America s Church: The National Shrine and Catholic Presence in the Nation s Capital (Hardcover)

The National Shrine in Washington DC has been deeply loved blithely ignored and passionately criticized. It has been praised as a dazzling jewel and dismissed as a towering Byzantine beach ball. In this intriguing and inventive book Thomas Tweed shows that the Shrine is also an illuminating site from which to tell the story of twentieth-century Catholicism. He organizes his narrative around six themes that characterize U.S. Catholicism and he ties these themes to the Shrine s material culture--to images artifacts or devotional spaces. Thus he begins with the Basilica s foundation stone weaving it into a discussion of brick and mortar Catholicism the drive to build institutions. To highlight the Church s inclination to appeal to women he looks at fund-raising for the Mary Memorial Altar and he focuses on the Filipino oratory to Our Lady of Antipolo to illustrate the Church s outreach to immigrants. Throughout he employs painstaking detective work to shine a light on the many facets of American Catholicism reflected in the shrine.