The Smoke of Satan: Conservative and Traditionalist Dissent in Contemporary American Catholicism

The Smoke of Satan: Conservative and Traditionalist Dissent in Contemporary American Catholicism is a crisp, witty, thorough, and fresh study of the inner workings of the Catholic right. Sociologist Michael W. Cuneo concentrates on three groups: anti-abortion activists, Catholic separatists (who believe that the American Church revoked its authority regarding true Catholicism by distorting the intentions of Vatican II), and mystics and apocalypticists. As Cuneo explains, these groups believe that "the Catholic church in the United States has strip-malled its liturgical life, compromised its doctrine, and squandered its moral capital. Once defiant and blessedly haughty, the church is now a cheap floozy, cozying up to the modern world, smiling, winking, desperate for flattery and approval." In analyzing each of these groups and their distinctive methods of protest against the purported corruption of the American Church, Cunea provides fascinating anecdotes based on wide reading and firsthand encounters. All of them, it seems, pose variations of one essential question--and it is surely one of the most vexing questions at this point in American Christian history: what, exactly, constitutes an ultimate authority worth trusting? --Michael Joseph Gross