The political and military upheaval of 1836 in Texas left Catholics north of the Nueces River cut off from the ordinary ties binding them to the institutions of the church and ushered in an era of reorganization, evangelization, and change unprecedented in the North American Catholic church. James Talmadge Moore engagingly chronicles the history of the Catholic church in Texas from the point at which Carlos E. Castañeda ended his celebrated account up to the present century.
Moore deftly integrates local and regional events after the Texas Revolution into the larger social and political history of the young nation and state and shows their relationship to ecclesiastical and philosophical movements in the United States and abroad. He traces the contributions of various religious orders—as missionaries and in establishing schools and hospitals—and shows the evolving institutional complexity of the church as the number of Catholics in Texas grew. Moreover, he shows the character of the people who did the work of the church—many different kinds of people, some courageous and compassionate, others less admirable. All, he concludes, were united in "their effort to live their faith in an unquiet age, an age filled with the incessant motion of unprecedented political and demographic change."
With full access to the Catholic Archives of Texas as well as other archival and primary sources and supplementing these amply with secondary literature, Moore has given a full and extremely readable account of the various facets of this important part of the state's religious and socio-political life. Scholars of religious history, Western and Southwestern studies, and Texas history will find it a solid corpus of information, while those with more general interests will enjoy the lively description of the church, the times, and the people who made them what they were in Texas.
About the Author
James Talmadge Moore holds a bachelor's degree from the University of Houston, an M.Div. from the Episcopal Theological Seminary of the Southwest, and an M.A. and Ph.D. in history from Texas A&M University. He teaches church history at the University of St. Thomas in Houston and is on the history faculty at North Harris College. A priest of the diocese of Galveston-Houston, he is pastor of Our Lady of Walsingham Catholic Church (Anglican Use). He is the author of several articles on nineteenth-century topics and of a previous book, Indian and Jesuit: A Seventeenth-Century Encounter.
Praise For…
"I highly recommend this book. It is interesting, informative and easy to read. It relates the wonderful story of faith and determination of the men and women who bravely endured frontier Texas to establish the Church in our state after the collapse of the mission era. . . . a good read and well worth the money."--Bishop Joseph A. Fiorenza — Bishop Joseph A. Fiorenza
