Graduate Readings in Modern Catholic History – James P. McCartin
Graduate Readings in Modern Catholic History
James P. McCartin
Department of History
Seton Hall University
Introduction and Course Goals
This course is a M.A.-level introduction to the history and historiography of Catholicism and the Roman Catholic Church since about 1500. The course treats major themes in modern Catholic history, including: the “Catholic Reformation” (often called the “Counter-Reformation”), or the reform of Catholic life and institutions between about 1500 and 1700; Catholics’ engagement with major intellectual and political transformations in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; and the processes of globalization and modernization in recent Catholic history. Students will consider the role of Church leaders and institutions, as well as the “everyday” practice of Catholicism manifested in popular beliefs and acts of piety. Consequently, students will work to understand the complex relationship between the “official Catholicism” defined by the Church hierarchy and the “popular Catholicism” practiced by ordinary Catholics.
Questions we will engage throughout the semester include: What major themes and events have dominated the history of modern Catholicism? How has “Church history” been shaped by “secular history”? How did phenomena like the Protestant Reformation and the French Revolution influence Church leaders? In what ways did such phenomena influence ordinary Catholics? How have ethnic identity and national politics been significant in the history of modern Catholicism? In what ways has Catholicism become “modernized”? In what sense might Catholicism be considered “antimodern”? How has the recent trend toward globalization shaped the history of Catholicism?
Upon completion of this course, students should: 1) possess an understanding of major trends and issues in modern Catholic history and historiography; 2) be able to evaluate a range of historians’ work on modern Catholicism and discuss these works in relation to one another; and 3) be able to articulate how the history of Catholicism relates to a range of major themes in modern European, American, and global history.
Course Themes and Reading List
The Catholic Reformation and the Emergence of Modern Catholicism: 1500-1800
John C. Olin, Catholic Reform: From Cardinal Ximenez to the
Council of Trent, 1495-1563 (New York, 1990).
Robert Bireley, Refashioning of Catholicism, 1450-1700: A Reassessment of the
Counter-Reformation (Washington, D.C., 1999).
Louis Châtellier, The Religion of the Poor: Rural Missions in Europe and the
Formation of Modern Catholicism, ca. 1500-ca. 1800,
trans. Brian Pearce (Cambridge, 1997).
Enlightenment, Revolution, Confrontation, Expansion: 1700-1900
“Enlightenment” and “Dechristianization,” in François Furet and
Mona Ozouf, eds., Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution
(Cambridge, Mass., 1989).
Susan Desan, “Redefining Revolutionary Liberty: The Rhetoric of Religious Revival
during the French Revolution,” Journal of Modern History 60 (1988).
Sheryl T .Kroen, “Revolutionizing Religious Politics during the Restoration,”
French Historical Studies 21 (Winter 1998): 27-53.
David I. Kertzer, The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara (New York, 1997).
Michael B. Gross, The War Against Catholicism: Liberalism and the Anti-Catholic
Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Ann Arbor, 2005)
David W. Miller, “Irish Catholicism and the Great Famine,” Journal of Social History 9
(Fall 1975).
Emmet Larkin, “The Devotional Revolution in Ireland, 1850-1875,”
American Historical Review 77 (Jun. 1972).
Sheridan Gilley, “The Roman Catholic Church and the Nineteenth-Century
Irish Diaspora,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 35 (Apr. 1984).
Jay P. Dolan, The Immigrant Church: New York’s Irish and German
Catholics, 1815-1865 (Notre Dame, Ind., 1975).
Patricia Byrne, “American Ultramontanism,” Theological Studies 56 (Jun. 1995).
Globalization, Modernization, Change, Continuity: The Twentieth-Century Church
Angelyn Dries, The Missionary Movement in American Catholic History
(Maryknoll, N.Y., 1998).
John W. O’Malley, What Happened at Vatican II? (Cambridge, Mass., 2008).
Stephen Schloesser, “Against Forgetting: History, Memory, Vatican II,” Theological
Studies 67 (Jun. 2006).
Joseph A. Komonchak, “Modernity and the Construction of Roman Catholicism,”
Cristianesmo nella Storia 18 (1997): 353-85.
Vincent Donovan, Christianity Rediscovered (Maryknoll, N.Y., 2003 [1968]).
Leslie Woodcock Tentler, Catholics and Contraception: An American History
(Ithaca, 2004).
Helen Hull Hitchcock, “Women for Faith and Family: Catholic Women Affirming
Catholic Teaching,” in R. Scott Appleby and Mary Jo Weaver, eds., Being Right:
Conservative Catholics in America (Indianapolis, 1995), 163-85.
Philip Jenkins, The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity
(New York, 2003).
Assignments and Grading
Two short book review essays (ca. 3 pages each)……. 10% each
Historiographical essay (ca. 15 pages) ……………….. 40%
Class participation ……………………………………. 40%
Students will submit two short book review essays (ca. 3 pages each) during the semester; students may choose which three assigned books to review in these essays, but they must adhere to the three due dates that are listed below for these assignments. These short reviews are designed to help students to think critically about a secondary text: that is, they are designed to help students to identify and assess the strengths and weaknesses of a particular work of historical research and writing. Some guidelines for writing these review essays can be found below. In addition, each student will produce one major historiographical essay (ca. 15 pages). Students are at liberty to choose which of the assigned books to write about in this essay, but they must adhere to the following rules: a student must discuss at least six assigned books in his/her essay; and he/she may not re-use a book that he/she already treated in a short review essay. Class participation is essential in this course, and it constitutes a total of 30% of the student’s grade. Attendance is therefore required for each session.
Course Schedule
Week 1: Introduction: What does it mean to be “modern”? What is “Catholicism”?
Week 2: Sources of Reform: Catholicism in Early Modern Europe
Reading: Olin
Week 3: Catholic Reformation: What was it? How effective?
Reading: Bireley
Week 4: Education and Piety in Missionary Europe: The Emergence of
Modern Catholicism
Reading: Châtellier
Week 5: The French Revolution and the Catholic Reaction
Reading: Selections from Furet and Ozouf, eds.
Desan
Kroen
Week 6: The Papacy of Pius IX and Italian Unification
Reading: Kertzer
**First book review due on or before this date
Week 7: Kulturkampf: German Liberalism meets Catholic Ultramontanism
Reading: Gross
Week 8: The Transformation of Catholic Ireland and Its Consequences
Reading: Miller
Larkin
Gilley
Week 9: American Catholicism in the Nineteenth Century: Growth and Conflict
Reading: Dolan
Byrne
Week 10: The United States and the Globalization of the Roman Catholic Church
Reading: Dries
Week 11: Vatican II: Catholic Aggiornamento
Reading: O’Malley
Komonchak
Schloesser
Week 12: African Catholicism: The Massai Example
Reading: Donovan
Week 13: Catholicism and Authority: An American Perspective
Reading: Tentler
Hitchcock
**Second book review due on or before this date
Week 14: Prospective: Global Catholicism and the Rise of the Southern Hemisphere
Reading: Jenkins
***Historiographical essay due today
