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Reviews
BROKERS OF CULTURE: ITALIAN JESUITS IN THE AMERICAN WEST, 1848–1919
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by Gerald McKevitt
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| Stanford University Press, Palo Alto, California, 2006. Photographs, notes, index. 448 pages. $60.00 cloth. |
| Post-Napoleonic Europe seethed with anti-clericalism. At the middle of the nineteenth century, Italy's Risorgimento added two new dimensions to the movement by focusing on anti-Catholicism and, later, by singling out Jesuits for extra criticism. Italian animosity toward the Catholic Church stemmed from the desire of nationalists to unify nine Italian states, some of which were controlled by the Pope. The Italians' disagreeable relationship with the Jesuits, on the other hand, had more to do with the order's non-Enlightened philosophy of education. Once stirred up in the 1840s, the relationship between the church and the state remained merely contentious until 1873, after which the intensity roiled into violent anti-Jesuit uprisings in Rome, Turin, Sardinia, Naples, and Palermo. Jesuit provinces in Italy closed, and several hundred men in the Society of Jesus sought safe refuge in the United States, where the Catholic population doubled between 1840 and 1850, and then doubled again by 1860. Priests were in short supply. Hence, approximately one-fourth of the Jesuits in Turin Province made their way to the West Coast of America, and nearly one-half of the Jesuits from Naples relocated to New Mexico and Colorado where, by 1906, they staffed 19 parishes and 121 mission stations in the American Southwest. |
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Father McKevitt, S.J. is the most knowledgeable historian of Jesuit activity in the nineteenth-century trans-Mississippi West. In several previously published articles, McKevitt asked and answered important questions about the attributes and attitudes that encouraged Jesuit missionary success among Native Americans, including members of multiple tribes of the Pacific Northwest. In Brokers of Culture, McKevitt limits his analysis to the activities of Jesuits who emigrated from Italy — about 400 of them — but, at the same time, he extends his examination of Jesuit missionary success in the American West to their activities as entrepreneurs in the fields of education, religion, immigration, and minority relations. As members of the Society of Jesus, a Catholic order of priests and brothers founded in 1540, Jesuit missionaries carried with them to America three hundred years of missionary zeal, considerable resources, and a military-like organization. As Italians, Jesuit missionaries to America brought with them the appearance, though not the reality, of added clout as special emissaries from Rome, the seat of Catholicism. That perceived status antagonized religious groups in America, including other Catholic orders. Thus, McKevitt has written a lengthy book encompassing multiple themes. |
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In Brokers of Culture, McKevitt conjoins the fields of immigration history and religious history. The Italian Jesuits he writes about sometimes found it difficult to adapt to a nation that separated church and state — though most of the religious men who came to America after 1848 found that detachment to be a blessing, considering the government harassment that had sent them to the New World in the first place. According to McKevitt, Italian Jesuits also had some difficulty with the American concept of free public education. They believed church schools, on the European model, served a good purpose. Ultimately, the Italian Jesuits realized that they would have to act on their own and, accordingly, established numerous college preparatory schools in the West, plus five Jesuit institutions of higher education, including Gonzaga University and Seattle University. McKevitt is most effective when he reviews the several ways Jesuit missionaries merged Catholic culture with Native American spirituality. This "brokering of cultures" became the title of the book (p. 322). |
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An experienced teacher at Santa Clara University, where he is professor of Jesuit studies, McKevitt is highly regarded as a classroom scholar, and he uses his pedagogical skills to good advantage in leading readers of this book through seventy years of change in the American West. This is especially true in his careful examination of the Jesuit Rocky Mountain Mission, a vast territory that spread from Oregon and Washington to eastern Montana. The research for this volume is impeccable. McKevitt's conclusions derive from materials he examined at Jesuit provincial archives in Rome, Turin, London, Naples, Maryland, New York, Louisiana, Missouri, Colorado, Oregon, and California. McKevitt is least effective when his text unnecessarily elevates Santa Clara University to the forefront of Western missionary activity. Happily, Brokers of Culture provides two maps and ten times that number of pertinent illustrations placed among thirteen chapters. There are endnotes aplenty — more than one thousand — but no formal bibliography. That absence is, perhaps, the only genuine flaw in this otherwise remarkable book. |
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| Robert Carriker
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| Gonzaga University, Spokane, Washington |
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