Following World War II, millions of U.S. Catholics were poised
to attain the American dream, while at Vatican Council II, the
liberal vision of the church seemed finally to triumph. Yet by the
end of the twentieth century, American Catholicism was in crisis,
plagued by grave ideological divisions; a dwindling pool of
priests, nuns, and monks; and declining financial resources. What
went wrong?
In "Tracing the Sign of the Cross," Marian Ronan identifies the
roots of this crisis in an inability on the part of American
Catholics to mourn a variety of losses suffered in the last third
of the twentieth century. Drawing on the work of four writers with
distinctively Catholic imaginations, Ronan argues that endless
battles over sexuality and gender in particular have kept American
Catholics from confronting these losses, thus jeopardizing the
future of Catholicism.
The writings of James Carroll, the archetypal liberal American
Catholic, form the basis of Ronan's exploration of the church in
the decades following Vatican II. Carroll's writings, especially
his memoir, "An American Requiem," seem to embody the very
engagement with loss Ronan calls for-yet a highly gendered pattern
of resistance to mourning emerges throughout Carroll's writing.
Ronan discerns a similar Catholic "inability to mourn" in the
early works of the novelist Mary Gordon, the feminist philosopher
of science Donna Haraway, and the essayist Richard Rodriguez. While
Gordon's characters gradually engage their profound losses,
Haraway's female cyborg dons a crown of thorns, and Rodriguez
confronts his own gay/brown identity-contributing in all cases to a
new and chastened vision of the church. Framed by the author's own
personal experience, "Tracing the Sign of the Cross" is an intimate
and persuasive account of Catholic possibility in a postmodern
world.
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