"In the fascinating Catholics' Lost Cause, Adam Tate argues that the primary goal of clerical leaders in antebellum South Carolina was to build a rapprochement between Catholicism and southern culture that would aid them in rooting Catholic institutions in the region in order to both sustain and spread their faith. A small minority in an era of prevalent anti-Catholicism, the Catholic clergy of South Carolina engaged with the culture around them, hoping to build an indigenous southern Catholicism. Tate's book describes the challenges to antebellum Catholics in defending their unique religious and ethnic identities while struggling not to alienate their overwhelmingly Protestant counterparts. In particular, Tate cites the work of three antebellum bishops of the Charleston diocese, John England, Ignatius Reynolds, and Patrick Lynch, who sought to build a southern Catholicism in tune with their specific regional surroundings. As tensions escalated and the sectional crisis deepened in the 1850s, South Carolina Catholic leaders supported the Confederate States of America, thus aligning themselves and their flocks to the losing side of the Civil War. The war devastated Catholic institutions and finances in South Carolina, leaving postbellum clerical leaders to rebuild within a much different context"--

In the fascinating Catholics’ Lost Cause, Adam Tate argues that the primary goal of clerical leaders in antebellum South Carolina was to build a rapprochement between Catholicism and southern culture that would aid them in rooting Catholic institutions in the region in order to both sustain and spread their faith. A small minority in an era of prevalent anti-Catholicism, the Catholic clergy of South Carolina engaged with the culture around them, hoping to build an indigenous southern Catholicism. Tate’s book describes the challenges to antebellum Catholics in defending their unique religious and ethnic identities while struggling not to alienate their overwhelmingly Protestant counterparts. In particular, Tate cites the work of three antebellum bishops of the Charleston diocese, John England, Ignatius Reynolds, and Patrick Lynch, who sought to build a southern Catholicism in tune with their specific regional surroundings. As tensions escalated and the sectional crisis deepened in the 1850s, South Carolina Catholic leaders supported the Confederate States of America, thus aligning themselves and their flocks to the losing side of the Civil War. The war devastated Catholic institutions and finances in South Carolina, leaving postbellum clerical leaders to rebuild within a much different context. Scholars of American Catholic history, southern history, and American history will be thoroughly engrossed in this largely overlooked era of American Catholicism.

Army, in which Catholics and Protestants fought and died for the same causes. As Catholics, the Confederate soldiers valued the accompaniment of a priest for sacramental and spiritual guidance. The experience of combat energized their religious sensibilities, but they did not express their religion in the same ways as Confederate evangelicals. After the war, Catholic southerners participated in the remembrance of the Lost Cause. Yet in addition to focusing on the standard Confederate icons of Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis, they emphasized the memory of ordinary soldiers, their brothers-in-arms. Moreover, they transformed the figure of Turgis into a hero of the South, acceptable even to non-Catholics, despite his position as a recent French immigrant and an anti-slavery advocate.

Many historical myths are actually false yet psychologically true. The contributors to this volume see myth and reality as complementary elements in the historical record. Myth and Southern History is as much a commentary on southern historiography as it is on the viability of myth in the historical process. The Old South contains new articles on ......