Catholic Confederates - by Kraszewski (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

How did Southern Catholics, under international religious authority and grounding unlike Southern Protestants, act with regard to political commitments in the recently formed Confederacy? How did they balance being both Catholic and Confederate? How is the Southern Catholic Civil War experience similar or dissimilar to the Southern Protestant Civil War experience? What new insights might this experience provide regarding Civil War religious history, the history of Catholicism in America, 19th-century America, and Southern history in general?

For the majority of Southern Catholics, religion and politics were not a point of tension. Devout Catholics were also devoted Confederates, including nuns who served as nurses; their deep involvement in the Confederate cause as medics confirms the all-encompassing nature of Catholic involvement in the Confederacy, a fact greatly underplayed by scholars of Civil war religion and American Catholicism. Kraszewski argues against an "Americanization" of Catholics in the South and instead coins the term "Confederatization" to describe the process by which Catholics made themselves virtually indistinguishable from their Protestant neighbors.

The religious history of the South has been primarily Protestant. Catholic Confederates simultaneously fills a gap in Civil War religious scholarship and in American Catholic literature by bringing to light the deep impact Catholicism has had on Southern society even in the very heart of the Bible Belt.

Review Quotes

"Kraszewski has taken us on an interesting dive into an uncommon aspect of the Civil War." --The Journal of America's Military Past

"Gracjan Kraszewski's important new study of how thoroughly white Catholic southerners became Confederates is a welcome addition to American Catholic and Civil War history. By focusing on the stories of sister-nurses, bishops, priest chaplains, and laypeople, Kraszweski has made an important contribution to our understanding of why the Catholic Church and its adherents in the Confederacy so eagerly embraced their new government. Their process of 'Confederatization' was remarkably quick and thorough, especially when compared to the sometimes lukewarm patriotism of some Catholic laypeople and religious in the northern states. Catholic Confederates fills a major gap in our understanding of the war and its effect on American Catholics in the mid-19th century South." -- William B. Kurtz, author of Excommunicated from the Union: How the Civil War Created a Separate Catholic America

"Gracjan Kraszewski has uncovered a long-ignored dynamic in the cultural life of the Southern Confederacy. Roman Catholics, mostly of French, Irish or German origin, lent critical support to the Confederate cause at both the elite and grassroots level. As Kraszewski perceptively reveals, Catholic bishops, chaplains, sister-nurses, and ordinary Catholic soldiers and civilians crafted a coherent Catholic Confederate identity decades before the Americanization of Northern Catholics." -- Aaron Astor, author of Rebels on the Border: Civil War, Emancipation, and Reconstruction in Kentucky and Missouri and The Civil War Along Tennessee's Cumberland Plateau

About the Author

Gracjan Kraszewski is director of Intellectual Formation at St. Augustine's Catholic Center at the University of Idaho and an instructor in the School of Design + Construction at Washington State University. The author of The Holdout: A Novel, he previously taught in the history department at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.