Creed and Culture: The Place of English-Speaking Catholics in Canadian Society, 1750-1930

Dominique Marshall is an assistant professor of history at Carleton
University in Ottawa.

What did English-speaking people of the Catholic faith make of the
fights over imperialist wars that divided Canada at the turn of the
century? What happened to the English-speaking Catholics of Toronto
after 1890? How did the French-speaking bishops of Quebec react to the
rising strength of Catholic communities in Atlantic Canada after 1760?
In this collection, 10 historians and students of religion have drawn a
preliminary picture of the role played by this “double minority”
over two centuries.

The book is a warning to social historians, who tend to consider belief
as a variable dependent on material conditions, and churches as
institutions of social control (although some articles show the opposite
problem—of failing to make enough use of the findings of social
historians). Ultramontane devotions, as Brian Clarke shows, are crucial
to understand the mental world of 19th-century Toronto mothers. This
claim to a sunny place in the discipline is the counterpart to a modest
move away from the earlier core of apologies. A useful glossary marks
this critical distance and this openness to a larger readership.
Changing theologies are carefully discussed, together with the economic,
cultural, and political history of the groups that held them. Terrence
Murphy’s remarkable discussion of the heavy influence of trustees on
the early history of Catholicism in Atlantic cities sheds light on the
nature, strength, and legitimacy of the later Ultramontane institutions.
Readers interested in Vatican diplomacy, its breathtaking extent and its
intricate channels of information, won’t be disappointed by Luca
Codignola’s suggestion of a Roman Catholic master plan for North
America at the turn of the 19th century.

The various fates of English-speaking Catholics provide a laboratory in
which to discuss the relative importance of ethnic and religious
identities. Some distinctively Canadian features appear, while others
are shared with the American Catholic, at times calling into question
the historiography of Western Catholicism. The tenacity and diplomatic
skills of the Scottish Catholics studied by J.M. Bumsted, for instance,
together with the homogeneity and peculiarities of their communities,
made for a disproportionate amount of power and a surprising longevity.
English-speaking Catholic experiences also varied over time. The solid
introduction to this collection traces patterns of evolution, from
“sect” to “ethnic subculture” to “mainstream.” Despite
admitted lacunae (the English-speaking Catholics of Quebec are absent,
and some authors could have held more tightly to the introductory
propositions), this book is a testimony to the importance of religion in
the explanation of politics and identities in 19th- and 20th-century
history.