Righting America

by Sean Swain Martin, Andrew McNeely, and Laura M. Tringali

 Editor’s Note: The phenomenon of Catholic fundamentalism is finally starting to receive the scholarly attention it deserves. In 2024 Chelsea Ebin’s The Radical Mind: The Origins of Right-Wing Catholic and Protestant Coalition Building was published by the University of Kansas Press (sometime in the next few weeks my review of Ebin’s book will appear in American Catholic Studies). 

And now, from Oxford University Press, comes Mark Massa’s Catholic Fundamentalism in America. Below are three reviews of this important book, which are followed by a wonderfully gracious response from the author himself. Enjoy!   

Sean Swain Martin is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies and Theology at Viterbo University in La Crosse, WI. His American Pope: Scott Hahn and the Rise of Catholic Fundamentalism (October 2021) published by Pickwick Publications, explores the centrality of epistemological certainty in the work of Scott Hahn, attributing to Hahn a specific Protestant fundamentalist approach in his very popular Catholic theological contributions. Sean specializes in American Catholicism, Christian Fundamentalism, John Henry Newman, and early modern philosophy. He holds a Ph.D. and an M.A. in theology from the University of Dayton as well as an M.A. in philosophy from Georgia State University. When not teaching or endlessly grading, Sean and his wife, Beth, are raising two insanely adorable children, Gwen and Milo, and a wildly destructive dog, Luna, in Onalaska, WI.

Newly published in March, 2025, Mark Massa’s Catholic Fundamentalism in America should be regarded as the standard to which all subsequent works must be measured. An unassuming 200-page Oxford University Press text with a relatively plain black dust jacket and simple red and yellow typeface, Massa’s work bears all the markings of yet another obscure, academic tome destined for the shelves of a few university libraries. Inside, however, hides a masterful account of how mid-20^th century Catholic sectarian organizations laid the foundation for the bombastic hard-right Catholic media and internet vitriol plaguing the American Church today. 

The crowning achievement of Massa’s account lies in his demonstrating the theological and historical depth of what so often gets dismissed as a thoroughly anti-intellectual and unserious phenomenon. Beginning with the story of Jesuit Leonard Feeney, whose St. Benedict Center developed in response to the liberalism across the street of Harvard University, Massa successfully navigates the confusion of Feeney’s derisive, mocking rhetoric blended with a deeply historical (even if problematic) theological tradition. While it often seems that it is only the antagonism and ridicule of Feeney, and then subsequently Gommar Depauw, Mother Angelica, and several others, that gets bequeathed to the next generation of fundamentalists, Massa properly identifies and then dismantles the theological tradition that undergirds the fundamentalist position. This allows the reader to recognize these theological commitments at work in Massa’s accounts of the more contemporary fundamentalisms of Christendom College, Crisis magazine, and Church Militant. That is, Massa allows his readers to recognize theological method to the (oftentimes literal) madness of the current expressions of Catholic fundamentalism. 

While Catholic Fundamentalism in America largely succeeds in the heavy theological lifting of critiquing the fundamentalist framework by employing the contributions of Mircea Eliade, Emile Durkheim, and, specifically, Thomas Kuhn, what rescues it from sharing the fate of so many excellent academic texts is Massa’s commitment to following the discussion into the horrifying depths of internet and social media communities. Massa understands that while Michael Voris’s fundamentalist attacks on the American Catholic Church is important, to fully understand it is to also cite the theological musings of, for instance, “baseballmomof8” and those like her who haunt the halls of Church Militant and Crisis blog comment sections. For better or for worse (and it seems to me that it is much worse), the majority of Catholic theological discourse takes place in these spaces. For academic theologians to overlook these discussions, as has almost entirely been the case, is a terrible mistake. Not only is Massa able to highlight the importance of these internet communities, but he is also able to introduce his readers to the work of those already at work in these places, such as the contributions of the incredibly insightful Mike Lewis (mistakenly identified as “Mile Lewis” by Massa), co-founder of the website Where Peter is.

Despite all of its many successes, the one failing of Massa’s excellent work lies in a mistake that he inherits from one of the first researchers of Christian fundamentalism, George Marsden. Massa identifies fundamentalism, in keeping with Marsden, as a particular Christian militarism, that is, a willingness to describe one’s position as being at war with the remainder of popular, and popular religious, society. Where Marsden, and thus, Massa, fail is not in naming militarism as the hallmark of fundamentalism. I actually agree with them that it is. 

But, rather, they fail in situating militarism as a subsequent expression of a particular theological ideology. Massa comes incredibly close to recognizing the heart of fundamentalism when he refers to the theological systems of the early portion of his discussion as solipsistic. He understands that, for many of these fundamentalist voices, their perspectives depend upon epistemologies that are informed entirely upon their own contributions. That is, every fundamentalist is completely and absolutely certain of their conclusions, and there is nothing external to themselves that can shake them from their certainty. What Massa and Marsden fail to recognize is that certainty, epistemological solipsism, is itself a militarism. To reject our own fallibility and the reality that we are irrevocably imbedded in a myriad of communities that stretch out across the world around us, into the generations of the past, and extend into the future, is to be at war with the remainder of the human community. 

Certainty is, in its very essence, violence.

Andrew McNeely is a Ph.D. student in Theology at the University of Dayton. McNeely’s research interests include nineteenth and twentieth-century evangelicalism and fundamentalism at the intersections of theology, education, politics, and American culture. His dissertation research documents the twentieth-century Christian Day School movement and its contributions to contemporary American evangelicalism and the formation of the Christian Right.

The last decade or so has witnessed an abundance of scholarly exposés highlighting the ever indefatigable energy of American Protestant fundamentalism. A whole slew of scholarly studies have demonstrated that no realm of American culture seems to be untouched by fundamentalism. Aside from the low hanging fruit of politics, studies as of late have explored the following realms of fundamentalism’s extensive reach. To name only a few: education, Wal-Mart, big oil, music, publishing, film, sport industry, the military, the FBI, suburbanization, literary fiction, museum exhibits, fast food, social media spaces, tourist city destinations, and theme parks. The list goes on. 

Until recently, however, few studies have explored fundamentalism’s reach into American Catholicism. Can one be Catholic and fundamentalist? In his Catholic Fundamentalism in America, Mark Massa takes up this question and argues, through seven case studies, that some quarters of American Catholicism have indeed succumbed to fundamentalism. Massa locates the origin of Catholic fundamentalism in the controversy surrounding Leonard Feeney, S.J., of the St. Benedict Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts, prior to Vatican II. According to Massa, the events that unfolded with the so-called Feeneyites “crafted the paradigm for American Catholic fundamentalism–an anti-modern, reactive, and sectarian impulse that has been with us ever since” (p. 9). Massa identifies five protracted characteristics of Catholic fundamentalism that the Feeneyite controversy birthed: “its sectarian impulse, its championing of an older paradigm of Catholic identity…, its use of American political monikers, its militant tone in denouncing its enemies…of the True Church, and its appeal to apocalyptic urgency in denouncing fellow Catholics…” (p. 18). 

Limited space does not permit me to comment on each of Massa’s seven case studies of Catholic fundamentalism, all of which are simultaneously fascinating and bizarre. I would, however, like to introduce a few remarks concerning historiography. Of course, as George Marsden, Joel Carpenter, and an earlier generation of historians portrayed them, fundamentalists aspired to purity in both doctrinal certainty and practice, militantly separating their boundaries from modernism. Massa predicates and develops his five distinctives of Catholic fundamentalism on and from this Marsden-Carpenter paradigm. But as my opening remarks suggest, a new school of historiography has taken shape since the turn of the century, qualifying and overturning previous conceptions and categories that the Marsden-Carpenter paradigm established. Fundamentalists were never really all that isolated; nor were they always militant. In fact, many remained quite amiable. Of course, some leaders militated against secular authorities in order to safeguard their own intellectual resources and institutions, but this didn’t always stem from an anti-modern or sectarian persuasion. As historian Brendan Pietsch noted in his 2015 study of first-generation Dispensationalists: “They did not reside in marginal social positions, read the Bible literally, or militantly oppose modernity.” Fundamentalists, to the contrary, often viewed themselves as distinctly modern, sometimes even suggesting that their organizational efforts were more modern than secular authorities and their related institutions. Under the Marsden-Carpenter paradigm, it’s difficult to square the current GOP’s political platform with the supposedly sectarian, isolated, and anti-modern fundamentalists who helped shape it.

Massa’s exploration of Catholic fundamentalism does not engage sources of the recent historiographical turn in fundamentalist studies. This by no means negates the fact that these groups are Catholic fundamentalists, but one wonders if engagement with the new historiography might have better illuminated the modern strategies at play in these groups’ increasing popularity. In other words, are Catholic fundamentalists, especially those associated with Mother Angelica, EWTN, Crisis magazine, ChurchMilitant, or Dr. Taylor Marshal, Ph.D. (who never fails to broadcast his credentials), really just isolated, sectarian, and anti-modern Catholics? Each respectively appear quite comfortable using modern technologies and being socially active both culturally and politically. Perhaps they see themselves, as the later historiography of fundamentalism concurs, as thoroughly modern actors competing in the spiritual marketplace of consumption, pioneering a new “old-time” vision of Catholicism? These are important questions that remained unexplored in the study. 

But Massa has nevertheless conducted a deep amount of spade work for further interpretative developments and studies on Catholic fundamentalism–a subject that remains all too neglected. Therefore, let us thank him.

Laura M. Tringali is a PhD candidate in Religious Studies at the University of Dayton. Her research interests include the intersection of religion, gender, and culture in the United States. Her publications include “Enraptured by Rapture: Production Context, Biblical Interpretation, and Evangelical Eschatology in The Rapture, Left Behind, and This is the End” in Journal of Religion & Film, co-authored with Meghan R. Henning and Robert G. Joseph (Oct 2024); “Life-Giving Bodies: Towards an Analogical Relationship Between Breastfeeding and the Eucharist” in New Horizons (2023); and” The Female Standard: Evaluating Cultural Expectations for Women in Scripture and Politics” in Lumen Et Vita (2020).

Mark Massa’s timely Catholic Fundamentalism in America comes in an early wave of scholarly interest in the parallels between Catholic and evangelical conservatism in the United States. His argument is framed by Thomas Kuhn’s now famous notion of paradigm revolutions, a linchpin also found in George Mardsen’s historical work on American Protestants. In the field of scientific study, Kuhn argued, science did not progress as if it were a cumulative process or compilation of discoveries. Scientific progress, rather, is better understood as disjunctive, marked by major paradigm shifts in which a dominant scientific model was demonstrated to have too many anomalies to continue to be the reigning paradigm. At such a point, it would be replaced by a new paradigm. In Massa’s text, the paradigm shift that created Catholic Fundamentalism was the mid-twentieth century transition from a “Church as perfect society” Catholicism marked by an uncompromising claim that there is no salvation outside of the Catholic Church, to a “People of God” Catholicism marked by ecumenism.

Massa offers five characteristics of Catholic Fundamentalism: sectarianism, the paradigm of Tridentine Catholicism, an ahistorical understanding of the Catholic past, the use of political monikers in the presentation of Church teaching, and rhetoric of apocalyptic urgency. Through a thematic exploration of exemplars including Leonard Feeney, the Society of St. Pius X, and Mother Angelica, he makes a compelling case for not only the existence of but also the prevalence of the Catholic Fundamentalism that has surrounded us for decades. 

Massa makes an important point that a movement of fundamentalism among Catholics emerged before the Second Vatican Council. Since conservative Catholic distaste for the novus ordo and other reforms following the council is a salient characteristic of the movement in our present moment, one may be tempted to mark Vatican II as the birth of a traditionalist counter-movement. Massa points to Leonard Feeney and the religious order he founded after he was dismissed from the Jesuits, the Slaves of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, as an early source of fundamentalist thought among Catholics in the United States. He describes the group as illustrative of “an anti-modern, reactive, and sectarian impulse that has been with us ever since” (9). 

The Second Vatican Council, though, does mark a significant moment. Feeney’s contingent found themselves at odds with the post-Vatican II Church because, like the Protestant Fundamentalist who came before them, there was a paradigm shift that they rejected. Not “higher criticism” of the Bible that challenged the perfect truth of the Scriptures or Darwinian theory that transformed scientific thinking, as were significant factors in the shaping of Protestant Fundamentalism. But rather, a paradigm shift toward ecumenism for the Catholic Church that seemed, for Feeney and those that followed, to make too many concessions to modernity and to undermine the Catholic claim to being the One True Church.

As Massa explains and draws comparisons to Protestant Fundamentalism in the United States, he relies heavily on the influential work of George Marsden and Margaret Bendroth to the detriment of engaging more recent scholarly work. The texts Massa frequently cites from Marsden and Bendroth were published in 1980 and 1993, respectively. Though Massa’s writing predates a second Trump Administration, scholarly and journalistic interest in evangelical support of Donald Trump and the political power of this voting bloc has dominated the conversation about American evangelicals (Fundamentalists) in the last decade. Fundamentalist Catholics, to use Massa’s apt label, share the militant and “culture war” mindset with American evangelicals. In 2025, the alignment of Catholic and evangelical Trump-supporters is a crucial part of the conversation about the political and cultural significance of both groups.

Massa’s historical and theological work in this text is both timely and important. His historical narrative makes illuminating connections that will catalyze scholarly discourse on contemporary Catholicism in the United States.

Author’s Response:

I want to thank Sean Swain Martin, Andrew McNeely, and Laura M. Tringali for their very smart and insightful reviews of my monograph on Catholic fundamentalism. All three make important observations that I need to consider and incorporate into my text for the book’s second edition (e.g., more of a focus on militarism as an essential feature of the movement, the inclusion of “amiable” fundamentalists who don’t want to break away, etc.). And as I always tell my own doctoral students, “you will soon be offering smart rejoinders to my scholarship that I will have to consider in revising my scholarly work.” These three young scholars have done just that, so I’ll head off to the library today to look up the texts they mention and ponder how I will rewrite the next version of the text. -Mark S. Massa, S.J.