Professor; Director of the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life
24 Quincy Road
Telephone: 617-552-6502
Email: mark.massa@bc.edu
For the past decade my research interest has focused on the Catholic experience in the United States since World War II. Catholics and American Culture sought to provide a non-“master narrative” approach to understanding how Catholics left their secure ghetto after 1945 to enter the verdant pastures of middle class affluence, with somewhat mixed results. And precisely because of those mixed results, I utilized Reinhold Niebuhr’s rich category of “theological irony" to tell my tale. Anti-Catholicism in America mined David Tracy’s protean distinction between “analogical” and “dialectical” pre-conceptual languages to explain how and why Catholics and other Americans actually do see the world differently, a difference that has contributed significantly to “prejudice” against Catholics in the U.S. And I use that term in neutral sense (and not in its more usual pejorative) sense: prejudice comes from two Latin words that mean “prejudgment.” I thus attempted an ideologically neutral approach to anti-Catholic “prejudice.” My latest book, The American Catholic Revolution (Oxford 2010) examines what happened after Vatican II when historical consciousness (i.e., the awareness that everything in history changes) was let loose in the American Catholic community. The book starts with Vatican II, and examines the reception of Humanae Vitae, the "Catonsville Nine" anti-Vietnam War protest, the reform of women's religious orders, and Avery Dulles' classic work, Models of the Church.
Mondays: 1 - 3pm, at the Boisi Center
Thursdays: 1 - 3pm, at the Boisi Center
The American Catholic Revolution: How the Sixties Changed the Church Forever. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010.
Anti-Catholicism: The Last Acceptable Prejudice? New York: Crossroad Press, 2003.
Catholics and American Culture: Fulton Sheen, Dorothy Day, and the Notre Dame Football Team. New York: Crossroad, 1999. Winner of the AJCU/Alpha Sigma Nu Award for Outstanding Work in Theology for 1999-2001.
World Religions: A Sourcebook (with Richard Viladesau). Metuchen, NJ: Paulist Press, 1993.
Foundations of Theological Study (with Richard Viladesau). Metuchen, NJ: Paulist Press, 1991.
Charles Augustus Briggs and the Crisis of Historical Criticism. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1990.