Leslie woodcock tentler biography of william

The best things about this book, aside from its engaging style, are the attention it gives to the very early years of North America, where Catholicism was present in the Spanish and the French before English-speaking Catholics ever arrived on these shores, and the careful focus on the doings and beliefs of ordinary Catholics rather than the exploits of bishops and clergy.

She is also careful to recognize the ambivalence of the church's attitudes toward slavery in the first half of the 19th century and the painfully slow progress made in generating Black clergy. If this attention fades out once she turns to the 20th century, that may do nothing more than mirror the slow drift into Protestantism that happened to many Black Catholics in the opening decades.

Today, though, there are still about 3 million Black Catholics, and in our day of Black Lives Matter some consideration of their situation in