Continental Ambitions: 
Roman Catholics in North America
  
by kevin starr 
ignatius, 675 pages, $34.95

IThe Good Shepherd, the 2006 spy film, mobster Joseph Palmi asks CIA agent (and stereotypical WASP) Edward Wilson an insolent question: “We Italians, we got our families and we got the Church. The Irish, they have the homeland. The Jews, their traditions. Even the n——s, they got their music. What about you people . . . What do you have?” After a haughty pause, Wilson delivers the punchline: “The United States of America. The rest of you are just visiting.”

The line reflects an immemorial perception, never quite overcome and lately resurgent, that the United States is basically an Anglo-Protestant affair. In his final book, Continental Ambitions: Roman Catholics in North America; The Colonial Experience, the late Kevin Starr set out to dispel this perception. Continental Ambitions tells the story of Catholic conquest, exploration, and settlement in North America (involving Norse, Spanish, French, and British Catholics), emphasizing the relevance of this story to understanding the present-day continental United States. “The history of Catholicism in America,” says Starr in his preface, “is not simply Catholic history. It is American history . . . part of the warp and woof, the very fabric and meaning, of American life.”

Best known as a historian of California, Starr was also a thoughtful and erudite Catholic layman in the mold of his friend John T. Noonan, the jurist and historian he predeceased by only four months. While Continental Ambitions is addressed to all, it is written from an explicitly and passionately Catholic point of view. And passion, as great and refreshing as it is, is the least of Continental Ambitions’s many strengths. Nicely tempered by a certain scholarly caution, the book is neither embarrassed nor bloodless.

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