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Reviews
Adapting in Eden: Oregon's Catholic Minority, 1838–1986
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By Patricia Brandt and Lillian A. Pereyra
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Washington State University Press, Pullman, 2003. Photographs, maps, notes, bibliography, index. 224 pages. $21.95 paper.
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Reviewed by Robert Bunting
Fort Lewis College, Durango, Colorado
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American Catholic historical studies have grown in quantity, quality,
and breadth in the past three decades. Yet, little attention has
been paid to Catholicism in the American West, and the few histories
that have treated the Catholic West have generally omitted the twentieth
century. Adapting in Eden is, therefore, a particularly welcome
volume. It provides the first historical overview of the Roman Catholic
Church in Oregon, particularly west of the Cascade Mountains, in
more than sixty years and gives relatively equal weight to the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries.
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The opening chapter provides a brief
background on the permanent establishment of Catholicism in the
Pacific Northwest. The remaining chapters are organized according
to the episcopacy of each Portland archbishop. This arrangement
is apropos for a story institutional in nature, constructed around
episcopal biographies, heavily reliant on clerical and church sources,
and largely concerned with infrastructural issues. The result is
a chronological history about how religious, social, political,
economic, and cultural forces commingled to shape Oregon Catholicism
as the church moved from frontier conditions through industrialization
to a modern and then postmodern society. In the process, Brandt
and Pereyra treat specific internal church problems, such as finances,
clerical and religious shortages, ethnic tensions and concerns,
bishops' struggles to achieve diocesan control, and the challenges
of the post–Vatican II church; external influences on the
church, such as anti-Catholicism, the Great Depression, World War
II and postwar changes, and the upheaval of the 1960s and 1970s;
and the profound ways that the church shaped society through politics,
education, social service agencies, and social justice movements.
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Although Adapting in Eden largely conforms to an older model of ecclesial institutional history, the authors avoid adopting a hagiographic or consensual historical approach. Rather, Brandt and Pereyra acknowledge both church accomplishments and failings. Their evaluations of each archbishop are measured and judicious. In addition, the authors pay service to current concerns about the role of the laity, women, ethnicity and race, and intra-church conflicts within their institutional framework. |
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The ecclesial focus and chronological narrative are both the book's strength and its liability. This approach provides the work with a structural coherence that is easy to follow. Moreover, a focus on the religious and clergy are crucial to an understanding of Catholic beliefs, values, and behaviors. The limitations, in this case, are that theoretical constructs, newer methodologies, the Catholic intellectual tradition and theological disputes such as modernism, and concerns by recent Catholic historians are largely omitted or, when mentioned, not fully developed or analyzed. |
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The book's major weaknesses, however, are the lack of an overarching interpretative framework and definitional precision. The book's suggestive subtitle might have served as a framing device but was not articulated so as to weave the whole together. Definitional clarity about the Catholic religious mentality that Andrew Greeley has termed the "Catholic Imagination" is never explicitly set forth. As a result, issues of what constituted Catholicism and where and how shifts occurred lack meaning and context, and how the faith was inculcated, preserved, or transmitted remains unrecorded. Moreover, there are no descriptions or analyses about differing forms of ethnic Catholicism, various expressions of "public Catholicism," for example, or the contested meanings of Vatican II in the post-conciliar church. In addition, the development of key factors for understanding Catholicism in Oregon, such as those suggested by Patricia O'Connell Killen in the U.S. Catholic Historian (Summer 2000) and Historical Studies (2000), are ignored. |
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Nonetheless, Patricia Brandt and Lillian Pereyra have pointed the way for future study in what they have achieved, left unanswered, and not explored. With larger institutional outlines in place, it may be time for others to fill in the deeper contours of the Catholic landscape. Using a wider breadth of sources than found in Adapting in Eden, those investigations might employ parish records, religious order holdings, newspapers, and manuscript collections held in the Oregon Historical Society's Research Library. Those sources might, in turn, begin to open up questions regarding the experiences of discrete communities, about how a pluralistic, largely unchurched, and religiously disinterested context influenced individual and group religious commitments, identity, rhetoric, style, and structures and how and why Catholic religious practices conformed to or differed from those in other sections of the country. Regardless of the shortcomings in Brandt and Pereyra's volume, anyone interested in not just Catholicism but religion, Oregon, and the American West will benefit from reading this well-written and sound book. |
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