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Published: February 2005
Professor James O’Toole, a historian of American Catholicism, talks with Boston College Magazine editor Ben Birnbaum about the transformations that have taken place in American Catholic ritual life since Vatican II, particularly changes in the practice of prayer, confession, the Eucharistic sacrament, and Marian devotion, and places them in the broader context of 20th-century American history.
O’Toole is the editor of, and a contributor to, Habits of Devotion: Catholic Religious Practice in Twentieth-Century America (2004); author of Passing for White: Race, Religion, and the Healy Family, 1820-1920 (2002) and Militant and Triumphant: William Henry O’Connell and the Catholic Church in Boston, 1859-1944 (1992); and a professor of history at Boston College.
“Ritual life” was filmed in the Thompson Room of Boston College’s Burns Library in Chestnut Hill, on February 2, 2005.
