This volume considers how and why colonial Catholics embraced the individualistic, rights-oriented ideology of the American Revolution, in spite of the fact that the Revolution's rhetoric was riddled with anti-Catholicism, and even though Catholicism has had an uneasy relationship with Enlightenment liberalism until very recently.

Michele Dillon investigates why pro-change Catholics continue to remain actively involved with the Church.

American Catholics in Transition reports on five surveys carried out at six year intervals over a period of 25 years, from 1987 to 2011. The surveys are national probability samples of American Catholics, age 18 and older, now including four generations of Catholics. Over these twenty five years, the authors have found significant changes in Catholics’ attitudes and behavior as well as many enduring trends in the explanation of Catholic identity. Generational change helps explain many of the differences. Many millennial Catholics continue to remain committed to and active in the Church, but there are some interesting patterns of difference within this generation. Hispanic Catholics are more likely than their non-Hispanic peers to emphasize social justice issues such as immigration reform and concern for the poor; and while Hispanic millennial women are the most committed to the Church, non-Hispanic millennial women are the least committed to Catholicism. In this fifth book in the series, the authors expand on the topics that were introduced in the first four editions. The authors are able to point to dramatic changes in and across generations and gender, especially regarding Catholic identity, commitment, parish life, and church authority. William V. D’Antonio, Michele Dillon, and Mary L. Gautier provide timely information pertaining to Catholics’ views regarding current pressing issues in the Church, such as the priest shortage and alternative liturgical arrangements and same-sex marriage. The authors, also, provides the first full portrayal of how the growing numbers of Hispanic Catholics in the U.S. are changing the Church.

Diverse essays - from a youth minister to a university president - all struggling for Catholic identity in times of crisis. With heightened concern for the future, this is necessary reading.

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.

American Catholics Today presents trends in American Catholic opinion from 1987 to 2005, using four identical surveys. These surveys depict trends in Catholics' views of the sacraments, church authority, church teachings in the area of sex and gender, and strength of Catholic identity. This book suggests that the future will see more Catholics making decisions about their own faith and fewer Catholics who are fervently committed to church life.

A personal and historical examination of white Catholic anti-Blackness in the US told through 5 generations of one family, and a call for meaningful racial healing and justice within Catholicism Excavating her Catholic family’s entanglements with race and racism from the time they immigrated to America to the present, Maureen O’Connell traces, by implication, how the larger Catholic population became white and why, despite the tenets of their faith, so many white Catholics have lukewarm commitments to racial justice. O’Connell was raised by devoutly Catholic parents with a clear moral and civic guiding principle: those to whom much is given, much is expected. She became a theologian steeped in social ethics, engaged in critical race theory, and trained in the fundamentals of anti-racism. And still she found herself failing to see how her well-meaning actions affected the Black members of her congregations. It seemed that whenever she tried to undo the knots of racism, she only ended up getting more tangled in them. Undoing the Knots weaves together narrative history, theology, and critical race theory to begin undoing these knots: to move away from doing good and giving back and toward dismantling the white Catholic identity and the economic and social structures it has erected and maintained.