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America's Church: The National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception and Catholic Presence in the Nation's Capital (review)

Historians of Catholicism are biased toward events. By most accounts American Catholic history stars the faithful, whether clergy or laity, but it gets its clarity and its momentum from episodes those people experience together. In these narrations, Catholicism in the twentieth-century United States trips from one pregnant happening to another – the celebrations of the immigrant Church give way to a suburban exodus, which gives way in turn to the election of a Catholic president and the upheaval of Vatican II. In America's Church, Thomas A. Tweed unsettles this status quo by demonstrating that physical spaces can also orient Catholic history. His study of the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception, on the grounds of The Catholic University of America in Washington, DC, posits that a single structure – albeit an unusually emblematic one – can act as a "threshold to Catholic America," granting access to multiple historical moments and Catholic populations simultaneously. Tweed's focus is the National Shrine's planning, fundraising, and construction, most of which occurred between 1913 and 1959. These decades were also the height of "consolidated" Catholicism in the United States – an era when clergy and laity shared, to an extent unheard of before or since, a single religious outlook on the world. This outlook was characterized by an emphasis on institutional authority _