The Catholic Church Through the Ages, 2nd ed. (Fr. John Vidmar, OP, 2014)

Astute readers of this blog will know right away this one was for class. I read it, so it counts! I actually read it over the course of about eight months. Sure, I could have torn through it back in 2015 and added it to my last year book count, but that wouldn't have served me well in class. So, consider this, in terms of the book count, an exercise in delayed gratification.

Although the book served as our textbook in the class, Fr. Vidmar wrote this book for a general audience. In the introduction, he explains the work is in part a way to make church history more accessible to the average parishioner and address criticism over history-based homilies that "the sheep were not fed." As far as being a classroom text, it has good and bad points related to this intent. On one hand, it is a very friendly volume and reads quickly. Although there are some holes and some parts are overemphasized, it generally managed the two-thousand year sweep in a reasonable number of pages. Also, unlike other church history books, Vidmar is relatively agenda-free, though he does presume most of his readers are Catholic. The danger with the book, however, is that he sometimes slips into a "golly gee" tone with lots of exclamation marks. Also, as stated in the introduction, he is targeting the parish, not the classroom. Therefore he readily anticipates what a priest may have to reckon with when he gets hard questions in church history: the Inquisition, the Crusades, "Hitler's Pope", and Luther, Calvin, Zwingli and company all trigger a more defensive writing style. All of these are understandable in providing the reader with tools to answer those tough questions, but in the classroom they can suck all of the oxygen out of all the other topics.

All in all, it's not a bad book to pick up if you are curious about the long history of the Catholic Church, and it certainly won't hurt if you are Catholic, though I didn't find myself being frozen out. Hitchcock's history (read a couple years back) is much more academic and opinionated, but also more thorough. It all depends on how in-depth you are ready to go.

I read my copy through my place of employment, liberally borrowing the reserve copy. Even though it is a general history, it is published by Paulist Press, which means public libraries probably don't have it on their active watch lists to acquire. The 2005 edition is more widely held than this edition, and you probably won't suffer too badly if that's what you can find, unless Popes Benedict XVI and Francis are the end-all be-all of your interests in the Church, or plan to rely on Vidmar's bibliographies for future reading. Check out Worldcat to find a holding library near you, or shell out $20 to Paulist or, of course, there's always "Earth's largest store" for the unimaginative.