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In his book The Irish Diaspora in America, Lawrence J. McCaffery quoted the then-conservative columnist and former Nixon speech-writer Garry Wills as claiming that FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover liked to employ Roman Catholics in the FBI "because of their intensive, almost neurotic loyalty to the United States" ([Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976], 205). While Wills's observation is hyperbolic, it nevertheless points up the narrative of Americanism within which Steven Rosswurm sets his well researched, much-needed, and remarkably illuminating book. Rosswurm's perceptive research skills aid in the creation of a flowing narrative grounded in the best-published and archival sources. For Rosswurm, it was "Hoover's profound admiration and respect for Catholicism and its values," which provided the basis for an institutional partnership that lasted from the "G-Man" era of the 1930s through the first decades of the Cold War.
While studies of religion and religious organizations are becoming increasingly valued in the academy, Rosswurm's book offers much more than a political history of a church-state relationship. What is chronicled here, for the first time in any substantial way, is the history of a relationship between an American ecclesiastical community and a branch of the U.S. national security apparatus. As Rosswurm points out, this relationship was based not only in the shared institutional values of good social order and emerging Catholic ideas on masculinity, but also in the ability of Catholic theological concepts to easily conform to the dogmatic crime-fighting and anti-communist culture of the Bureau.
Leo XIII was the first pope to theologize the internal safety of the state when he penned his encyclical Diuturnum as a response to a grave criminal act--the assassination of Czar Nicholas II in 1880. A decade later, Leo...