America's Church

The grandiloquently named Basilica Shrine of the Immaculate Conception is a sort of Rodney Dangerfield of ecclesiastical edifices: it gets no respect. Often compared unfavorably with the elegant National Cathedral, it is not centrally located in the nation's capital, and reaching it requires a somewhat long ride on the Metro's Red Line to Brookland. One feels like an ant when entering the cavernous surroundings of the “Great Upper Church.” With John DeRosen's scowling Christ the Pantocrator looking down from the apsidial dome, the gigantic sanctuary reduces the altar and by extension the eucharistic celebration to minute proportions—a spectacle to be watched. At least a million visitors come through its doors every year, and the shrine has long needed a scholarly interpreter and has found one in Thomas Tweed, a religious historian at the top of his game. This study took many years to complete; the work nonetheless is what one would expect from a scholar of Tweed's excellence: challenging, informative, and at times brilliant. He uses this mammoth church as a window on the richness and diversity of the American Catholic experience. The conception, fundraising, design, and building of the shrine produces a cast of characters and incidents that can be legitimately taken as a case study of Catholic life and identity through much of the twentieth century and beyond. Conceived during a period of Catholic mobilization between the condemnation of modernism and the beginning of Vatican II (what Tweed and others call the consolidating period), the author, among other things, unpacks the shrine's significance as a place of meeting, moving, and crossing—a case study of his own theory of religion.

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