| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

James M. O'Toole, editor. Habits of Devotion: Catholic Religious Practice in Twentieth-Century America. (Cushwa Center Studies of Catholicism in Twentieth-Century America.) Ithaca: Cornell University Press. 2004. Pp. 289. $39.95.
Inspired by religious historians' turn toward the study of practice and sustained by the collaborations of Notre Dame's Twentieth-Century America Project, the authors of the four essays collected in this useful volume set out to analyze American Catholics' "deeply ingrained habits of devotion" during the twentieth century, especially between 1925 and 1975 (p. 1). By focusing on this period, the authors self-consciously assess the significance of Vatican II (1962–1965) for U.S. Catholics. They aim to "see how the world of Catholic belief and practice both changed and remained the same after that important gathering had adjourned" (p. 4). Yet the central task of the book is to trace the shifts in the "key elements" of the "week-to-week religion" of Catholics in twentieth-century America: prayer, Marian devotion, confession, and the Eucharist (p. 4).	1
The initial chapter, Joseph P. Chinnici's "The Catholic Community at Prayer, 1926–1976," is the longest and most inclusive. Chinnici divides his impressive chapter into three sections. The first chronicles the "explosive changes in the pattern of Catholic prayer in the 1960s" (p. 10). The second section—perhaps the most important for revising the usual historical narratives—traces the "continuities" in the decades before the Second Vatican Council, just as the final section identifies the "discontinuities" that emerged in middle of the 1960s. In the conclusion of this detailed essay, which spans seventy-eight pages and includes 309 endnotes, the author ponders the "rupture" of the 1960s and analyzes the reception of "transformational reform" (pp. 82–87). Chinnici argues that "the initial liturgical adaptations were generally accepted within the community" (p. 82) because the earlier religious practice had "encoded a social world that no longer existed" (p. 83). So Americans received the Second Vatican Council in this context of social and religious change, and "its decrees provided both the grammar and the words for the creation of a new public language that made experiential sense" (p. 85).	. . .

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