American Catholics in the Protestant Imagination Carroll, Michael P. Published by Johns Hopkins University Press Carroll, Michael P. American Catholics in the Protestant Imagination: Rethinking the Academic Study of Religion. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007. Project MUSE. doi:10.1353/book.3479. https://muse.jhu.edu/. For additional information about this book https://muse.jhu.edu/book/3479 [ Access provided at 23 Sep 2021 22:11 GMT with no institutional affiliation ] This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. American Catholics in the Protestant Imagination This page intentionally left blank American Catholics in the Protestant Imagination Rethinking the Academic Study of Religion michael p. carroll The Johns Hopkins University Press Baltimore This book has been brought to publication with the generous assistance of the J. B. Smallman Publication Fund and the Faculty of Social Science of The University of Western Ontario. © 2007 The Johns Hopkins University Press All rights reserved. Published 2007 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 246897531 The Johns Hopkins University Press 2715 North Charles Street Baltimore, Maryland 21218-4363 www.press.jhu.edu Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Carroll, Michael P., 1944– American Catholics in the Protestant imagination : rethinking the academic study of religion / Michael P. Carroll. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-8018-8683-6 (hardcover : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-8018-8683-X (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Catholics—United States—History. 2. Catholics—United States— Historiography. I. Title. BX1406.3.C375 2007 282Ј.73—dc22 2007006282 A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library. Special discounts are available for bulk purchases of this book. For more information, please contact Special Sales at 410-516-6936 or [email protected]. contents Acknowledgments vii Introduction ix 1 How the Irish Became Protestant in America 1 2 Why the Famine Irish Became Catholic in America 27 3 Italian American Catholicism: The Standard Story and Its Problems 62 4 Were the Acadians/Cajuns Really Good Catholics? 96 5 Hispanic Catholicism and the Illusion of Knowledge 113 6 Protestantism and the Academic Study of American Religion: An Enduring Alliance 149 Epilogue 186 Notes 189 Bibliography 193 Index 215 This page intentionally left blank acknowledgments By their nature, books take a relatively long time to write; and during that period an author, unless he or she is incredibly arrogant, inevitably harbors con- cerns about what works and what does not work in the text being created. For that reason, it is important to receive feedback from informed commentators while a book is in progress. With that in mind, I would like to thank Donald Akenson, Je= Burns, Fred Gardaphe, Eugene Hynes, Bill Issel, Timothy Matovina, Sal Primeggia, and Thomas Tweed, all of whom very graciously took the time to read and comment on preliminary drafts of particular chapters. A book is always the sole responsibility of the author, but this book is certainly better than it would have been without their comments. The research in this book was made possible by a grant from the Social Sci- ences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), and SSHRC’s con- tinuing and very generous support of scholarly investigation is something for which everyone in the Canadian academic community must be thankful. Publi- cation of this book was also aided by a grant from the J. B. Smallman Publication fund administered by the Faculty of Social Science at the University of Western Ontario. An earlier version of Chapter 1 appeared in Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation (Carroll 2006) and an earlier version of Chapter 4 appeared in Studies in Religion (Carroll 2003). A portion of Chapter 6 (mainly, the section on the upstart sects) is derived from an article published in Religion (Car- roll 2004). I love being an academic for many reasons, but primary among these is the fact that I have the freedom to go where my intellectual curiosity leads me. Acquiring such an ideal career would not have been possible without the very real sacri>ces of my parents, Olga Ciarlanti and William Carroll, who for years put viii Acknowledgments long hours into jobs they often did not enjoy and who also were a constant source of encouragement to me and my brothers. Finally, I must acknowledge Lori, the love of my life and the person who, more than anyone else, sustains me in all that I do. introduction This book is about several di=erent things at once. Most chapters are con- cerned with some variant of American Catholicism, and one goal certainly is to provide new insight into the several Catholic traditions that have ?ourished in the United States over the past two centuries. But every chapter also seeks to identify some historigraphical puzzles in the study of American religion. Thus, we will en- counter staunch Irish Presbyterians in the colonial era who weren’t very staunch, Irish Catholic Famine immigrants who came to America in the wake of Ireland’s devotional revolution who weren’t very devout, Italian Catholics clinging to the saints and madonnas they knew in their natal villages who didn’t really cling very hard, Cajun Catholics whose Catholicism may be something quite di=erent from what it appears to be, a strongly matricentered Hispanic Catholicism that turns out not to be matricentered at all, and more. As will become clear, the master puzzle in all this is why American scholars studying religion have accepted some claims about American Catholics (and sometimes about American Protestants as well) when those claims have little or no empirical support and why these same scholars have simultaneously ignored clues that point to interpretations of the American Catholic experience that allow for less passivity and more creativity than the interpretations that have prevailed. When all the bits and pieces of my re- sponse to this puzzle are put together, it will be apparent that this book is as much about the conceptual frameworks that American scholars past and present have brought to the study of American religion as it is about Catholics, and even more speci>cally, it is about the continuing in?uence of a “Protestant imagination” in studying American religion. I like to think (though I suspect I’m romanticizing the research process) that this book represents the latest stage in an intellectual journey that began in the Church of Saints Peter and Paul (SSPP) in San Francisco’s North Beach area. The full history of this church will be discussed in Chapter 3. For now, it is su;cient x Introduction to say that SSPP was designated an Italian national church in 1897 and has always been emblematic of Italian American Catholicism in the San Francisco Bay area, even though for quite some time most of its parishioners have been Chinese Americans. I have a personal connection to SSPP, because ancestors on my mother’s side were Italians who settled in North Beach over the period 1870 through 1915. Pasqualina Demartini (1819–1894), my third great-grandmother, emigrated from Italy in the 1840s, settled originally in Washington D.C., and— if family tradition is to be believed—headed west to San Francisco in the early 1870s, literally walking most of the way. My great-grandfather Ra=aele Ciarlanti (1859–1913) decided to emigrate to San Francisco in late 1906, >guring that the devastation caused by the Great Earthquake would make it easy to set up a gen- eral store (which is precisely what he did). My mother, Olga Ciarlanti, was born and raised in North Beach. Although my parents (and I) joined the post–World War II exodus of Italian Americans out of North Beach into other neighborhoods in and around the city, we returned to North Beach on a regular basis because my mother’s father owned a restaurant on Grant Avenue. On those Sundays when I was brought to the restaurant and left to amuse myself, I often visited SSPP, one of the few places open on Sunday afternoons in North Beach. At the time, what most caught my eye at SSPP were the statues, displayed in an abundance that would soon become unfashionable in the wake of Vatican II. Some of the statues in the nave of the church might be found in any Catholic church, for instance, the Infant of Prague, the Immaculate Conception, St. Joseph, and St. Anne. Other statues depicted saints who were more distinctively Italian, like Teresa Mazarello, Gemma Galgani, and Don Bosco. But what I always found most interesting were the statues and other holy images in the three small chapels at the back of the church, where you enter the building. The images in those back chapels were clearly di=erent. My favorite was a plas- ter diorama showing Our Lady of Mt. Carmel sitting above a sea of blood-red ?ames (Purgatory) and holding out a rosary toward a dozen or so su=ering souls engulfed by those ?ames. This particular image, unfortunately, was removed sometime in the early 1990s, presumably because it was a little too graphic for modern Catholic sensibilities. Also in those chapels were a cramped recreation of the grotto at Lourdes showing Mary talking to Bernadette, and images of St. Rocco showing the plague sore on his leg to his dog, the Madonna della Guardia talking to the seer Benedetto Pareto, and several other madonnas tied to certain speci>c regions or villages in Italy. One of the things that made those back chapel images so interesting, I think, was that they were colorful and “active” in a way not true of statues found elsewhere in the church.