Pennsylvania History: A Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies

Catholics in the United States have historically been outsiders. As Catholics they were often seen as foreign in what many viewed as a Protestant nation, but as Americans they often felt excluded from the inner circles of the Vatican. According to Kathleen Cummings, one way they hoped to bridge both gaps was through a patron saint of their own, one whose sanctity could pass muster with the Vatican and whose life could also “be framed to support U.S. Catholics’ vision of themselves as Americans” (7). Cummings traces US Catholics’ quest for their saint from the 1880s, when they nominated their first candidate, through 2015, when Pope Francis named their twelfth saint in a ceremony on US soil. She explains that US Catholics searched for a saint [End Page 269] who would embody their American ideals, but that quest was challenging because those ideals remained in a constant state of flux, making it difficult to identify the perfect representative. When they did find a likely candidate, by the time they put them through the process of canonization, US culture had already shifted to the point that the saint failed to capture the public imagination, and the process would begin all over again. By tracing this process, Cummings explores changes to the canonization process as well as the larger picture of “U.S. Catholics’ understanding of themselves both as members of the church and as citizens of the nation,” and, in so doing, she traces the ways in which those identities “converged, diverged, and changed over time” (4).

According to Cummings, US Catholics began their quest in the midst of “a structural as well as a spiritual transformation in the American church” (11). At this point US Catholics were starting to think of themselves as a self-sustaining church equal to those in European countries and they hoped that having a saint of their own would reinforce their place in the international Catholic family. They also hoped that their patron saint would diminish anti-Catholicism in the United States, create a strong connection to the Holy See, show that the American Catholic church had matured past its infancy, and affirm American Catholics’ place in the nation.

The saints proposed changed according to the times. The first cause was that of a Native American named Tekakwitha who converted to the faith after working with Jesuits in what would later become Canada. She was appealing in the 1880s when her cause was introduced because she was native to North America and her story attested to the success of missionary work. At this time, Latin America had seventeen saints, including Saint Rose of Lima, and the United States and Canada had none. Tekakwitha would eventually be canonized, but not for nearly a century, and by that point her appeal had diminished and Catholics had come to seek candidates that related to their own times. Philippine Duchesne, a French-born missionary who had worked in Missouri from 1818 to 1852, met a similar fate. The person who came the closest to being made the United States’ patron saint was Elizabeth Seton, a Protestant convert to Catholicism who was connected by family ties to the Roosevelt political dynasty and by religious ties to the Sisters of Charity, a group that had served as nurses during the Civil War. Her canonization process ran in tandem and in competition with that of John Neumann of Philadelphia. They were both heralded as the parent of the US parochial school system, though neither could honestly claim that distinction. [End Page 270]

Changes in US society affected Catholics’ perspective of who would best represent the nation as a patron saint. Those changes included the scale of immigration at any given time, changing attitudes toward colonialism and missionary work, the growth and waning of anti-Catholic prejudice in the nation, the spread of Catholicism into urban environments, and changing attitudes about the role of social justice in Catholicism. All of these factors affected the outlook of US Catholics at any given time and determined which causes for canonization they worked the hardest to pursue.

Cummings’s story is also about how US Catholicism benefited from changes made to the canonization process. Canonization in general advanced more rapidly in the 1930s after Pope Pius XI initiated a process that would culminate in a major revision to the process in the 1980s. Vatican independence, gained in the 1920s, also meant greater openness to naming saints. By that point, the US hierarchy had become “better organized at home and more influential in Rome” (61) and American Catholics had a strong advocate in apostolic delegate Amleto Cicognani. His advocacy, and the power of US cardinals, helped build necessary transatlantic connections to bring American causes to Rome. The United States had gained such respect among international Catholic circles that the Twenty-eighth International Eucharistic Congress was convened in Chicago in 1926, leading to a sense of triumph among US Catholics that would eventually lead to a sense of entitlement in the interwar years. The Second Vatican Council, known as “Vatican II,” was called in 1959 and resulted in bishops being asked to update the church to reflect their contemporary world. This endorsement of religious liberty and pluralism in society led to a further liberalization of the canonization process. Finally, Pope John Paul II reformed the canonization process in 1983 and canonized two Americans and beatified six more. As US Catholics assumed leading positions in US society, they expected this clout to spread into their relations with the Vatican and influence the canonization process.

As of the present time, the United States still does not have an official patron saint because “for most of their nation’s history, U.S. Catholics’ attachment to a newly canonized saint rarely matched the enthusiasm shown by the generation that had originally proposed the candidate” (7). Catholics have moved out of the margins of US society, but polarization within the church over social issues has become a dividing internal force. Saints have lost their importance in helping Catholics create and understand their identity but the continuing process of declaring US saints offers insight into divisions within the Catholic Church that reflect divisions in American society today, [End Page 271] including those along the lines of gender and sexuality, race and ethnicity, geographic regions, and clerics versus lay people.

Cummings’s study offers insight in the history of the Catholic Church in general and the Catholic Church in the United States in particular. In telling this story, it also opens a window into American society and cultural values from the 1880s to today. It would be a valuable addition to an upper-division or graduate course on US religious history. It offers a great deal of insight into the relationship between American Catholics and the Vatican, as told through the quest for an American patron saint.