American Catholicism

by John Tracy Ellis

Book Overview

The Catholic Church remains one of the oldest institutions of Western civilization. It continues to withstand attack from without and defection from within. In his revision of American Catholicism, Monsignor Ellis has added a new chapter on the history of the Church since 1956. Here he deals with developments in Catholic education, with the changing relations of the Church to its own members and to society in general, and especially with arguments for and against the ecumenical movement brought about by Vatican Council II.

The author gives an updated historical account of the part played by Catholics in both the American Revolution and the Civil War, and of the difficulties within the Church that came with the clash of national interests among Irish, French, and Germans in the nineteenth century. He regards immigration as the key to the increasingly important role of American Catholicism in the nation after 1820. For contemporary America, the author counts among the signs of the mature Church an increase in Church membership, the presence of nine Americans in the College of Cardinals in May, 1967, and the expansion of American effort in Catholic missions throughout the world.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0226205568
• ISBN13: 9780226205564
• Release Date: June 1969
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Length: 342 Pages
• Weight: 0.50 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.3" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

Honest Scholarship

That young Americans know so little history is frequently bemoaned, as if history were a sort of medicine that people should be convinced to take. Perhaps the reason history is not exactly popular is that it brings you right into the difficult complexities of life. Unlike the movies there are not easy good guys and bad guys to identify. This book, by a former professor of mine, counts as history well done. I attended John Tracy Ellis' course on American Catholicism at Catholic University in the eighties. It was a fascinating tour through a complicated subject. I admired greatly, for instance, how Ellis did not hesitate to elucidate on a theme in his book, one of the oddest elements in American Catholic history: the support of many bishops for the institution of slavery. I recall in particular his glosses on sermons given by the then bishop of Charleston, whose support for that execrable institution seemed to pain Ellis in particular because of the knowledge of the influence this man had not only in the Catholic Church of his day but in the wider Southern society of his day. In this Ellis differed somewhat from the general thrust of his book written years before. Perhaps more research had caused a slight modification of his view in the book that Southern Catholics were a minority that assimilated into the wider culture and thus were in a sense victims of it. A perusal of the later literature on the subject confirms that the change that I saw in his glosses in class are in synch with the changing view of historians on the matter. The view now seems to be that Southern Catholics participated actively in what one historian calls "white supremacist" influencing of the larger Southern culture. This is seen as a change from what is now called the "Ellisonian" paradigm of American Catholicism. It is now much easier to get information on such topics. But John Tracy Ellis' scholarship still seems impressive in terms of the history of ideas. Unfortunately when I was at Catholic University the library was in such a deplorable state that it had been de-accredited by the accreditation agency for Graduate Studies. Thus making it nearly impossible to do further research when one was stimulated to do it by such an interesting scholar as Ellis.