A Flawed Portrait of Dissent
The Smoke of Satan: Conservative and Traditionalist Dissent in Contemporary
American Catholicism
by Michael W. Cuneo
New York: Oxford University Press, 1997
(214 pages; $27.50, cloth)
reviewed by Leon J. Podles
Vatican II and the changes in Roman Catholicism that followed it have not pleased all Catholics. Michael W. Cuneo, a professor of sociology and anthropology at Fordham University, gives representative sketches of what he sees are the three main types of those displeased with the current condition of the Roman Catholic Church in America. The first is the conservatives, the second the separatists-traditionalists, the third the Marianists-apocalypticists.
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Leon J. Podles holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of Virginia, has worked as a teacher and a federal investigator, and is president of the Crossland Foundation. He is the author of The Church Impotent (Spence), Sacrilege (Crossland Press), and Losing the Good Portion: Why Men Are Alienated from Christianity (St. Augustine Press). Dr. Podles and his wife have six children and live in Baltimore, Maryland. He is a senior editor of Touchstone.
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