Derek C., HATCH and Timothy R. GABRIELLI, eds. Weaving the American Catholic Tapestry: Essays in Honor of William L. Portier. Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2017. pp. 333. $41.00 pb. ISBN: 978-1-49820-279-4. Reviewed by Ryan MARR, The National Institute for Newman Studies, Pittsburgh, PA 15237

 Although I’ve sometimes wondered if festschriften have proliferated beyond their usefulness, I’m grateful that Derek Hatch and Timothy Gabrielli took the time to compile this volume. While Bill Portier may not be as well known a scholar as, say, Jay Dolan or the late Avery Dulles, his contribution to the study of American Catholicism has been broad-reaching and significant. This accessible, roughly 300-page book thoughtfully engages some of the key themes that run through Portier’s publications, providing an informative, though obviously not exhaustive, introduction to his thought. In contrast to some collections of essays, the quality of the scholarship in this work is impressively even across the fifteen chapters that make up its content. The opening chapter, by William Collinge, provides a helpful overview of Portier’s scholarly career, while Sandra Yocum deftly wraps up the volume with a moving essay on “holiness in history,” a reflection that takes as its primary dialogue partner Portier’s Divided Friends: Portraits of the Roman Catholic Modernist Crisis in the United States.In between these book-ends are three sections inspired by key motifs that have emerged in Portier’s scholarship: (I) Reflecting on the Word of God, (II) Inculturating the Catholic Tradition, and (III) Exploring Faith and Reason in the Body Politic.

That second motif—inculturating the Catholic tradition—is arguably the animating principle behind Portier’s overall achievement. During the formative years of his theological education, scholars in the field were keen on cultivating historical-mindedness,“the recognition that terms and propositions must be understood against the background of the thought-frameworks and practices of their time period and that something like an act of translation is required in order to incorporate them into our frameworks or to reject them as untrue” (quoting Collinge, p. 2). The trouble, though—as Portier himself has noted—was that “between 1968 and 1980, Catholic theology in North America was awash in a sea of Europeans” (Portier, “Confessions of a Fractured Catholic Theologian,” p. 121). In this situation, Catholic theologians in the U.S. were sometimes insufficiently critical in their handling of the monumental theological projects produced by such figures as Karl Rahner, Yves Congar, and Edward Schillebeeckx. As Collinge notes, “in the hands of American Catholic theologians of the time, their world became simply the ‘modern world,’ in which supposedly we all live” (p. 2).

Through his work in the classroom, in particular, but also as an author, Portier has sought to disabuse theologians in training of this sort of naivete. Notably, Portier has done so not by employing a hermeneutic of suspicion, but by shining a light on the contextual nature of all theology. For him, one’s social location and situatedness in history are not burdens to be transcended, but gifts to be received, for these are precisely the lenses through which we come to see the truths of the faith. Regarding his own narrative, Portier writes that, “One day [at the University of Toronto in the 1970s], while reading Isaac Hecker for a paper on ‘Americanism’ it hit me that ‘U.S.’ and ‘Catholic’ defined the particular forms and terms in which I had and would come to know God. U.S. Catholicism was the site, the location or standpoint, from which I could think theologically” (“Confessions,” p. 121). In this light, paying due attention to one’s context is a humble acknowledgment of our own finitude. We do not come to know the living God in an abstract and universalizable manner. To pretend that we do is to adopt a false anthropology, mistakenly assuming that we have a view on revelation that comes from above or outside of history, when in fact we are creatures bound by time. Acknowledging this reality frees us from the idolatrous anxiety that our own theological reflection has to be the final word on God and God’s action in history, as opposed to one part in a larger, symphonic witness to the truth.

Approaching the theological vocation in this way has enabled Portier to maintain a critical edge in relation to the “Americanist tradition.” While Portier admires the attempt of some American Catholic thinkers to attain a “fit between American institutions and a Catholic natural law world view” (Portier, “Americanism and Inculturation,” p. 151), he also recognizes that there are unique temptations that emerge from this endeavor. To their discredit, “nineteenth-century Americanism and, still more, its putative twentieth-century descendants, tend toward an uncritical acceptance of American social, political, and economic structures” (Collinge, p. 16). One of the key challenges facing historians of American Catholicism, then, is how to narrate the story of God’s people in this land, with all of the attendant graces that God has extended to the Church, but to do so in a properly penitential key. Any truthful narrative of U.S. Catholic history would have to include, in Portier’s phrasing, “both the Americanists’ transforming vision of their country’s conversion and the conservative critique of the Americanists’ culture capitulation” (“Americanism and Inculturation,” p. 159).

Through his impressive body of scholarship, Portier has provided us with an instructive model of what writing history in this key should look like. Weaving the American Catholic Tapestry represents a fitting honor to his scholarly achievement. The book, commendably, does not simply retrace previously explored topics, but utilizes Portier’s scholarship as a springboard for original, well-researched treatments of various strands of the American Catholic heritage. In my estimation, those who are first learning about Portier’s work, as well as those already familiar with it, could both benefit from a careful reading of this festschrift.