About this Book

Two centuries of struggles and sympathies between one religion and democracy in America. FOR TWO CENTURIES, Catholicism has played a profound and largely unexamined role in America's political and intellectual life. Emphasizing the community over the individual, Catholics have alternately challenged and supported American liberals on a variety of controversial issues, including slavery, public education, economic reform, the movies, contraception, the nuclear arms race, and abortion. The story of Catholicism is also international, as Catholics and non-Catholics reacted to people, ideas, and events abroad, from the 1848 revolutions to the rise of European fascism in the 1930s and the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s. Putting the current sexual-abuse scandal in the Church and the media's response in a much larger context, this stimulating history of both Catholicism and anti-Catholicism is a model of nuanced scholarship and provocative reading.