The Vatican and the American Hierarchy from 1870 to 1965

Rome, Catholicism, and the nation‐state in America: Re‐centering a debate?

“…In the process, my work also suggests the importance of appreciating Romanity in its institutional aspect, that is, the church's peculiar hierarchical and bureaucratic structure and the archival trail it leaves behind. With few exceptions—notable among which is Gerald Fogarty's masterpiece, The Vatican and the American Hierarchy (1982), scholarship on US Catholicism had long disregarded Roman sources as both inadequate to the writing of history “from the bottom up” and irrelevant to the experience of a church presumed to find in taking exception from Rome its defining trait. Yet, bishops and ecclesiastical leaders were not just the historical actors most directly responsible for negotiating the church's relationship with the American nation‐state; when doing so, they were bound by their institutional obligations to take into account a set of transnational as well as domestic concerns.…”