The Fight of Our Lives

By William Bennet. thomasnelson.com

The Fight of Our Lives is one of those books that makes a lot of useful observations, but never hits the bullseye. Bennett is guilty of the same shortcoming he accuses Americans and their leaders of having. They cannot say the full truth, either out of shame or out of blind ignorance.

The author details the enemy, radical Islam, with enough facts and background as to offer a convincing case. While he doesn't tar all of Islam with the terrorist brush, he rightly notes that Muslims confessing a moderate religious path need to do more to oppose terrorists.

It is also the work of the American government and the citizenry to fight. Here is where the argument is both best and worst. He correctly and convincingly identifies the biggest problem in the war on terror as the cultural battles being fought in America. Americans don't study their history or love their country. They have bought into the multi-culti deconstructionist habit of cutting down a nation's history and highlighting the negatives rather than the accomplishments. Thus America and the West have little self-confidence in fighting the terrorists, whom they could easily defeat if they were in the right mind.

This is all good, but what is missing is the real root of this, which is the feminization of society, the emasculation of men, and the destruction of marriage and the family largely because of feminism. The feminist takeover of Western society has left us adrift, lacking confidence, and fearful of people we could easily defeat. Like most Christian writers, Bennett is blind to this feminization, perhaps because of the feminizing tendencies of Christianity itself.

After the Hangover

By R. Emmett Tyrrell, Thomas Nelson Publishers, 272 pages.

Emmett Tyrrell tells the history and perspectives of the conservative movement in the US through the personalities involved. After the Hangover shows that these thinkers, originally a tightknit group fighting against the tide of big-government Liberals in the 1950s and after, changed the political landscape in the country, eventually leading to the Reagan years.

Readers get a strong sense of the major ideas of conservatives, including the belief in individual freedom, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights. For conservatives, the human is a mixture of good and bad, perfectly capable of choosing virtue yet easily swayed in the other direction. Government cannot legislate virtue. If someone is forced to do good deeds, rather than freely from his heart, it is not virtue.

Tyrrell calls on conservatives to quit the careerism and backbiting that became pronounced, he argues, during the Second Bush years. As one way to avoid this, conservatives must continue to work at changing American culture, and not only politics. The author fears many of the projects, including Obamacare, that are currently remaking America. Yet he confidently believes that conservatives are in or near the center of American life, even if the Liberals control the media and universities.

Aside from a few swipes at conservative personalities such as William F. Buckley's son, which tend to be confusing rather than informative, Tyrrell offers a solid introduction of the main beliefs and characters of American conservatism from the mid-twentieth-century onwards.

The Faithful: A History of Catholics in America

By James O'Toole, 376 pages, Caravan Books.

After a slow start in the first 150 years of English settlement in what became the U.S., the American Catholic church took off in the mid-nineteenth-century, fueled by Catholic immigration from Ireland, Germany, Italy, and Poland. These waves of Catholics were greeted by a skeptical, anti-Catholic Protestant society who accused them of being unpatriotic, as serving Rome and the pope first, and America only second.

French support of the American Revolution was 1 of the earliest events that showed Americans that their country and Catholicism were compatible. Yet the biggest obstacle to the Church in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries came, surprisingly, from Catholics themselves. Ethnic rivalry caused problems on occasion, as when the priest had a different nationality than the congregation he was pastoring. In fact, O' Toole notes, “priests from one county in Ireland might be equally unacceptable to people from another county.”

American Catholics had been influenced by the Protestant practices they saw all around, and often claimed the right to run the parishes themselves, rather than the bishops, and even to hire and fire their priests. As the hierarchy grew during the nineteenth century, bishops and trustees of parishes often battled for control, though by the end of the 1800s the hierarchy had firmly established itself throughout the country.

While American Catholics of the 1700s rarely saw a priest, by the 1890s parishes often had several, and could offer Mass several times on Sunday and weekdays as well. The Faithful profiles the spiritual practices of the laity, showing that until Vatican II the most important sacrament seemed to be Confession rather than the Eucharist. This was in part due to fasting rules, which required no food or drink from midnight until after Mass the next day, which in the 1950s was relaxed considerably, though with minimal effect on the reception of the Eucharist.

Though mostly made up of poor first and second generation immigrants, American Catholicism of the 80 years before Vatican II was sure of itself. The laity knew what it was to believe; priests and bishops firmly controlled the parishes, with sisters performing the charity work in the community; devotions such as Eucharistic adoration and Benediction, the praying of the Stations of the Cross, and the praying of novenas, united the laity with the clergy.

O'Toole does a good job of explaining many of these practices, and the underlying theology, which is important because the post-Vatican II years has seen much less of these practices.

The author does not avoid the controversies of Vatican II and its aftermath, but neither does he use the topic as a launchpad for his own formula; he does not bemoan that post-Vatican II reforms didn't go far enough; nor does he condemn liberal Catholics. He does note that “Call to Action” and other such groups have seemed to become rather hollow (and aging) as the years passed.

While O'Toole does examine the sex-abuse scandals, he ends by citing, with hope, the challenges facing the American Church in the twenty-first century.

A Century Turns: New Hopes, New Fears

By William J. Bennett, 319 pages, thomasnelson.com.

Conservative writer Bennett covers with a journalistic eye the cultural shift that occurred in America between the end of the Reagan era and the present day. He centers this analysis on the bruising politics of D.C., spending much time looking at the presidential campaigns and what the issues of the day really meant from a larger cultural perspective.

In the past two decades, the record shows, American pop culture (though not necessarily Americans themselves) has become less Christian and more anti-family. Post-modern, in other words.

The rise of China, the fall of the Wall and Soviet Communism, the use of “values” by politicians, violence-oriented entertainment, and a preoccupation with all sorts of reform are detailed, from a staunchly pro-Republican viewpoint.

Bennett covers the personalities and styles of President Clinton and Presidents Bush Father and Son quite well, emphasizing Clinton's political skills and the second Bush's Christian beliefs, and his ability to articulate those beliefs in a way that touched many Americans.

Behind Bennett the journalist is a more philosophical thinker, and through this perspective he shows some of the longer-term changes that occurred, as with the following words from Ted Koppel, which he cites in A Century Turns:

“What we have done in America today is to turn ethics into a commodity. Virtue may still be its own reward, but we lose touch with its meaning when we allow it to be defined by the standards of the market-place or the political arena. The equation really couldn't be much simpler: When people, in large numbers, consistently reward bad behavior, then, inevitably, we perpetuate that sort of behavior.”

Despite these words and the many instances of cultural degradation, Bennett also highlights the good, such as the importance of electing the first black president. The author emphasizes that he remains an optimist.

Parallel Empires: The Vatican and the United States – Two Centuries of Alliance and Conflict

By Massimo Franco, 240 pages, Doubleday, $26.00, ISBN: 978-0-385-51893-2.

America and the Vatican are like 2 cousins who have gone in very different directions, but, having common roots and overlapping agendas, keep running into each other. The relationship at its various political, cultural, and social levels swings between estrangement and familiarity.

In looking at the institutions of governance, and also at important individuals involved in this complicated relationship, Franco never loses sight of the fundamental difference between the 2 powers. America in its heart is a Protestant country, and the Vatican is the heart of Roman Catholicism.

Anti-Catholicism has often been alive and well in the United States, refreshed by new arrivals from Europe who brought negative experiences and views with them: “[T]hese settlers brought with them a heavy burden of bitter memories of a Europe divided by a pitiless and bloody religious conflict,” with alienation between, for instance, Catholics and German Lutherans in nineteenth-century Cincinnati.

Franco ties together particularly well the social, cultural context of mainly-Protestant America with higher-level relations between Washington and the Vatican. He tells the fascinating story of a Vatican diplomat, the apostolic nuncio to Brazil, Cardinal Gaetano Bedini, and his visit to America in 1853. Since Bedini was nuncio to Brazil, Washington did not have to follow diplomatic niceties, so it didn't.

Americans, even Catholic Americans and some of their bishops, were concerned about the separation of church and state. Bedini spent weeks traveling through the country, and faced hostile reactions from anti-Catholics who feared that American Catholics could never give their whole hearts to their country because of the influence of the papacy.

The diplomat's “nightmare visit,” which he recorded and sent to Rome, “betrays the fear and dismay of someone who has come face-to-face with an alien, baffling, and even menacing world,” a place with “a passionate, anti-papist sentiment he had never before experienced.”

Franco gives a fascinating account of the contrast between egalitarian, democratic, even skeptical America, and the heavily traditional, hierarchical Catholic Church. That contrast, as well as the deep American desire to separate church and state, heavily complicated Vatican-American relations until Ronald Reagan.

Yet a visit to the 1892 Chicago Exposition by Archbishop Francesco Satolli, to oversee a loan of ancient and renaissance artifacts, was an unexpected success. Satolli toured around the U.S. much as Bedini had years earlier, trying to convince people that Rome did indeed respect America's political system. “He showed no fear of American liberty; rather he embraced it and declared that the Roman papacy now shared the same principles.”

Ironically enough, when Satolli's status changed during his stay “from distinguished visitor to the Chicago exposition to apostolic delegate to the Catholic episcopate of the United States,” it was the American bishops who were unenthusiastic, “fearful that the assignment of an Italian would strengthen the image of Catholicism in some quarters as the religion of foreigners.”

Franco's fascinating tale continues until about midway through the book, including the important details of American-Vatican relations during the Second World War and during Pope John Paul II and Ronald Reagan's battle to open up the Iron Curtain, during which the “normalization” of relations between the 2 states is discussed.

After this point, Parallel Empires gets bogged down in the politics and spin surrounding George W. Bush's wars in the Middle East, and the Vatican's responses.

Do we really need to know all about Bush's hard drinking days and a lengthy discussion on those pesky neo-cons in the White House? How is the minutiae of Vatican diplomacy to Iraq in the weeks preceding the beginning of the Second Gulf War more important than much of the early history between the Vatican and Washington over which Franco skims or ignores. This early foundation will have a much greater bearing on future relations than an unpopular president's unpopular wars will have.

While Parallel Empires is an interesting and good read at this time, its imbalance means that it will become dated and boring very quickly, given the rate of political change.