Southern Crucifix, Southern Cross: Catholic-Protestant Relations in the Old South . By Andrew H. M. Stern. Religion and American Culture. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2012. x + 268 pp. $39.95 cloth.

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)Southern Crucifix, Southern Cross: Catholic-Protestant Relations in the Old South . By Andrew H. M. Stern . Religion and American Culture. Tuscaloosa : University of Alabama Press , 2012. x + 268 pp. $39.95 cloth.Book Reviews and NotesAndrew Stern has done a great service in exploring relations between elite white Protestants and Catholics in Charleston, Louisville, and Mobile. Catholicism in the South has been at issue at least since the poet Allen Tate observed that the region was a feudal society without a feudal religion, yet historians have reflected relatively little about how Catholic practice and institutions fit into the questions we ask about the region.This brief book adds nuance to the literature on elite Catholics first explored by Jon Wakelyn in 1983, and it should encourage future work. As late as 1840, Catholics in the southern states made up the majority of all American Catholics. They held positions of prominence throughout the region and Catholic institutions served people of all kinds. Jefferson Davis, to cite one example, was educated in Catholic schools in Kentucky.Stern boldly argues that "tolerance and cooperation, more than violence and animosity, marked Catholic-Protestant relations in the antebellum South" (2). This was rooted in Catholics' accommodation to slavery. "The Catholic Church, like the Protestant churches of the South, mirrored the racial values of its adherents. This gave the church a cultural home in southern society," Stern writes. "Southern Protestants supported the institutions--charities, schools, and churches--central to Catholicism, and Catholics supported the institution central to the South" (146).The strongest evidence of tolerance came in the cooperation between Catholics and Protestants in building charitable institutions, schools, and churches. Catholic nuns nursed residents of Augusta during a yellow fever epidemic in 1839. In 1836, the Sisters of Nazareth opened St. Vincent Infirmary in Louisville. Catholics opened orphanages in Mobile. Kentucky boasted a large system of Catholic schools that educated many Protestants. Catholics worshipped in buildings owned by Protestants, and raised monies for their own churches from wealthy patrons, who often praised the beauty of Catholic liturgy. The point of cooperation that mattered most, Stern argues, was Catholic support for slavery. In this, he affirms earlier work on the subject, but the focus on cities outside of Maryland and Louisiana, home to the largest numbers of black Catholics in the region, mean that the book does not engage in their experiences.Case studies can be suggestive, and Stern is right to claim that scholars have often focused on the notorious incidents of violence and prejudice against Southern Catholics (two of the most notorious anti-Catholic riots in the period occurred in Louisville and Charleston) at the expense of the more ordinary ways that Protestants and Catholics lived together. …