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Reviewed by Leslie W. Tentler | Book Review | The Indiana Magazine of History, 105.1 | The History Cooperative
105.1  
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March, 2009
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Frontiers of Faith
Bringing Catholicism to the West in the Early Republic

By John R. Dichtl
(Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2008. Pp. ix, 240. Notes, bibliography, index. $50.00.)

John Dichtl's study traces Catholic fortunes in the trans-Appalachian West—Kentucky, the backcountry of Maryland and Pennsylvania, the southernmost portions of Ohio and Indiana—from the 1780s through the 1820s. The trans-Appalachian frontier in these decades, he argues, was for Catholics a "contested space"—a place where they encountered an almost bewildering variety of Protestants on more or less equal terms. If Catholics were still a numerical minority and handicapped by poverty, they could draw on the resources of a rich devotional tradition that was rendered the more evocative by the circumstances of frontier privation. They also enjoyed the services of some remarkable priests—men who aspired to communal as well as religious leadership. As a result, frontier Catholics, and especially their clergy, were more apt than their East Coast confreres to be optimists with regard to the future of American Catholicism and confident in their own standing as citizens. . . .
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