Rome in America

by D'Agostino, Peter R.

• ISBN13: 9780807855157
• ISBN10: 0807855154
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2004-04-01
• Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Pr

Summary

For years, historians have argued that Catholicism in the United States stood decisively apart from papal politics in European society. The Church in America, historians insist, forged an "American Catholicism," a national faith responsive to domestic concerns, disengaged from the disruptive ideological conflicts of the Old World. Drawing on previously unexamined documents from Italian state collections and newly opened Vatican archives, Peter D'Agostino paints a starkly different portrait. In his narrative, Catholicism in the United States emerges as a powerful outpost within an international church that struggled for three generations to vindicate the temporal claims of the papacy within European society.Even as they assimilated into American society, Catholics of all ethnicities participated in a vital, international culture of myths, rituals, and symbols that glorified papal Rome and demonized its liberal, Protestant, and Jewish opponents. From the 1848 attack on the Papal States that culminated in the creation of the Kingdom of Italy to the Lateran Treaties in 1929 between Fascist Italy and the Vatican that established Vatican City, American Catholics consistently rose up to support their Holy Father. At every turn American liberals, Protestants, and Jews resisted Catholics, whose support for the papacy revealed social boundaries that separated them from their American neighbors.

Author Biography

Peter R. D'Agostino is assistant professor of history and Catholic studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Rome in America was awarded the Frank S. and Elizabeth D. Brewer Prize by the American Society of Church History

Table of Contents

Preface	ix
Introduction: Whose Rome? Whose Italy?	1	(18)
PART I. INTRANSIGENCE, 1848-1914
Chapter 1 The Roman Question: The Battle for Civilization, 1815-1878	19	(34)
Chapter 2 The Transnational Symbolic Contest for Rome, 1878-1914	53	(31)
Chapter 3 The Mayor of Rome Is an "Atheist Jew," 1910-1914	84	(19)
PART II. TRANSFORMATION, 1914-1929
Chapter 4 The Great War: "Keep the Roman Question Alive," 1914-1920	103	(29)
Chapter 5 The Church Encounters the Order Sons of Italy in America, 1913-1921	132	(26)
Chapter 6 Catholics Meet Mussolini: "The Chosen Instrument in the Hands of Divine Providence," 1919-1929	158	(39)
PART III. REALIZATION, 1929-1940
Chapter 7 The Lateran Pacts of 1929 and the Crisis of 1931: Defending "The Holy Island"	197	(33)
Chapter 8 Preaching Fascism and American Religious Politics	230	(28)
Chapter 9 Stubborn and Lonely: American Catholic Anti-Fascists	258	(24)
Chapter 10 Parish Conflicts: The Church and Fascist Italy Manage "All Spirit of Rebellion"	282	(22)
Epilogue	304	(13)
Notes	317	(44)
Bibliography	361	(22)
Index	383