Contending with Modernity: Catholic Higher Education in the Twentieth Century/ by Philip Gleason, Oxford University Press, 434 pp., $35

Other books mentioned in this essay:

Kevin Coyne, Domers: A Year at Notre Dame (Viking, 329 pp., $23.95, 1995)

Ralph McInerny, A Cardinal Offense (St. Martin's, 372 pp., $21.95, 1994)

Michael Zöller, Washington und Rom: Der Katholizismus in der amerikanischen Kultur (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 281 pp., 1995)

Question: What is the Roman Catholic Church?

(a) With over 1 billion adherents and about 54 percent of all Christians worldwide, it is simply the essential expression of the Christian faith.

(b) With an immense welter of local expressions, ethnic sub-groupings, doctrinal, behavioral, and devotional differences, and now encompassing a wide range of opinions on how best to define the church itself, Roman Catholicism is simply a name that collects as broad a collection of Christians, quasi-Christians, and pseudo-Christians as exists within the thousands of individual Protestant churches.

(c) With its hierarchy articulated into nearly every corner of the globe and coordinated at its head by the office of the papacy, it is simply the most universal, authoritative, wide-ranging, comprehensive, and stable form of religion ever known in human history.

(d) With the church's basic teaching so thoroughly mixing the voice of God in Scripture, the voice of the church in tradition, and the voice of reason in natural revelation, it is simply a confused, degenerate form of authentic Christian faith.

(e) With its principled reverence for the Trinity, its insistence on the foundational reality of divine grace, its constant celebration of the death and resurrection of Christ as the central realities for all humanity, and its noble army of martyrs, prophets, and spiritual mentors, it is simply the fullest, deepest, most enduring expression of Christianity.

(f) All of the above.

(g) None of the above.

Efforts to grade this kind of multiple-choice question can assume several forms. Traditionally, both friends and foes have taken the high road of dogmatism to define the church. Thus, although such discussion-eviscerating clinchers are not heard as often now as even a generation ago, it is still possible to find quite a few spokesmen (but far fewer spokeswomen) who remain confident enough to assert with great self-assurance that, for example, "The Roman Catholic church is the bride of Christ in the world"; or "The pope is the anti-Christ"; or "The pope is the vicar of Christ"; or "Roman Catholicism teaches salvation by works"; or "Roman Catholicism is the only true Christian faith"; or "Roman Catholics may be saved but only despite their Roman Catholicism."

Those for whom these kinds of dogmatic utterances prove unsatisfying sometimes turn to historical studies, where the questions become more complicated. In such studies, questions about what the Roman Catholic church is in general are not as compelling as questions about what the Roman Catholic church has been in specific precincts and restricted periods. For those who are able to set aside the big question long enough to study actual histories, the burden of interpretive complexity is, however, sometimes matched by the reward of luminous insight.

Such is now the case for those who are interested in the history of Roman Catholic higher education, in the United States, over the course of the last century. Even if examining this limited question is only loosely related to the basic issue of what Roman Catholicism is, the great quantity of illuminating reading now available on the subject of American Catholic higher education over the last century still offers material of considerable significance.i In the end, it may also provide a clue for how to go about answering the multiple-choice question posed above.

The most striking thing about the recent crop of good reading is the variegated picture of twentieth-century Roman Catholicism that emerges, depending upon the angle of inquiry: whether football, the teaching of Catholic theology, or general assessments about the health of Catholic higher education.

According to accounts found in both Philip Gleason's magisterial survey of twentieth-century Catholic higher education and Kevin Coyne's snapshot of a single year at the University of Notre Dame, two generations ago the president of Notre Dame thought he could see a correlation between the number of his students participating in daily masses on campus and the number of victories racked up by the Fighting Irish on the gridiron. Shortly after the Notre Dame president made this statement, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching publicly rebuked Notre Dame and the University of Southern California for diverting educational energies into developing a transcontinental football rivalry.

Now roll forward to the very recent past. As recorded in Coyne's Domers,/ just a year or two ago, after a mandatory game-day mass, Notre Dame football players filed out of the basilica situated at the heart of the Notre Dame campus past a priest who held "a small, round gold case that contained-according to the authentication papers that accompanied it, issued by the Vatican and written in Latin-a piece of the True Cross, the cross that Jesus died on. Resting inside the case on a red velvet cushion, shielded behind glass, were two tiny splinters of wood, arranged in the form of a cross. All the players but one-Karmeeleyah McGill, the team's lone Muslim-bent to kiss the relic."

When thinking about the president counting masses and the players kissing relics, it might seem as if Catholic higher education had remained essentially the same over the course of the twentieth century, only more so. While Protestants have gone their merry way worrying about God and country, Catholics seem to be still pretty deep into God and football.

But the picture changes dramatically if one looks not at football but at the teaching of theology in Catholic colleges and universities. Seventy years ago, the teaching of theology-or of Thomistic philosophy that carried manifest theological implications-was central to the self-defining mission of most Catholic universities and colleges. Moreover, that teaching was being carried on in self-conscious connection with a revival of liturgy and a renewed concentration on a practical theology of the "Mystical Body" that joined together study of this world, contemplation of the person of Christ, and commitment to the work of the church.

The situation now appears very different. For nearly three decades, some of the sharpest commentary on contemporary American Catholicism has been appearing in the novels and detective stories of Ralph McInerny, who, when he is not writing fiction, is busy as a philosopher and medievalist at Notre Dame. Many of McInerny's novels offer sharply etched-sometimes sharply barbed-portraits of contemporary Catholicism. In the best of this writing-including The Priest/ (1973), Connolly's Life/ (1983), Leave of Absence/ (1986), and the novels featuring his detective protagonist Father Roger Dowling-are found gems of coruscating insight.

McInerny usually sticks to veiled portraits of actual people and institutions, but one of his most recent Father Dowling stories, A Cardinal Offense,/ takes place in part at Notre Dame and so offers McInerny an opportunity to comment directly on the teaching of theology at Catholic universities. When Father Dowling meets a young woman from South Bend, he asks her, "So you're at Notre Dame?" When she replies, "My husband is doing graduate work," and then adds, after hesitating, "in theology," Father Dowling responds, "Good God," and is prompted to wonder, "How many of those teaching theology still believed?" So, when contrasting the way in which formal theology was once integrated into Catholic worship and practical Christian life with how it has now (at least in the eyes of McInerny's Father Dowling) become chaotic, unruly, and even unbelieving, you might conclude that nothing has stayed the same in Catholic higher education.

The picture is just as confused if one lines up general assessments of the situation. Throughout the twentieth century, the harshest judgments on the state of Catholic higher education in America have come from American Catholics. For example, in 1939 a symposium edited by John A. O'Brien, entitled Catholics and Scholarship,/ bemoaned the fact that Catholic universities had produced, in the words of one contributor, not "a single scholar of national importance." Then in 1955 appeared a famous essay from Msgr. John Tracy Ellis, "American Catholics and the Intellectual Life," which again excoriated Catholics for neglecting and trivializing intellectual pursuits.

Yet others have come to different conclusions. The German sociologist Michael Zöller, who has spent considerable time at both Catholic and secular universities in the United States, includes a substantial section on Catholic higher education in his recent interpretation of American Catholic history. According to Zöller, "the success story of American Catholicism is nowhere more clearly reflected than in its schools and universities, and therefore this educational achievement is the showpiece of the American church."

To take readers past the confusion offered by quick and dirty glimpses at football, the teaching of theology, and general assessments, we need precisely what Philip Gleason provides in Contending with Modernity/-a measured, balanced, meticulously researched, and authoritative study of a subject as important as it is vast. Reading this book is an almost unalloyed delight. "Almost," because once in a while the mass of detail becomes nearly overwhelming. For example, when Gleason explains how Catholic institutions took part in government-sponsored educational programs during World War II, we find dense clusters of references to V-12s, V-12a's, V-7s, V-5s, ASTPs, NROTCs, and STARs that make for tough slogging. Once in a while the same is also true of the full-cast, blow-by-blow accounts of tempests in the National Catholic Educational Association. But even at such moments the book offers its own rewards, for should anyone ever need to confirm details on such matters, they know exactly where to find them.

Most of the time, however, the insights of Contending with Modernity/ fully match both the complexity and importance of its subject. The book is divided into three parts and an epilogue. First comes a description of traditional Catholic education at the start of the twentieth century and the way that numerous tactical adjustments (for example, recording courses by credit hours or abandoning an integrated prep school-university curriculum for the American divide between high school and college) brought the form of Catholic higher education into line with dominant American patterns. Then comes the high point of the book in Gleason's description of the Catholic intellectual revival, linked closely with the promotion of Neo-Thomist or Neo-Scholastic philosophy, that energized Catholic colleges and universities between the wars and linked self-confident Catholic thinking with a wide range of liturgical, social, and ecclesiastical activity.

It is difficult to explain Neo-Thomism succinctly, but the burden of the movement was its confidence that the right use of reason would lead the fair-minded thinker very close to what God had revealed to the church through the Scriptures and the apostolic traditions guarded by the church's hierarchy. What made Neo-Scholasticism so profoundly important in the first 60 years of this century, however, was not just its sense of intellectual depth and adventure, but also its many links to social action, missionary service, and liturgical renewal. A shorthand indication of the power of the Neo-Thomist synthesis is to note that it undergirded not only the social radicalism of Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker Movement, but also the popular apologetics of Bishop Fulton Sheen, as well as the profound reflections of John Courtney Murray, S.J., on church and state in the modern world.

The third section of the book is a painstaking, and also painful, account of the dismantling of the once dominant Neo-Scholastic synthesis. The synthesis unraveled as a result of a combination of factors: the impact of World War II (which brought Catholic colleges and universities the benefits and bane of government assistance), growing pressure to conform to broader secularizing patterns in American higher education, criticism of Neo-Thomism from within the church itself, the unanticipated effects of the Second Vatican Council, the movement of once-immigrant Catholic communities to the prosperous suburbs, and the culture shocks of the 1960s. Gleason's epilogue describes briefly the situation since the early 1960s, where the once coherent practices of Catholic higher education have splintered into a thousand fragments. He notes the impossible thicket of contradictory explanations for how the contemporary situation came about, but also the indisputable fact that, in the wake of these realities, Catholic higher education, though holding its own numerically and financially, has entered into an intellectual valley of shadow.

Indications of the contemporary confusion of interpretations are well illustrated in the other three books mentioned earlier. Ralph McInerny, a traditionalist, seems almost to despair about the drift of the American hierarchy, but he retains confidence in the piety found among individual laypeople and clerics as well as in the wisdom resident in the Vatican. Michael Zöller seems to be at home in the moderately progressive camp and so sees substantial benefit arising from the Catholic church's adjustment to modem circumstances. He can even say that American expressions of individualism and communitarianism, which McInerny appears to reprobate as the undoing of the church, have served to build a stronger form of Catholicism than in Europe or elsewhere in the world. For his part, Kevin Coyne records the discussion that has been under way for several years at Notre Dame over what the character of a Catholic university should be. The most striking aspect of Coyne's reporting, however, is the incredibly diverse range of opinions he could find at a single Catholic institution in response to that question.

For its authoritative account of how two generations that self-confidently "challenged modernity" gave way to a generation fragmented by intellectual "crosscurrents" (to employ Gleason's phrases), Contending with Modernity/ is indispensable. Catholics will no doubt find other things more striking in this book, but from a Protestant reading, two things stand out-the striking parallels in the history of Catholic and Protestant education in the United States and Gleason's curious assessment of the critical papal pronouncements that set the tone for Catholic higher education through the first two-thirds of this century.

The main difference between Catholic and Protestant (especially evangelical or confessional Protestant) higher education turns out to be timing. There is an amazing similarity between phases in the history of American Catholic universities and similar phases in the history of Protestant higher education-set off by a generation or two. To mention only two of dozens of possible examples, Protestant colleges in the 50 years after the American Revolution experienced virtually the same struggles to divide collegiate from secondary education, and almost the same conflicts between classical curricula and more modern forms of instruction that Catholic universities experienced at the start of the twentieth century.

Again, over the last three decades, at confessional and evangelical Protestant colleges like Calvin, Goshen, Messiah, Pepperdine, Valparaiso, and Wheaton, you could hear the same kinds of earnest discussions that prevailed everywhere among Catholic institutions from the 1920s to about 1960. Although details are different because of the theological and cultural traditions involved, these discussions concern how to organize the curriculum around an integrating theological principle, how to translate an intellectual Weltanschauung/ into guides for daily living, and how to exploit the best of modern learning without falling prey to modern secularism-in other words, how to achieve the very ends that Catholic colleges and universities pursued so diligently during the half-century before 1960. It is, thus, a sad commentary that disengagement between Catholic and sectarian Protestant communities-a disengagement that once was fiercely theological but now is more a product of benign ignorance-means that almost none of the Protestants who today are struggling to implement a higher education both responsibly intellectual and responsibly Christian have paid attention to the history recorded in Contending with Modernity./

One further Catholic-Protestant comparison is pertinent. Gleason's volume fairly cries out to be read alongside the only other magisterial volume we have on a similar subject, George Marsden's The Soul of the American University: From Protestant Establishment to Established Nonbelief/ (1994). Reading the two studies side by side, however, leads to the conclusion that the form of each book follows the ideal of Christianity that energized the rival traditions. That is, Marsden writes primarily an ideological story, with institutional history as a backdrop, while Gleason writes an institutional history with ideology as a supporting theme. Gleason can write of the "Catholics' near obsession with order and unity," while Marsden's subjects are obsessed with what, in a series of greatly differing circumstances, they think is true. Truth, per se, is hardly irrelevant to the Catholics; order and unity, per se, have been very much on the minds of twentieth-century Protestant educators. But the manifest contrast in the emphases of the two books might, in fact, be a clue to the religious visions at the heart of each narrative as well as to the religious dynamic at the heart of each movement.

The one substantial question of interpretation that the structure of Gleason's own narrative raises concerns his assessment of the two momentous papal pronouncements that set the tone for the intellectual shape of American Catholic higher education from 1900 to 1960. In 1899 a papal letter from Pope Leo XIII, Testem Benevolentiae,/ condemned a shadowy collection of traits denominated "Americanism." In particular, the letter scored the notion that Catholicism needed to conform to American habits of liberty and individual expression rather than the reverse. In a famous response, Archbishop James Gibbons said that he, too, opposed such errors, but that they were not found in America. Nonetheless, this "Americanist" controversy led to much greater caution among American Catholics in their engagement with the forms of American popular life.

The second papal statement, the 1907 encyclical Pascendi Dominici Gregis/ from Pius X, was a wholesale condemnation of "modernism." Although aimed mostly at Continental and British thinkers who were following paths marked out by Protestant liberals like Albrecht Ritschl and Adolph von Harnack, Pius X's sweeping condemnation of modern intellectual conventions ensured that Catholic institutions in America would move very cautiously in emulating the academy at large. At the same time that Leo XIII and Pius X were warning the faithful away from modern secularism, they and their successors also mounted a strenuous campaign to promote the work of Thomas Aquinas as an intellectual anchor for Catholic intellectual life. So it was that just as American Catholics were setting about the task of refurbishing their colleges and universities, they received explicit papal guidance about what they should fear and what they should foster with respect to the life of the mind.

In Contending with Modernity,/ Gleason treats these key papal pronouncements as major problems. For a book marked by unusually even-handed opinions, Gleason's assessment of the effects of Testem Benevolentiae/ and Pascendi/ is uncharacteristically strident. Thus, the condemnation of Americanism "exerted a broader negative influence by closing off self-conscious reflection on the relationship between the Catholic religion and the national culture for some years." Pascendi/ represented the pope's "draconian measures … to ensure orthodoxy." Again, "the Modernist crisis had seriously damaging long-range effects on the intellectual development of American Catholicism … Insofar as it reinforced the tendency toward intellectual passivity inherent in a religion that stressed authority as strongly as Catholicism did, the Modernist episode could not help having negative long-range consequences." And for Gleason's sharpest judgment, "The campaign of the super-orthodox 'Integralists,'" which lasted into the time of World War I, "constituted what can legitimately be called an intellectual reign of terror."

These are strong words. Yet almost as soon as they are spoken, Gleason goes on to show that the obverse of papal condemnation was papal-inspired invigoration, leading to the Neo-Scholastic revival, the network of innovative educational and social initiatives known as "Catholic Action," a burst of energy creating Catholic academic societies, and what (with luminaries like the political theorist John Courtney Murray, the historian John Tracy Ellis, and the educational leader Theodore M. Hesburgh) can only be called a Silver Age of Catholic intellectual life. Much later in the volume Gleason pauses to recapitulate the book's intellectual plot: "papal condemnations of Americanism in 1899 and of Modernism in 1907 played a crucial role in establishing the ideological framework within which Catholic higher education developed in the twentieth century."

Gleason's harsh words for the papal encyclicals are even more curious in light of how he describes the character of the Catholic revival in the American colleges and universities. Yes, we do read that it was never as solidly grounded historically or as self-evidently coherent as its strongest advocates maintained. We read that it led to pedagogical inanities like trying to pump a little Neo-Thomism into 2,400 Notre Dame undergraduates each semester during the 1950s. We read that its triumphalism papered over the insecurity of immigrant Catholics and vast numbers of first-generation college students. And we read that in the early 1960s it collapsed as suddenly and as irrevocably as Humpty Dumpty after his great fall. In short, we are told that the Catholic revival, Neo-Scholasticism, and the imposing empire of Catholic popular magazines, academic journals, and disciplinary societies that sprang to life in the 1920s and 1930s were neither celestial in their substance nor permanent in their accidents.

Yet even with eyes wide open to the limits, self-delusions, and weaknesses of the Catholic intellectual revival, it is still possible-as Gleason implies at many points-to rate this Catholic revival very highly indeed. By way of comparison, the only Protestant system currently at work in twentieth-century America that can even approach the intellectual depth, breadth, and sanctity of Neo-Thomism is the Kuyperianism of Dutch-American Calvinists and their English-speaking camp followers, but Kuyperianism has never come even close to the scope, energy, and achievements of Neo-Thomism in its heyday.

Other comparisons may be even more germane. The Catholic revival was weaker than its proponents thought, but so, too, have been reigning intellectual paradigms in American university life more generally. If forced to choose on only formal intellectual grounds between the Neo-Thomism of the Review of Politics/ or Modern Scholasticism/ and the delusive objectivist progressivism of the academics profiled in Peter Novick's That Noble Dream/ (1988), the spineless conformism of McCarthyism in the 1950s, or the spineless conformism of multiculturalism in the 1990s, Neo-Thomism looks at least respectable.

The only movements of comparable intellectual power in American religious history are the Puritanism of the seventeenth century and the brief out-burst of theological creativity among Reformed theologians in the two decades before the Civil War (including, with all their differences, Horace Bushnell, Robert Lewis Dabney, Charles Hodge, C. W. Nevin, E. A. Park, H. B. Smith, and James H. Thornwell). But both of those earlier Protestant movements were much more narrowly theological than Neo-Thomism between the wars, and both had the advantage that Neo-Scholasticism lacked of flowing along with historic currents in American culture rather than resisting them.

Quite apart from comparisons, the Catholic revival testifies to remarkable strengths when observed in itself. Even if its highest ideals were never fully realized and partially realized only among a few of its adherents, those ideals possess-at least to the eyes of a Christian-breath-taking beauty. In Gleason's summary,

To learn more of God and God's creation was not merely to be called to apostolic action; it was to be drawn more powerfully to God as the object of contemplation, of worship, of prayer, of devotion, of the soul's desire for spiritual fulfillment … The God-centeredness that was integral to Thomism, and the affective reactions it aroused, help us to understand how the philosophical dimensions of the Catholic revival-which seems, in retrospect, so often dry and mechanical-nourished, and was in turn nourished by, the literary, aesthetic, and even mystical dimensions of the revival.

An intellectual system that aspired to those goals must be taken seriously by anyone who feels that reality is grounded in creation, incarnation, and redemption; in the realities of sin and grace.

Even the circumstances affecting the demise of the Neo-Scholastic revival underscore its strength. Gleason's argument is persuasive that John Tracy Ellis's 1955 critique of Catholic intellectual life played more of a role in dismantling the entire Neo-Scholastic system than Ellis intended. But it is also true that Ellis's critique owed as much to the high ideals of Neo-Scholasticism as it did to his internalization of standards from elite American universities. Although Theodore Hesburgh played a large role in pushing for more independence from papal control for Catholic institutions, it is also clear that the prodigies of intellectual midwifery he accomplished at Notre Dame were not conceivable apart from his nurturing in the Neo-Scholastic revival.

In the most poignant example, when after World War II John Courtney Murray's opinions on questions of church and state displeased his Jesuit superiors in the United States and the Vatican, he was ordered to stop writing on these subjects, a proscription he obeyed. Yet, in retrospect, it is clear that Murray's path-breaking insights into how deeply rooted religious convictions could flourish in a democratic polity sprang directly from certain balancing features of the Thomism in which he was trained. To put the matter provocatively, the penetrating Catholic intelligence of John Courtney Murray is difficult to imagine outside of a church that could not through the exercise, in Gleason's words, of "raw ecclesiastical power, wielded in utter contempt of academic freedom," silence John Courtney Murray.

And so a question must be raised about Gleason's assessment of Testem Benevolentiae/ and Pascendi/. Clearly, these documents were tactically inept. Strategically, however, something like them was absolutely necessary in order for two full generations of flawed, but still remarkably powerful, intellectual life to flourish in the Catholic revival and in order for a generation of mature intellects like Ellis, Hesburgh, and Murray to emerge.

What this Catholic story offers to believers of other flavors can be put bluntly: While solid, well-defined theological boundaries can be enforced in ways that stifle productive Christian thinking, sustained, meaningful, doxological Christian thought will not flourish unless such boundaries exist in some form.

Simply to mention the activities of leaders like Ellis, Hesburgh, and Murray returns us from the smaller world of Catholic colleges and universities to a larger world where questions like "What is Roman Catholicism?" are once more in order. In particular, Gleason's fine study shows that, whatever else it may be, the Roman Catholic church is not the smoothly oiled, monolithic, well-coordinated ecclesiastical engine that both foes and adherents sometimes think it is. Midway along in Contending with Modernity,/ Gleason pauses to discuss Catholic efforts at coordinating the higher education provided by various orders, under different kinds of diocesan relationships, and with varied degrees of lay control. His conclusion for why efforts at coordinating Catholic higher education always failed emphasizes the reformers' failure to recognize "the fundamental fact that Catholic higher education is a radically decentralized non-system." Anyone who follows Gleason's careful research to that abrupt conclusion simply cannot think of worldwide Catholicism-with a complexity many times more involved than that found in American colleges and universities-as a monolith. As the story of Testem Benevolentiae/ and Pascendi Gregis/ indicates, by comparison with the fissiparousness of Protestantism, Roman Catholicism may indeed have a center. But attention to only one domain of specific (as opposed to theoretical) Roman Catholicism shows that ecclesiastical hegemony is at best a relative term.

And so it is as well with other snap conclusions. Gleason's history of Catholic higher education reveals both self-seeking careerism and altruistic saintliness, hopeless doctrinal waffling and sterling dogmatic integrity, church politics as a cloak for self-worship and church politics as a vehicle for expressing the love of Jesus. If in only one detailed study of only one kind of institutional life in only one national setting this range of Catholic expressions emerges, who would dare to speak, except with extreme caution, about the essential nature of Roman Catholic Christianity in general?

In the end, Protestants who are interested in higher education have a special reason to read Gleason's story with sympathy. Zealous evangelicals who retain the anti-Catholic instincts of former days sometimes think that when their fellow Protestants begin to take an interest in the Catholic church or to make sympathetic noises about Catholic beliefs, practices, and institutions, the moth has begun to circle the flame. In fact, there is a better metaphor that more accurately reflects both historical reality (Protestantism emerged from Roman Catholicism and has always required the Catholic church to define itself) and the realities of modem Christian demography (where there are about three times as many Roman Catholics as Protestants on the face of the earth). The more apt metaphor is of a Protestant moon orbiting a Roman Catholic earth. In a heliocentric universe, the dance of orbits and revolutions means that the sun's light shines more directly now on parts of the moon, now on parts of the earth. But the earth is a lot bigger and, at least for this analogy, was certainly there first. In the terms of such an image, what happens on the earth-for example, what is portrayed with such luminous clarity and such thoughtfulness in Contending with Modernity/-could not be more important for the future of the moon.

Books&Culture September/October 1996 31

i In addition to the books discussed here, and at the risk of excluding worthy volumes, file recent flourishing includes these other noteworthy efforts: Patrick Allitt, Catholic Intellectuals and Conservative Politics in America, 1950-1985 (1995); R. Scott Appleby, "Church and Age Unite": The Modernist Impulse in American Catholicism (1992); Patrick W. Carey, The Roman Catholics (1993); Jay P. Dolan, ed., The Notre Dame History of Hispanic Catholics in the United States, 3 vols. (1994); Martin E. Marty, A Short History of American Catholicism, 2d ed. (1995); and David J. O'Brien, From the Heart of the American Church: Catholic Higher Education in American Culture (1994).