Many years ago John Higham identified a transition in American culture “from boundlessness to consolidation,” the beginnings of which could be traced to the 1850s. Among indications of a scaling back in the prevailing sense of unlimited openness were an incipient shift from romanticism to realism in the arts, and a movement toward tighter organization and centralization, often associated with the Civil War, which was already discernible in the prewar decade. In describing this shift, Higham said little about religion, observing only that the growth of professionalism reduced competition among Protestant denominations and “produced a more highly trained ministry, greater concern with the liturgical side of religion, and a decline of the crusading fervor of an earlier day.” Although he made no mention of American Catholicism, the concept of “boundlessness” seems sufficiently capacious to apply to the pioneering decades of Catholic development, and by midcentury a process of consolidation was definitely under way in that dimension of the national culture. My aim in this essay is to look more closely at boundlessness in one area of Catholic life and to call attention to a generational shift in outlook that accompanied the process of consolidation.

In 1846, Oran Brownson, the older brother of the famed Catholic convert Orestes A. Brownson, penned a letter to his brother recounting a dream Orestes had shared with him much earlier. In the dream, Orestes, Oran, and a third brother, Daniel, were “traveling a road together.” “You first left the road then myself and it remains to be seen whether Daniel will turn out of the road (change his opinion),” Oran wrote. At approximately the same period in which Orestes converted to Catholicism “because no other church possessed proper authority,” Oran joined The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints because he believed that “proper authority rests among the Mormons.” Indeed, in an era characterized by denominational proliferation, democratization, and competition, Catholic and Mormon claims to divine authority proved appealing to some Americans, like the Brownsons, wearied by the diversity and disunity of the Protestant world. Oran cautioned Orestes to not trust polemical literature against Mormonism, but to “get your information from friends and not enemies.” Orestes could have repeated the same warning about Catholicism, given the number and intensity of nineteenth-century attacks on both Catholics and Mormons. Leaving mainstream Christianity to join the most despised religions in nineteenth-century America, the Brownson brothers embarked on spiritual quests that few contemporary Americans would have understood, much less approved.

When Dwight L. Moody left his native town of Northfield, Massachusetts, for Boston in 1854, he was one among hundreds of young men flocking to urban centers in hopes of achieving greater prosperity and “success” in mercantile careers than their families had attained through agricultural pursuits or village commerce. This trend was part of a larger pattern of urban growth that began in the early nineteenth century, fueled by both foreign immigration and the expansion of industrial capitalism. In the decades prior to the Civil War, Boston's population expanded exponentially, reaching nearly 140,000 at the time of the 1850 census, a six-fold increase since 1800. Of this number, nearly one-half were of “foreign” birth or parentage, and an additional 25,000 were “Americans” who had migrated to Boston from rural New England and other areas of the United States. Only around 50,000—or 35 percent of the total population—had been born and raised in Boston. This rapid influx of newcomers to the city provoked growing concern among native Bostonians, as the presence of rural youths, Irish Catholics, and other “outsiders” began to challenge and transform traditional patterns of social, economic, political, and religious life.

The mid twentieth century was an important period of theological and liturgical change for mainline Protestants. Theologically, the optimistic liberalism of the turn of the century came under sharp critique from a variety of theologians who sought to give greater attention tc the historic Christian doctrines. Liturgically, the practices of evangelicalism were compared to historic models of Christian worship and found wanting. No American was more prominent in the theological critique than Reinhold Niebuhr (1892–1971). After rising to national prominence as a preacher and essayist while serving as a pastor ir Detroit, Michigan, he joined the faculty of Union Theological Seminary in New York City in 1928 and gained an international reputation as a social ethicist, preacher, and advocate of a theological perspective known variously as “Christian realism” or “neo-orthodoxy.” It is less well known that as part of his theological program Niebuhr advocated liturgical reform. From his days in Detroit when he confessed devoting an entire fall “to a development of our worship services” to the height of his career when he warned that “a church without adequate conduits of traditional liturgy” is “without the waters of life,” Niebuhr was vitally concerned with “the weakness of common worship in American Protestantism.”

Narratives about women and religion in Victorian and Edwardian society seldom addressed the world of the Catholic laity, leaving the impression that Catholics were unimportant in English history. Pushed into anonymity, they were easily misunderstood because of their religious sensibilities and loyalty to a church governed not from London but Rome. This was a church long subject to various forms of disability in England and with a membership of roughly 5 percent of the population around 1900. By then, objections to the Catholic Church as a foreign institution had lessened, but critics still labeled Catholics “a people apart,” viewing them as too disinterested in their neighbors' welfare to play a vital part in public life. So commonplace was this particular point of view that it obscured Catholic participation in social causes such as the hard fought campaign for women's suffrage. As often as journalists, suffragists, and members of Parliament debated enfranchisement in the years before and after the First World War, very little is known today about the role Catholics played in the struggle for women's rights.