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This chapter introduces the law of unintended consequences for understanding Catholic changes since Vatican II. The law of unintended consequences simply refers to the insight that historical actions, once undertaken, have consequences of their own, regardless of the actors who made them. This insight is especially important with regard to the Second Vatican Council, as recent debates centered on the intentions of the participants at the event in 1962–65. The chapter thus offers a distinctive point of view on what many refer to as the “Vatican II battles” over the meaning of that Council: it argues that Catholics first recognized historical change in the years after the Second Vatican Council. It was the growth of this historical consciousness within the Church that set off the battles within the Catholic community. The chapter thus sets up the narrative that follows.

This chapter explores the Atlantic Return from a return of the mission and the specific perspective of a Mexican-founded religious order, the Legionaries of Christ which has been strong in Rome. More specifically, the chapter frames this exploration through a focus on the mimetic drives that exist between religious orders, particularly those mediating the relationship between the Legionaries of Christ and the pre– and post–Vatican II Jesuits. The two orders are not homologous, but are connected by revelatory details, and the affective forces that animate them. By the filling in/taking over of affective spaces (promoting a virile posture of priesthood in the church, which Jesuits were perceived as lacking after Council Vatican II), the Legionaries have implicitly benefited from the strength of a “death” and a loss of vocations within another order, and captured some of their historical affective power, some of their virility. This mimetic field between religious orders is an important aspect of the Atlantic Return and a fertile conjuncture to study the Catholic Church as a passionate machine.

This essay views the reception of the Council against the background of the transformation of the American Catholic landscape in the late 1950s and 1960s, when upward mobility and suburbanization contributed to the final collapse of the American Catholic subculture. Largely unrelated to the Council, these developments intersected with responses to the Council in interesting ways. In debates over the use of birth control, divorce and remarriage, and liturgical innovation, laypeople often took things into their own hands. In the city of Detroit, Catholic laity, in their interaction with Archbishop John Francis Dearden (1958-1980), occasionally used the authority of the Council in defending their own views, in particular with regard to the archbishop’s controversial actions in dealing with race related problems in the city in the 1960s.

This introductory chapter begins with a brief discussion of the history of U.S. Catholicism, which is traced back to the efforts of Franciscan missionaries in the sixteenth-century Southwest prior to the arrival of Anglo-Protestants along the Eastern Seaboard, and then moved on to Jesuits in New France (Canada) early in the following century. By 1850, Catholicism was the largest religious denomination in the United States, and remains so to this day. American Protestant Christianity has always boasted a substantial aggregate majority of religious adherents, but Protestantism was broken into so many movements by the mid-nineteenth century that no single Protestant group equaled in size the nation's Catholic populace. An overview of the subsequent chapters is also presented.

This chapter examines aspects of American Catholic history that lay outside the commonly told story of parishes and immigrants by surveying the efforts of American Protestants—from the colonial era to the present—to properly map that Catholic place in the life of their nation and their own religious sensibilities. It shows how the ambivalent greeting initially extended to Catholic immigrants by U.S. Protestants was shelved for outright hostility during the nativist era prior to the Civil War, when the mass emigration of impoverished, famine-stricken Irish Catholics greatly aggravated preexisting fears of “popish superstition.” At the same time a number of Protestants—often from elite backgrounds—found themselves powerfully drawn to Catholic art and ritual, and more than a few took the plunge into religious conversion.

This chapter explores the narrative of Catholic history in Canada, and particularly Québec. It begins with an overview of Québecois Catholicism under British rule and its adoption of many conventional stereotypes of American “ghetto Catholicism.” It then considers how, in the decades bookending World War I, French Canadians—les Canadiens—displayed a somewhat confounding self-identity in the face of Protestant British occupation. It also examines the impact of modernization, urbanization, ethnic diversity, and industrialization on French Canadian identity during the early twentieth century in Québec; how the francophone nativist rendering of history contributed to the construction of Québecois nationalism; and the perceived threat of Jews and Freemasons to the Canadien psyche. Finally, it discusses the shift in Québecois culture that paved the way for the Quiet Revolution of the 1960s.

The introduction places the controversy in its historiographical context and it explains its relative neglect by historians of the Tudor/Stuart period. It then moves to connect the controversy with its immediate and longer-term contexts, and it tries to explain why the topics at the centre of the debate had long-term resonance through the rest of the post-Reformation period.

Many scholars have defined feminism narrowly as the desire for autonomy, thus failing to take into account the central role of women in their families, communities, and churches. In particular, Catholic women, who venerate the Virgin Mary as the model of ideal womanhood, have been commonly accused of being reactionary or antifeminist. This chapter urges historians to reframe the narratives of Catholic history and feminism so that the more complex accounts of religion's relationship with the modern feminist movement can be revealed. Focusing on Estela Ruiz, an elderly Mexican American woman who claims to both see and hear the Virgin Mary, it shows how faith and activism have empowered lay Catholic women to reform their families and society while also transforming the culture and identity of Catholicism.

The Introduction explains the nature of the late Elizabethan succession question. It clarifies the obstacles encountered by the closest hereditary heir James VI of Scotland and outlines the range of other claimants and their backers. It then examines the historiography of the succession issue before and after Mary Stuart’s execution with reference to new trends such as the New Catholic, New British, and New Political History, identifying problems and omissions and mapping out new directions for research. The Introduction concludes by highlighting longer-term significances of the constitutional issues discussed in the book.

These years mark the bloodiest of the conflict with the highest number of deaths. Priests, women religious, and the Irish Catholic hierarchy continued to find their voice in condemning violence and, in private moments, acted as mediators between the British government and republican paramilitary groups. However, ecumenical efforts between Protestant and Catholic Church leaders at this time remained limited. The English Catholic Church hierarchy began to publicly condemn republican paramilitaries as the IRA started to bomb England. The death of IRA member James McDade, after a bomb he planted in Coventry exploded prematurely, marked the first major schism between English and Irish Catholic Church doctrine and practice. This set a course of confusion over the Church stance on issues of suicide and excommunication that continued for the rest of the conflict.

The introduction provides a short discussion of the methodology and historical assumptions of the volume. It explains that the aim of the book is to run different narratives of the period against each other—narratives which have tended in the past to be kept separate. First and foremost, here, we have comparatively well-known accounts of the period based on European high politics and international relations rooted in, inter alia, dynastic unions between royal houses. The period is framed in part by attempts to secure political consensus and stability through alliances of this kind. Secondly we have a series of narratives which record contemporary critiques of royal authority, critiques which were frequently phrased by reference to the language of religion, and not least to constructions of orthodoxy which were not merely Protestant ones.

This chapter briefly describes the history of religious institutes in the United States. It first covers the demographics—the overall numbers and the ethnic and socioeconomic composition—of the various institutes during the nineteenth century. It next discusses the types of ministries the sisters, brothers, and religious order priests engaged in, and the sources of vocations to their institutes. The second section covers changes in religious institutes after 1950, covering the factors which contributed to the changes as well as their impact on the institutes themselves and the larger Church. The chapter concludes with a brief overview of the subsequent chapters.