"Cummings highlights four women: Chicago-based journalist Margaret Buchanan Sullivan; Sister Julia McGroarty, SND, founder of Trinity College in Washington, D.C., one of the first Catholic women's colleges; Philadelphia educator Sister Assisium McEvoy, SSJ; and Katherine Eleanor Conway, a Boston editor, public figure, and antisuffragist. Cummings uses each woman's story to explore how debates over Catholic identity were intertwined with the renegotiation of American gender roles. By examining female power within Catholic religious communities and organizations, she challenges the widespread assumption that women who were faithful members of a patriarchal church were incapable of pathbreaking work on behalf of women.".

What drove U.S. Catholics in their arduous quest, full of twists and turns over more than a century, to win an American saint? The absence of American names in the canon of the saints had left many of the faithful feeling spiritually unmoored. But while canonization may be fundamentally about holiness, it is never only about holiness, reveals Kathleen Sprows Cummings in this panoramic, passionate chronicle of American sanctity. Catholics had another reason for petitioning the Vatican to acknowledge an American holy hero. A home-grown saint would serve as a mediator between heaven and earth, yes, but also between Catholicism and American culture. Throughout much of U.S. history, the making of a saint was also about the ways in which the members of a minority religious group defined, defended, and celebrated their identities as Americans. Their fascinatingly diverse causes for canonization—from Kateri Tekakwitha and Elizabeth Ann Seton to many others that are failed, forgotten, or still under way—represented evolving national values as Catholics made themselves at home. Cummings’s vision of American sanctity shows just how much Catholics had at stake in cultivating devotion to men and women perched at the nexus of holiness and American history—until they finally felt little need to prove that they belonged.

Over the course of the twentieth century, Catholics, who make up a quarter of the population of the United States, made significant contributions to American culture, politics, and society. They built powerful political machines in Chicago, Boston, and New York; led influential labor unions; created the largest private school system in the nation; and established a vast network of hospitals, orphanages, and charitable organizations. Yet in both scholarly and popular works of history, the distinctive presence and agency of Catholics as Catholics is almost entirely absent. In this book, R. Scott Appleby and Kathleen Sprows Cummings bring together American historians of race, politics, social theory, labor, and gender to address this lacuna, detailing in cogent and wide-ranging essays how Catholics negotiated gender relations, raised children, thought about war and peace, navigated the workplace and the marketplace, and imagined their place in the national myth of origins and ends. A long overdue corrective, Catholics in the American Century restores Catholicism to its rightful place in the American story.

This volume tells the little-known story of the Dominican Family—priests, sisters, brothers, contemplative nuns, and lay people—and integrates it into the history of the United States. Starting after the Civil War, the book takes a thematic approach through twelve essays examining Dominican contributions to the making of the modern United States by exploring parish ministry, preaching, health care, education, social and economic justice, liturgical renewal and the arts, missionary outreach and contemplative prayer, ongoing internal formation and renewal, and models of sanctity. It charts the effects of the United States on Dominican life as well as the Dominican contribution to the larger U.S. history. When the country was engulfed by wave after wave of immigrants and cities experienced unchecked growth, Dominicans provided educational institutions; community, social, and religious centers; and health care and social services. When epidemic disease hit various locales, Dominicans responded with nursing care and spiritual sustenance. As the United States became more complex and social inequities appeared, Dominicans cried out for social and economic justice. Amidst the ugliness and social dislocation of modern society, Dominicans offered beauty through the liturgical arts, the fine arts, music, drama, and film, all designed to enrich the culture. Through it all, the Dominicans cultivated their own identity as well, undergoing regular self-examination and renewal.

For the first time, this volume takes a global and comparative approach to the lived local history of Vatican II.