Thomas T. McAvoy has written in his study of “Americanism” in the Roman Catholic Church: “The history of the modernist controversy in this country has not been written and the destruction of pertinent records will make such a study very difficult.”. “Modernism” was quite evidently a movement within the Roman Catholic Church in Europe. It had its roots and took its strength there. There, too, it was destroyed. For the most part, American Catholics did not contribute to “modernism”s evolution, development and defeat. But eventually the main current of “modernism” in Europe rolled its waves onto American shores. Amidst many other streams, its waters flowed into the life of one man, William L. Sullivan, an Irish Catholic and Paulist priest.

Even historians and historically minded Sociologists with little sense or awareness of the current Roman Catholic scene have been stirred by the precipitous flow of events of the last dozen years to ask questions about the Catholic role in American society. Virtually without warning, the history of American Catholicism has been catapulted from specialized ecclesiastical history of interest to Catholics primarily into an ecumenical history of unprecedented general interest. After hovering backstage for centuries, the Catholic presence has erupted almost simultaneously from the secular and theological wings and burst onto centerstage. A convergence of public events dramatized and personalized for world Catholicism by the papacy of John XXIII and for American Catholicism by the presidency of John F. Kennedy ironically magnified a sense of supreme Catholic crisis and confusion that in its scope and implications dwarfed earlier American Catholic crises, making them appear parochial and intramural by comparison. The elevation to the papacy of the most saintly and humble of priests and the brief presidency of the first Catholic president of the United States turned an aged pope and a young president into symbols of a new public Catholicism, cosmopolitan and courageous in its vision and democratic in its thrust. Vatican II, the ecumenical movement, the race revolution, the general revolt against authority, the new ethnic succession, explosive social and geographic mobility, and the heightened self-consciousness of newer ethnics of European origin and largely Catholic religion, combined with the instant exposure of the mass media, synchronized with an era of American world hegemony and the emergence of an American Catholicism of appropriate dimensions.

Extensive discussion of the origin and nature of Black Christianity in America has in recent years linked together two issues which are logically distinct: the degree of uniqueness attributable to the beliefs of Afro-Americans, and whether or to what extent their faith sustained resistance to the system of slavery. Abundant evidence that slaveowners hoped Christian instruction would persuade Black people to asquiesce in their bondage has been readily taken for proof that acquiescence was in fact the usual result of their conversion. This questionable conclusion has sometimes led to another: that such religious notions as occasionally inspired resistance were brought from Africa and were uniquely the heritage of Black men. According to this view, the biblical rationales for revolt such as Denmark Vesey and Nat Turner appear to have employed were merely a gloss upon ideas of freedom and justice which they and their people had long held.

Every one who have ever been comforted by hearing the words “By this authority I absolve thee” spoken by one of our priests after a penitent confession, is indebted to Oliver Sherman Prescott; and might give thanks to God that he lived and fought in courts ecclesiastical in these United States of America.

Europeans who came to America from the sixteenth century on, came not to discover a new world but to re-create their own versions of Europe. Whether Spanish conquistador or Virginia planter, each hoped to make America and native Americans into the shape of idealized Europes and Europeans. Of all those who made such plans, it was the Society of Jesus that had sufficient authority and manpower to put its visions into practice. Jesuits who came to New France in the 1630s brought not only Christianity but a whole complex of European social and political values. To examine Jesuit “civilization planning” in New France is to see in microcosm a significant part of early European-Indian relations.

Church historians have generally tended to ignore American Universalism. This was not because Universalists were unmindful of their past. Several works were produced in the nineteenth century trying to prove through Scripture and history the fact that the idea of universal salvation was always a part of the mesage of Christianity from the days of the apostles through the Reformation down to the modern era. It was an important argument in their voluminous debates and an essential ingredient of their theology. They were rather proud of this heritage. It cannot be said, therefore, that Universalism failed to produce its own historians. The problem for scholars of all disciplines has been that until recently there were no reliable sources available which dealt with American Universalism. Yet Universalism needs to be understood, for it helped to humanize the church through its teachings that God was a God of love and that he cared to save each and everyone of his children.

The revival of interest in American Protestant missionary activity is a remarkable feature of current historical writing in the United States. Two generations ago mission history was a flourishing enterprise, but was closely tied to the missionary movement itself. And when the fire went out of the crusade to evangelize the world in a single generation, the study of mission history was thereby virtually extinguished. With the exception of the distinguished writings of the late Kenneth Scott Latourette, the history of Christian missions in the modern period has been generally disregarded by American historians for most of this century. The renascence of mission history in a new, more modern and ostensibly more objective form began around a decade ago. Whether the present generation of historians will produce greater understanding of the missionary movement than did the generation of their grandfathers is an open question; in any event, the history of missions is once again the latest thing.

William G.McLoughlin, professor of history, Brown University, has suceeded in producing a most extensive monograph on the struggle for religious liberty in New England and his most ambititious work to date. The author’s painstaking research has been exemplary. The result is a meticulous narrative of two–hundred years of religious dissent, told in thirteen chapters consuming some thirteen–hundred pages of text in two hefty volumes with copious footnotes. At the outset, McLoughlin asserts that he undertook this study to clarify the confusion in regard to the history of separation of church and state in America.

This confusion, he holds, is the result of two basic misunderstandings regarding the formation of the concept of separation during the colonial era: The first misunderstanding is based on the theory that separation as we know it today came primarily, if not entirely, from the rationalistic spirit of the Enlightenment and that it received its essential exposition from Thomas Jefferson and James Madison in Virginia. The second misunderstanding derives from the very different assumption that separation sprang principally, if not wholly from the radical wing of the Protestant Reformation (brought to America by the Baptists and the Quakers) and that it received its essential exposition from Roger Williams in Rhode Island in the 1630's. (p. xv) McLoughlin is quite sure that the vision of full religious liberty and complete separation of church and state only gradually emerged, since “the fight for religious liberty was primarily a neighborhood affair—a series of dialogues and face to face confrontations in church, parish, and town meetings which continued over two hundred years” (p.xvii).