American Catholicism: The Chicago History of American Civilization

American Catholicism (The Chicago History of American Civilization)


by John Tracy Ellis (Author)Publisher: University of Chicago Press; (1956)
Hardcover: 207 pages5.5 x 8.2 inches

John Tracy Ellis (July 30, 1905 – October 16, 1992) was a Catholic Church historian, born and raised in Seneca, Illinois, USA.

Ellis was ordained a priest and received a doctorate in history from Catholic University in Washington, where he worked with Msgr. Peter Guilday to collect the central documents of the American Catholic heritage. He spent most of his career as a faculty member of the Catholic University, but he taught at the University of San Francisco between 1963 and 1976. He was a long serving executive secretary of the American Catholic Historical Association and editor of the Catholic Historical Review (1941–62). Ellis is best known for his 1952 argument that American Catholic scholars have failed to measure up to European Catholic standards of scholarship and intellectual leadership.

He wrote widely on church history, including a major biography of James Cardinal Gibbons. He attracted widespread attention in Catholic circles for his essay (1955) deploring an anti-intellectual "ghetto mentality" among American Catholics.

In his book American Catholicism, first published in 1956, he wrote that a "universal anti-Catholic bias was brought to Jamestown in 1607 and vigorously cultivated in all the thirteen colonies from Massachusetts to Georgia."