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Contents
Background
Content
Key Terms
Dialogue
References
External Links
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Background
Thomas A. Tweed has devoted his scholarly career to rethinking historical, sociological, and theoretical approaches to religion in the American context. Historians know him for the dynamic collection of essays he edited, Retelling American Religious History (1997), which troubled then-regnant narratives by privileging questions of gender, sexuality, colonialism, and ethnicity, and considering the trajectory of American religious history from new geographic perspectives. While his earliest work focused on Buddhism in the United States, Tweed’s more recent scholarship has reflected a sustained interest in American Catholicism (Our Lady of the Exile, 1997; America’s Church, 2011). In light of ethnographic research conducted at a Cuban-Catholic shrine in Miami, his 1997 book Our Lady of the Exile adumbrated a theory of “diasporic religion,” and Tweed is perhaps best known today for the revision and elaboration of that theory in Crossing and Dwelling: A Theory of Religion (Harvard University Press, 2006). In the 2006 work, Tweed controversially defined religions as “confluences of organic-cultural flows” that use “human and suprahuman forces” to “make homes and cross boundaries.” With its invocation of hydraulic metaphors and heavy emphasis on the spatial dimensions of religious practice, Crossing and Dwelling provoked rounds upon rounds of scholarly debate—and at least one book-length retort in Manuel Vásquez’s More Than Belief: A Materialist Theory of Religion (Oxford University Press, 2011). America’s Church should be read as another waypoint on the long and fruitful arc of the scholarly trajectory limned here: the work applies Tweed’s spatial theory of religion (with some minor modifications: cf. 241-245) to a Marian shrine in Washington, DC. Perhaps more importantly, Tweed uses the space and spatial practices of the shrine and its devotees as a point of departure for narrating a history of American Catholicism in the 20th Century. Because religions are inextricably spatial, for Tweed, their history is best told “from the threshold” of sites where religious practices and concerns reach a particular acuteness.
Since 2008, Tweed has served as the Shive, Lindsay, and Gray Professor of the History of Christianity at the University of Texas, Austin. He taught previously at the University of Miami, and held senior administrative positions at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
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Content
America’s Church tells the story of twentieth-century American Catholicism through an historical case study of the Basilica of the Shrine of the Immaculate Conception (BNSIC) in Washington, DC. Its author, Thomas A. Tweed, traces the shrine’s origins to a 1913 meeting between Bishop Thomas J. Shahan, then rector of the Catholic University of America, and Pope Pius X, during which the pontiff gave an “apostolic benediction and personal donation” to Shahan’s plan for a Marian shrine in the American capital. Among Tweed’s central concerns it to demonstrate the ways in which diverse groups of Catholic laity were mobilized by clerical concerns during the “Era of Consolidation” (c.1910-1960, roughly coterminous with the so-called “Brick and Mortar” period of intensified ecclesiastical construction). In successive chapters, Tweed outlines “six defining [clerical] aims” that “reflected broader patterns” in U.S. Catholicism: (1) building more robust Catholic institutions; (2) mobilizing women, primarily by sanctioning Catholic women’s organizations and encouraging monetary contribution; (3) to engage children as both donors and pilgrims—often through the burgeoning system of parochial education; (4) to contest Protestant critiques of Roman Catholicism through public discourse and architectural polemic; (5) to claim civic space in the national capital; and (6) to incorporate successive waves of Catholic immigrants through the construction of smaller ethnic and national chapels within the larger shrine. Tweed understands these processes as integral to, and representative of, a “consolidated Catholicism”; to this consolidation—bolstered by the doctrine of papal “ultramontanism” and discourses of “triumphalist Americanism”—he opposes a subsequent era of “fragmentation” within the Catholic Church, beginning with the convocation of the Second Vatican Council in 1962.
While America’s Church paints a thick picture of a particular American Catholic devotional site, and offers an valuable analysis of the ways that Catholic identity was consolidated at this Marian shrine (I found the treatment of the shrine’s Byzantine-Romanesque and catacombal architecture as ways of asserting Catholic authenticity, antiquity, and primacy over Protestantism particularly compelling), Tweed’s most valuable contribution is methodological: he considers the BNSIC as a “threshold” from which to view the broader historical landscape of American Catholicism. His method privileges “place” as a vantage point from which to narrate a contoured history. The contours of American Catholic history would undoubtedly looks different from a different threshold. By anchoring his history of Catholic America in such a particular place and space, Tweed foregrounds his own positionality. By telling the history of the BNSIC, that is, Tweed provides a “source” for the major trends that he imputes to American Catholicism more broadly.
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Key Terms
Brick and Mortar Era
Salve Regina (periodical)
“American Marys”/”Marys of America”
Catacomb
Selective Countermodernism
Triumphalist Americanism
“Age of Mary” (c. 1850-1950)
Subjunctive Mood
Washington National Cathedral
“National” Churches
Ultramontanism
Era of Consolidation/Consolidated Catholicism
Conciliar Catholicism
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Dialogue
Ostensibly, America’s Church is a microhistory of one Marian shrine during the half-century preceding Vatican II. Its dialogue partners, like the Protestants that Tweed describes in chapter 4, remain “lurking in the…shadows” as something of an “incorporeal Other” (125). If nothing else is clear, however, it is that Tweed is in dialogue with himself. If the Shrine of Our Lady of Charity was a source for his theory of religion in Crossing and Dwelling, then this history of the BNSIC is its first major test case. Of course any historical treatment of American Catholicism that doesn’t subsume Catholics into a larger, Protestant-centered narrative is also speaking to narrative trends that remain dominant within American religious history—trends which read the long arc of our religious heritage as originating in Puritan New England and fanning out into a web of liberal and evangelical Protestantism. Catholics have largely been relegated to the background of American religious history, and Tweed’s fifth chapter (“Claiming Civic Space”), like his fourth, effectively narrates Catholic resistance to that trend.
On a theoretical level, Tweed certainly owes debts to Appadurai, whose notion of disjunctive cultural landscapes influences Tweed’s treatment of religion as a dynamic spatial practice interacting with other spatial flows “across time and space” (as Tweed is so wont to add). It is worth noting, in addition, that Tweed analyzes space/place into at least ten discrete components: name, location, appearance, context, relations, representations, makers, donors, users, and functions (16). Unlike Basso, who celebrates traditional modes of emplaced knowledge which consolidate these categories through narrative, Tweed’s method remains influenced by the analytical and (quasi-)scientific paradigm of sociological inquiry.
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References
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External Links