among Catholics. It has also had reverberations in the political area, in the matter of church-state relations, on the ecumenical front, and has even aroused quite open expressions of a anti- Catholicism on the part of abortion supporters. Daniel Callahan's Abortion: Law, Choice and Morality (1970) expressed the position of a liberal Catholic, traditionally opposed to abortion, but led to reconsider the question

⁷ The most recent supplement to the New Catholic Encyclopedia devotes no fewer than twelve articles to the role of women in the church and society. See Vol. 17. Supplement: Change in the Church (1979), pp. 706-721.

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by the shift in liberal American thinking in the period of cultural upheaval. See also John T. Noonan, ed., The Morality of Abortion (1970). Supreme Court decisions of 1973, which virtually guaranteed an unrestricted right to abortion, made the issue a storm-center of controversy. A recent review of the issue by a leading scholar whose earlier book contributed to the Catholic acceptance of birth control, but who is a staunch critic of abortion, is John Noonan's A Private Choice: Abortion in America in the Seventies (1979). See also James T. Burtchaell, ed., Abortion Parley (1980). Mary T. Hanna includes a chapter on abortion as a "Catholic" issue in her Catholics and American Politics ( 1979).

V. GENERAL SURVEYS OR EVALUATIONS OF THE
CATHOLIC SCENE

Besides the writings focussed on this or that aspect of the changing scene, there have been efforts from the mid-sixties to describe and assess the overall situation. Some were written from a more definite ideological stance than others, but none was completely detached; they will be reviewed in rough chronological order.

An early and very defective attempt to paint the big picture was Edward Wakin and Joseph F. Scheuer's The De-Romanization of the American Catholic Church (1966). Donald J. Thorman's American Catholics Face the Future ( 1968) is a moderate liberal's interpretation. John O'Connor, ed., American Catholic Exodus (1968) brings together a dozen essays, all but one by liberals, on the changing Church. Thomas F. O'Dea's The Catholic Crisis (1968) is an excellent analysis of Vatican II and its effects on the Catholic Church by a scholar prominent in the sociology of religion. Philip Gleason, ed., Contemporary Catholicism in the United States ( 1969), is a collection of fourteen original essays, mainly by academics, dealing with various aspects of the changing Catholic scene; ideologically, the contributors range from moderate liberalism to moderate conservatism. The second edition of John Tracy Ellis' American Catholicism (1969) contains a long and very informative chapter on developments between 1956 and 1968. Thomas T. McAvoy, A History of the Catholic Church in the United States (1969) likewise includes a chapter on the 1960s.

A trio of important books published in 1972 represent three positions on the ideological spectrum. James Hitchcock's The Decline and Fall of Radical Catholicism is a reasoned and effective conservative critique; David J. O'Brien's The Renewal of American Catholicism is a historically informed interpretation by an outstanding spokesman for liberal Catholicism; and Garry Wills' Bare Ruined Choirs is a brillant analysis from a radical, if highly idiosyncratic, viewpoint.

Langdon Gilkey's Catholicism Confronts Modernity (1975) is a review of the Catholic situation (not just in the U.S.) by a sympathetic Protestant theologian. James Hitchcock's Catholicism and Modernity

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(1979) is, like his earlier book, a conservative critique. Hitchcock's Recovery of the Sacred (1974) is also critical, but concentrates on changes in liturgy. George A. Kelley's The Battle for the American Church (1979) presents a great deal of information in a tone of dismayed conservatism. George Devine, American Catholicism: Where Do We Go From Here? (1975), moderate in outlook, is a general survey of the postconciliar scene, seemingly intended for use in religious studies courses.

Andrew Greeley has been a host unto himself.⁸ The American Catholic (1977) sums up the results of his researches since the early 1960s; his Crisis in the Church (1979) is an even more recent general statement. Besides books already mentioned in connection with the intellectualism issue, Catholic education, the priesthood, and ethnicity, the following works by Greeley should also be noted: The Hesitant Pilgrim (1966), The Catholic Experience (1967), Come Blow Your Mind With Me (1971), The New Agenda (1973), and The Communal Catholic (1976). In An Ugly Little Secret (1977) Greeley argues that there has been a revival of anti-Catholicism in American society, some of the most blatant examples of which have occurred in connection with the abortion controversy.

Two other prolific Catholic contributors to the ongoing discussion in the 1960s (and after) were Daniel Callahan and Michael Novak. Their writings (elevated to the level of theology) are discussed in Joann W. Conn's doctoral dissertation in religion (Columbia University 1974) entitled, From Certitude to Understanding: Historical Consciousness in the American Catholic Theological Community in the 1960s. Garry Wills' autobiographical Confessions of a Conservative (1979) throws some light on the intellectual peregrinations of this dazzling, but hard to pin down, conservative-radical. John Cogley's A Canterbury Tale (1976) is a tantalizingly laconic memoir by a leading Catholic liberal of the 1950s and 1960s who joined the Protestant Episcopal Church in the mid-seventies. Charles A. Franchia, Second Spring; the Coming of Age of U.S. Catholicism (1980), combines personal reminiscence with a review of some of the leading developments of the 1960s and 70s. It is useful in what it presents-and perhaps even more so in highlighting how badly we need a good historical treatment of the multitudinous changes that overtook American Catholicism in the past generation.

⁸ I have discussed Greeley's writing at greater length in "Greeley Watching," Review of Politics, 40 (1978), 528-40.