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American Catholics and the Quest for Equality in the Civil War Era by Robert Emmett Curran (review)

2024; Kent State University Press; Volume: 70; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/cwh.2024.a926942

1533-6271

Maura Jane Farrelly,

Catholicism and Religious Studies

Reviewed by: American Catholics and the Quest for Equality in the Civil War Era by Robert Emmett Curran Maura Jane Farrelly (bio) American Catholics and the Quest for Equality in the Civil War Era. Robert Emmett Curran. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2023. ISBN: 978-0-80717930-7, 458 pp., cloth, $60.00. Given the title, this book was not what I was expecting—though the title tells readers exactly what the book is about. Robert Emmett Curran's latest, and possibly his most personal, contribution to the history of American Catholicism concerns "American Catholics" and "the Quest for Equality in the Civil War Era" but not, however, the quest of Catholics themselves to achieve some degree of equality on the American religious landscape. Rather, the book examines the reaction of American Catholics to the efforts of other demographic [End Page 85] groups—most especially Black Americans, with the help of their white allies—to achieve some degree of equality in nineteenth-century America. The reality Curran presents to his readers will disappoint anyone who believes that Catholics' historically marginalized status in the United States must have meant they were on the right side of history before, during, and after the Civil War. "Catholics, as a community, had known, for generations, the consequences of being treated inequitably," Curran writes in his book's epilogue. "But when the moment came to be part of a revolution to right the historic imbalance for everyone, most white Catholics could not rise above their tribal interests to treat equality as something more than a zero-sum commodity" (380). Curran shares this conclusion after he has spent twenty-two chapters providing his readers with copiously researched details on how American priests understood slavery and the racial hierarchy that underpinned it; how the Catholic press, North and South, responded to secession and the Emancipation Proclamation; and why the involvement of Catholics in the plot to assassinate President Lincoln, Vice President Johnson, and Secretary of State Seward was disproportionately large. Readers learn that Lincoln lost the Catholic vote—overwhelmingly—in 1860. They learn that Catholic newspapers, even pro-Union ones, "condemned the resort to any coercion to bring back the departing states" (59). Readers are told that American bishops "defended slavery as part of the order which is essential to civilized society" and that Black Catholics in New York City had to write to the pope to get their priests "to provide the same spiritual care for Blacks as they did for whites" (40–41). Irish priests like New York's Archbishop John Hughes were particularly inclined to exhibit what Curran calls a "tribal mentality" that made them loath to serve their Black parishioners (41). "Rev. Abp. Hughes … [hates] the black race so much that he cannot bear them to come near him," Harriet Thompson wrote to Pope Pius IX in 1853 (40). The result of Hughes's racial prejudice, Curran writes, was "mass defections among African Americans from the Catholic Church" (42). Curran has devoted his long and prolific career to writing about the American Catholic Church, and some of the information conveyed in this most recent book will be familiar to anyone who has read his older publications. Nevertheless, American Catholics and the Quest for Equality in the Civil War Era is different from any other book Curran has written, because it is a lament—the kind of lament that can be issued only from a place of love. The inability or unwillingness of American Catholics to recognize injustice in the nineteenth century and take a stand against it is finding new expression in [End Page 86] the politics of the early twenty-first century, according to Robert Emmett Curran. A majority of American Catholics voted for Donald Trump both times he ran for president, notably in 2020, when his opponent, Joe Biden, was only the second practicing Catholic to gain his party's nomination since John F. Kennedy. This Catholic support for Trump continued even after the January 6 insurrection. "Catholic plutocrats, motivated by anti-abortion and economic libertarian convictions" have provided "the financial means to execute [an] antidemocratic revolution," Curran writes (383). "Opportunistic Republican Catholics such as Elise Stefanik and Ron DeSantis...