Paperback : $72.35
"For generations, American Catholics... lived out their faith through countless unremarkable routines. Deep questions of theology usually meant little to them, but parishioners clung to deeply ingrained habits of devotion, both public and private. Particular devotions changed over time, waxing or waning in popularity, but the habits endured: going to mass on Sunday, saying prayers privately and teaching their children to do the same, filling their homes with crucifixes and other religious images, participating in special services, blending the church's calendar of feast and fast days with the secular cycles of work and citizenship, negotiating their conformity (or not) to the church's demands regarding sexual behavior and even diet.... It was religious practice, carried out in daily and weekly observance, that embodied their faith, more than any abstract set of dogmas."-from the Introduction
In Habits of Devotion, four senior scholars take the measure of the central religious practices and devotions that by the middle of the twentieth century defined the "ordinary, week-to-week religion" of the majority of American Catholics. Their essays investigate prayer, devotion to Mary, confession, and the Eucharist as practiced by Catholics in the United States before and shortly after the Second Vatican Council.
Contributors: Joseph P. Chinnic, O.F.M., Franciscan School of Theology; Paula M. Kane, University of Pittsburgh; Margaret M. McGuinness, Cabrini College; James M. O'Toole, Boston College
Show more"For generations, American Catholics... lived out their faith through countless unremarkable routines. Deep questions of theology usually meant little to them, but parishioners clung to deeply ingrained habits of devotion, both public and private. Particular devotions changed over time, waxing or waning in popularity, but the habits endured: going to mass on Sunday, saying prayers privately and teaching their children to do the same, filling their homes with crucifixes and other religious images, participating in special services, blending the church's calendar of feast and fast days with the secular cycles of work and citizenship, negotiating their conformity (or not) to the church's demands regarding sexual behavior and even diet.... It was religious practice, carried out in daily and weekly observance, that embodied their faith, more than any abstract set of dogmas."-from the Introduction
In Habits of Devotion, four senior scholars take the measure of the central religious practices and devotions that by the middle of the twentieth century defined the "ordinary, week-to-week religion" of the majority of American Catholics. Their essays investigate prayer, devotion to Mary, confession, and the Eucharist as practiced by Catholics in the United States before and shortly after the Second Vatican Council.
Contributors: Joseph P. Chinnic, O.F.M., Franciscan School of Theology; Paula M. Kane, University of Pittsburgh; Margaret M. McGuinness, Cabrini College; James M. O'Toole, Boston College
Show moreJames M. O'Toole is Professor of History at Boston College. He is the author of Passing for White: Race, Religion, and the Healy Family, 1820-1920 and Militant and Triumphant: William Henry O'Connell and the Catholic Church in Boston, 1859-1944. He is also coeditor of Boston's Histories: Essays in Honor of Thomas H. O'Connor.
Habits of Devotion is a significant contribution to the
historiography of lay Roman Catholics in the United States.
*H-Net Reviews, H-Catholic*
Everyday American Catholicism in the last century centered on
ritual prayers, devotion to Mary, frequent confession, and regular
reception of the Eucharist. This pattern changed drastically after
Vatican II.... This volume deals with the practice of private
devotion in a series of related essays by relying on letters,
newspapers, memoirs, and church publications. Strongly encouraged
in America during the first half of the century as a form of
Catholic identity in a largely non-Catholic country, private
devotion reached its peak during the 1940s and 1950s and declined
rapidly thereafter.... The reasons for this dramatic shift are
complex, and the contributors pass no judgments, seeking only to
present evidence, but they do offer a fascinating glimpse into
Catholicism as it once was and some speculations about where it may
be going. For all libraries.
*Library Journal*
For those who think they remember what it meant to practice the
Catholic faith on a day-to-day (or week-to-week) basis in the
middle of the 20th century, Habits of Devotion provides a bracingly
detailed jog (or challenge) to the memory. For those too young to
remember, it offers ready access to the world of pre-Vatican II
Catholicism.
*Choice*
This important book focuses on religious practice in the mid-20th
century (mid-1920s to mid-1970s), the decades before and after the
pivotal Second Vatican Council. The essays in the book look at
religious historical periods in terms of before-and-after, and do
it very well. Catholic historians want to claim a usable past so
that contemporary believers may ground their religious identity in
living traditions. Confession is one of four practices of ordinary
Catholics explored in Habits of Devotion, the others being prayer,
Communion, and Marian devotion. The book is a long-view historical
study written by four leading Catholic scholars and drawn from a
rich array of private diaries and archival records kept by priests
in New York, Boston, Milwaukee, and other major Catholic
strongholds where the Irish, German, and Italians practiced their
faith.... Habits of Devotion is a most readable and interesting
book.
*America*
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