Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #485016 in Books
• Published on: 1980-06
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 521 pages

Customer Reviews

Good overview of Catholic Church history
The copy I have was printed in 1935, and is a hardback book. The cover is orange with purple. The paper is fairly thick, and the printing is larger than is typical for a history book. There are a lot of black-and-white pictures, with many of them being reproductions of artwork. There are a handful of maps and a few photographs. The binding is fairly robust since it was intended as a book for elementary age kids.

The subject of the book is the history of the Catholic Church from its founding to 1935. Given the intended audience (Catholic elementary school kids in the United States), the book fulfills its intention quite well. The broad historical setting of the centuries it covers conforms to the stuff I learned in my world history classes in school, while the details relating to the Catholic Church were provided in more detail than were in my history classes.

The book is written from the point of view of an active Catholic historian, so the writing style (word choices, sentence construction, etc.) and choice of events to cover take on a distinctly pro-Catholic tone. Despite being overtly pro-Catholic, it covers many events in a surprisingly even-handed way. A quote from p.131 illustrates this (referring to the nations which had taken over Europe after the fall of Rome): "Though these new nations were known as barbarians, we must not think of them as savages. They had a culture all their own, which, though not as advanced as that of the Greeks and Romans, had produced much that was noble and beautiful."

The book takes an unsurprisingly negative tone towards the Reformation and the era of the Enlightenment. On the other hand, the split with the Eastern arm of the Church in 1438 is approached as a series of unfortunate misunderstandings compounded by certain people with political intentions.

There are some sections of the book specifically referencing the growth and (then) current status of the Church in the United States. This is material that is typically glossed over or ignored in typical history texts.

Overall, if you are interested in a history of the Catholic church written by a Catholic for the teaching of Catholic children, this is a well-written book. There are enough details to encourage additional research if one of the references proves intriguing, but not so many that the flow gets bogged down. In particular, the coverage of a large number of Saints through the years, and why they were important is something that a secular history book has little or none of.