American Patroness: Marian Shrines and the Making of U.S. Catholicism, eds. Katherine Dugan and Karen E. Park, New York: Fordham University Press 2024

Forty years ago, as a doctoral student, I took a summer course on American Catholic history with Robert Orsi, who was then also writing his dissertation.That work would become The Madonna of 115 th Street, published by Yale.Orsi's focus was the annual street festival, crowned by the procession of the statue of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, which took place at the Italian ethnic parish of Our Lady of Mount Carmel in Harlem every July 16.Since our course coincided with that festival, we also participated in it.Orsi was interested in how this popular or "folk" Catholicism of the streets had different "meanings" than the standard, liturgical celebrations of Our Lady of Mount Carmel.A secondary interest was how that meaning was changing with the changing ethnic demographic: by the 1980s, "Italian Harlem" was really an extension of Spanish, i.e., Latino Harlem.Latino Catholics joined the festivities, but also brought their own "meaning" to bear on it.I'm reminded of Orsi's interests reading Dugan and Park's American Patroness, a collection of 12 essays about how Catholic Marian shrines in the United States reveal the complexity as well as the "dynamic malleability" (i.e., adaptability) of the Church in this country.Among its themes are how Catholic institutions (in this case, Marian shrines) have changed with the changing face of Catholicism in the United States.One example: Ohio's National Shrine of Our Lady of Consolation, which originated with Germanspeaking Catholics but, in the early 20 th century, also became a Midwestern Slavic pilgrimage site.Given that Catholics of Polish extraction have been a group part of the Church in the United States since Panna Maria in 1854, they receive somealbeit limited -note in this book.Besides Our Lady of Consolation, they are mentioned in conjunction with the National Shrine Basilica of Our Lady of Fatima in Niagara Falls, New York, in part because the Buffalo area Catho-