Scholars have acknowledged that there is a systemic aspect to Catholic clerical sex abuse that acts as a type of grammar structuring behaviors and responses. Feminist critics in particular stress the patriarchal nature of the abuse that connects bishops, priests, and boys together. This essay argues that in addition to public systems dominated by men, there are also private structures that facilitate abuse. Using the extensive primary documentation assembled by BishopAccountability.org, I focus on the space of the home and the unique orientations of mothers and fathers to better understand the dynamics of clerical sex abuse in the American Catholic church. The essay begins with the abuse of a Milwaukee priest who tormented his parishioners from 1945 until his forced “retirement” in 1970. Drawing on themes found in this case, I examine other abuse narratives—focusing on how the Catholic understanding of alter Christus and mid-twentieth-century gender roles made the “good Catholic home” a particularly vulnerable place for abuse. Since public and private systems overlap, it is essential that the domestic aspects of clergy sex abuse also receive a full analysis.

This article examines one of the first court-martial of a US soldier for the murder of a Korean civilian. In December 1951, Pang Hwa-il died from injuries sustained at the hands of four American soldiers during a late-night search of a home he was visiting. Many acts of violence perpetrated by the US military against Korean civilians like Pang during the Korean War went unaccounted for. However, his death would receive public attention in the United States because he was the associate general secretary of the Korean National Council of Churches. Responding to public pressure, the US military eventually started an investigation approximately two months after the incident took place. By examining the circumstances surrounding Pang's murder, the subsequent trial, and its aftermath, this article challenges a standard characterization of the relationship among missionaries, Korean Protestants, and the US military during the 1950s as a close partnership. The American government, the military, and missionaries had all carefully cultivated a narrative that the US and a Christian South Korea were allies against communism. However, Pang, a Korean Christian leader, was killed by a US soldier, not a communist enemy. Furthermore, the US military's initial delay in bringing Pang's assailants to trial and the light sentence that was handed down shocked both Korean and American observers. As this incident reveals, the US military valued the lives of its Korean allies less than American lives, calling into question the American government's claims that it was working in partnership with South Koreans.

The activity of Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński as the Primate of Poland occurred in a period when Poland did not maintain diplomatic relations with the Holy See. The period between 1948 and 1981 can be divided, from the perspective of the Warsaw authorities, into three subperiods: no relations and no talks (informal and official), 1948–1965; negotiations, 1965–1974; and working contacts, 1974–1981. The years 1964–1978 were also the period of the apogee of the Vatican's Ostpolitik carried out by Msgr Agostino Casaroli, under the auspices of Pope Paul VI. Cardinal Wyszyński was directly involved four times in talks on the arrangement of Polish–Vatican relations: in 1951, 1957, 1963, and 1965. With time, however, the primate gained more and more distance from the purposefulness of establishing relations between the Holy See and communist states. It should be added that from the beginning of the 1970s, the primate was quite critical of the effects of the Vatican's so-called Ostpolitik. At the end of the pontificate of Paul VI, an open conflict arose between the Secretariat of State and the Primate of Poland, which was resolved only with the election of Karol Wojtyła as Pope.

Around a hundred Black people joined the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (the LDS Church) in the nineteenth century. From 1873 to 1876, a clerk created one of the most extensive records of an early Black Latter-day Saint when he wrote down Samuel Chambers's religious testimonies given in deacons quorum meetings. Though these records have been known to the academic community for decades, this article represents the first scholarly analysis of them. We argue that Chambers used LDS scriptural language and the authority of his own experience to clear a place rhetorically for himself in the deacons quorum and for Black people in the LDS Church more broadly. Chambers implicitly illustrated his fitness for holding the LDS priesthood and participating in LDS temple rituals, aspects of LDS practice from which Chambers was excluded because he was Black. This article adds depth and richness to our understanding of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century African American Mormon experience and provides a case study in some of the ways written scripture and spoken language intersect and function for members of a religious community with varying levels of literacy among members.

Approximately one third of the world is Christian, and half of those are Roman Catholics. The demographics alone make writing a global history of Catholicism a mammoth task. To attempt the impossible, Professor John T. McGreevy of Notre Dame University has tackled a theme that plays itself out over multiple centuries and diverse cultural settings—the conversation, negotiation, tension, and conflict between traditionalism and modernization. Given that conservatism and progressivism shift meanings according to historical context, the implications of each position in situ are complex and surprising. Only a scholar of McGreevy's maturity and erudition could hope to succeed in such a bold enterprise.

Few topics are more germane to this journal than the writing of ecclesiastical history, and no figure has had greater influence on the development of this genre than the bishop and scholar, Eusebius of Caesarea. In his masterful study of Eusebius and his readers from the late ancient to the modern era, Michael Hollerich has done a great service to all historians of Christianity. A work of reception history, the book begins with a chapter on Eusebius's life and work, focusing on his Ecclesiastical History and its relation to his Chronicle as well as other historical and non-historical genres with which he engaged. Subsequent chapters examine the reception of his work in the Christian Roman Empire of late antiquity, the non-Greek East, the medieval Latin West, and Byzantium, before turning to the rediscovery of Eusebius in diverse early modern contexts and his reception in modern scholarship including the implications of his historiographical work for future historians. The essays that comprise this roundtable, followed by the author's response, continue this important conversation about Eusebius and his legacy.

If a random member of the American Society of Church History (ASCH) were asked to select four individuals to go on a new Mount Rushmore of “Most Influential American Religious Historians,” I would wager that Mark Noll would make the cut pretty easily. After many years of laboring in the deep trenches of undergraduate education at Wheaton College, and then the even deeper trenches of graduate education at the University of Notre Dame, he now brings us America's Book: The Rise and Decline of a Bible Civilization, 1794–1911, the second in a brace of massively researched studies of the Bible's role in American life.

I spent much of the first decade of the 2000s writing a book about the Catholic Church in nineteenth and twentieth-century Vietnam. I came to the topic as a scholar of Vietnam, and very much not as a scholar of modern Catholicism. In the project's early stages I searched high and low for a general history to fill in the (many) gaps in my knowledge of the subject. The best I could find was Nicholas Atkin and Frank Tallett's 2003 Priests, Prelates & People: A History of European Catholicism since 1750. This book, although excellent and still worth reading, is squarely grounded in scholarship written from an older national and regional approach to the Church's modern history. It essentially ignores the fact that in the modern era more than ever before, Catholicism's historical epicenter in Europe was irreducibly tied to the rest of the world not only through the Ultramontane Church but also through the circulation of ideas and the printed word, migration, and (above all) European imperialism, and that the Church's institutional and cultural evolution since the eighteenth century is incomprehensible outside of such frameworks (Atkin and Tallett devote an astounding 5 of their 333 pages of text to the European empires in Latin America, Africa, and Asia, which made up two-thirds of the global Catholic population at the time they finished their book).

Mark A. Noll's insightful and comprehensive survey of the Bible as foundational to American history skillfully nuances this contested topic. While some might describe the United States as a Bible republic, Noll, in stunningly dense detail and documentation, correctly calls the nation a Bible civilization. In drawing this crucial distinction, Noll demonstrates that the Bible and Biblical literacy underlay discourse about politics, culture, and citizenship while at the same time he shows that religious neutrality was enshrined as a national norm in not privileging in the civic sphere one religion over another. After the “proprietary” churches that once exercised disproportionate influence in the public square yielded to a competitive religious marketplace, Methodists emerged in buttressing the body politic through the power of private piety. This disengagement from overt public involvements—a signature attribute of Wesleyan whites—paralleled what the American Bible Society designed in maintaining Biblical primacy in the life of the nation. Distribution of scriptures, especially on the expanding frontier, without doctrinal note or denominational advocacy would sustain the Bible as a glue holding together the American polis and sustaining this body of scriptures as “America's book.”

This book completes the magnificent two-volume work that Mark Noll began with In the Beginning Was the Word: The Bible in American Public Life, 1492–1783 (2016), or to say the same thing differently, it completes the trilogy of his summing-up books that he began with America's God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (2002). Like its two predecessors, America's Book contains capsule summaries of arguments that Noll has proffered in several of his many previous books, especially on US American evangelicalism and the Civil War. Moreover, it ranges comprehensively over the vast expanse of US American religious history in meaning-of-it-all fashion, with Noll's customary acumen. No scholar tires of the accolade “magisterial,” which Noll earned for America's God and In the Beginning Was the Word. This book completes a magisterial trilogy by lucidly, astutely, learnedly, and generously covering its waterfront, and by disciplining the entire exposition with a twofold argument that yields a third argument.

John T. McGreevy's chronicle of modern Roman Catholic history is a vivid and sometimes jarring reminder of the historical depth of contemporary divisions within the Church, especially as these enter the public sphere. Catholicism: A Global History from the French Revolution to Pope Francis elucidates the church's ambivalent response to the challenge of modernity over the long nineteenth and twentieth centuries, specifically the rise of democratic nation states, anti-colonialist movements from the global south, the struggles of poor and working people for liberation, and feminist and human rights movements. The spread of totalitarianism and the supposed triumph of capitalism represented a different set of challenges for the church in this period.

Mark Noll's new book is a masterpiece. A monumental work of scholarship and erudition, America's Book merits respect for its artistry as well. The writing is lucid and well crafted. Always judicious, circumspect, and fair-minded, America's Book moves the reader right along, one page to the next, through 846 pages not counting front matter, in a story of enormous importance for understanding religion's role in American life.

John McGreevy's Catholicism: A Global History from the French Revolution to Pope Francis hinges on seismic events that shook the foundations of the Catholic Church: the French Revolution, its aftershocks in many European nations, and the devastating effects of the Napoleonic Wars that followed. The episcopalism of Catholicism that arose from the ashes of the revolution seemed to reject the pillar of its globalism, namely the papacy. Pius IX paid for this with his life. Eternal Rome suddenly became mortal, overtaken by the revolutionaries. Catholic schools were nationalized. The Civil Constitution of the Clergy enacted an agenda for the secularization of society, the church itself, and its institutions. Notre Dame became a “Temple of Reason,” and the chalices and ciboria of Saint-Sulpice were melted down to make cash. The damage done to the church by this revolution was paralleled only by the communist revolutions of the twentieth century.