All Good Books Are Catholic Books: Print Culture, Censorship, and Modernity in Twentieth-Century America. By Una M. Cadegan. Cushwa Center Studies of Catholicism in Twentieth-Century America. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2013. x + 230 pages. $39.95 cloth.

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)All Good Books Are Catholic Books: Print Culture, Censorship, and Modernity in Twentieth-Century America . By Una M. Cadegan . Cushwa Center Studies of Catholicism in Twentieth-Century America. Ithaca, N.Y. : Cornell University Press , 2013. x + 230 pages. $39.95 cloth.Book Reviews and NotesThis is a smart book that takes on significantly larger issues than its title leads one to believe. The largest such issue is that of Catholicism and modernity itself in the twentieth century, an issue about which whole forests of tress have disappeared. The intellectual challenges posed by "modernity" (a weasel word, I know) to Roman Catholicism began with the 16th century reformations, grew more acrimonious in the 17th century in the wake of the successive movements collectively known as the Enlightenment, and were then abetted by the rise of historical consciousness in the 19th. As the author notes at the very opening of her work, "By 1917 Roman Catholicism was into its fifth century of opposition to many elements constitutive of political and cultural modernity in the West."The BIG question that intellectual and cultural historians of American Catholicism have attempted to answer regarding this ancient stand-off between the Catholic tradition and modern culture has been: how this stand-off was bridged, and when did the Catholic community become full participants in modern U.S. culture? Various answers have been offered over the decades to this question: the GI Bill of 1945 (which allowed Catholic service men and women to attend college); the presidency of John Kennedy (which served as a trope of "Catholic arrival" into middle class acceptance and affluence); the most common such answer (of course) has been the Second Vatican Council, which called for the faithful to listen to the "signs of the times" in order to serve human culture--especially modern culture--more effectively.Cadegan offers a new (and quite intriguing) interpretive spin about how and when U.S. Catholics engaged modern culture, and indeed modernity itself: she argues that in the half century between the end of the Great War and the immediate aftermath of the Second Vatican Council, North American Catholics performed "cultural work" with regard to modernity in the ways in which they thought, wrote, and talked about literature. In a somewhat breathtaking revisionist thesis about how Catholics contended with modernity--in the process laying a firm groundwork for the windows opened onto the modern world by Vatican II--Cadegan argues that it was through Catholic literary endeavors that U.S. Catholics made their peace with contemporary culture: Catholics who wrote and thought about what literature was, and what literature should be, played a key role in dramatizing the conflict between Catholicism and modernity, and also began the work of mediating between the two.As she carefully notes, this was an extremely delicate task, because in 1907 the Vatican had clearly and unequivocally condemned a set of beliefs that it had labeled "Modernism. …