Marking a century of progressive Catholicism
Catholic News Service has a feature that notes an interesting centennial, of sorts:
WASHINGTON (CNS) — The year 1910 was quite the watershed year for U.S. Catholicism. Catholic Charities USA was founded a hundred years ago. So were the Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers, followed by the Maryknoll Sisters in 1912. The Crosiers, founded in Europe 700 years ago, decided to place their first outpost in the United States in 1910.
And that’s just a sampling of Catholic groups marking their centennial.
What was it that prompted these Catholic organizations to take root in 1910 and not only to withstand the vagaries of the following century but to flourish a century later with an enduring influence on the larger society?
To hear some historians describe it, the growth of Catholic organizations 100 years ago has much to do with the Progressive Era, a period of social activism and reform that had its heyday from the 1890s to the 1920s. Among its leading exponents were presidents, including Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson and Herbert Hoover, Wisconsin Gov. Robert La Follette Sr., and Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes, who went on to become Chief Justice of the United States.
These groups still exist today, and may have even greater reach, it seems to me. And there are plenty of “progressive” Catholic leaders. But the Catholic Church is not seen as “progressive” in the wider social context. Is that a misperception, perhaps created by the focus on battles over abortion and homosexuality? Or is it perhaps an accurate assessment?
Quite a stretch. Many (most?) of the examples mentioned didn’t really happen in 1910, but in the twenty or so years around 1910.
Difficult, imho, to understand what Pattison is trying to say about the Boy Scouts. (Founded by the anti-Catholic Baden-Powell.) American Catholics (such as the Paulists) recognized the anti-Catholic tinge of that strange organization from the start.
As to Catholic Charities? Happy anniversary. This centennial year would be a good time to apologize to all adopted people and their parents, real and adopted, for separating babies from mothers, for separating twins, for concealing birth records, for falsifying baptismal records, etc., and to open all records to those involved.
And why no mention of the really important thing for Catholics that happened in 1910, the Oath Against Modernism, “To be sworn to by all clergy, pastors, confessors, preachers, religious superiors, and professors in philosophical-theological seminaries”?
http://www.papalencyclicals.net/Pius10/p10moath.htm
The early decades of the 20th century were important for American Catholics. Many churches were built, parish life flourished, parochial schools were bursting at the seams, private boarding schools conducted by religious orders were thriving, vocations to the orders were increasing, etc., etc., etc., but trying to pin all that to 1910 doesn’t really work, and why should it?
David, it’s an interesting question. FWIW, it was the progressive aspects of the church – its social justice teachings, its hospitals, its schools – that kept me “plugged in” as a young adult.
Perhaps it raises the question, ‘who gets to decide who and what is progressive?’. The church might say it is ‘progressive’ in the sense that it is supposed to be ‘progressing’ toward a greater realization of God’s kingdom and the 2nd coming ‘Prepare the way of the Lord’ and all that. Working for justice – social justice, distributive justice – is certainly part of that preparation.
One of the lessons that the church needs to continually learn, istm, is that the modern world sometimes has things to teach the church. On civil rights in the ’50′s and ’60′s, the church, as a whole, lagged the progressive elements of society. The church, I believe, has now largely caught up. But the church was not a leader. The same is true with regard to the abolition of slavery.
On that matter of just treatment of homosexuals, the modern world can teach the church. That’s not a brief for homosexual marriage, just a statement that modern society seems to be heeding what the Catechism teaches about ‘no unjust discrimination’ better than the church, or at least large segments of the church.
Regarding abortion: perhaps – perhaps – progressives can teach the institutional church more about what it means for a woman to be pregnant. But surely the church has more to teach the world than the other way around on this issue. And the trend in polls – that abortions are not as prevalent, and people are becoming more pro-life – suggests that the church’s leavening is having an effect.
For anyone who is interested in the campaign by physicians against midwives (immigrant women, often) and what happened in the peak year of 1910:
http://publishing.cdlib.org/ucpressebooks/view?docId=ft967nb5z5&chunk.id=d0e1742&toc.id=d0e2767&brand=eschol
It’s a chapter from:
When Abortion Was a Crime: Women, Medicine, and Law in the United States, 1867-1973, by Leslie J. Reagan. University of California Press.
I’m no expert on the history of American religion, but the early xx century was also a time that saw the beginning and flourishing of the Social Gospel movement among American Protestants, and that had an effect — a copy-cat effect? — on American Catholics (or so I’ve been told). And of course there were Protestant quarrels between those who the Social Gospeleers and those who saw the Social Gospel simply as a modernist way of abandoning the transcendent in favor of simply doing good (what was “good” of course, was defined by the former).
Here is a little hidden history:
[T]he contribution Der Wanderer made in the broad arena of social justice is told by Notre Dame professor of history (emeritus) Philip Gleason in The Conservative Reformers: German-American Catholics and the Social Order (University of Notre Dame Press, 1968)….
The effort to organize the various German associations, writes Dr. Gleason, “was largely the work of Joseph Matt, the editor of Der Wanderer in St. Paul. Then a young man in his mid-twenties who had emigrated from the Palatinate in 1895, Matt remained one of the giants in the German-American Catholic community until his death in 1966. The essential transformation wrought by the plan he proposed was that the Central-Verein was changed from a loose confederation of autonomous local benevolent societies into a more tightly-knit national federation of state federations . . .
“Virtually all the societies of German-American Catholics — both the older type and the more Americanized variety — were brought under one roof; within two years of the plan’s adoption and the membership of the Central-Verein almost doubled from the 1900 figure of about fifty-thousand . . . ”
The goal of the Central-Verein, as well as Der Wanderer, Dr. Gleason continued, was “Catholic unity” across the entire spectrum of Catholic issues, but front and center was a Catholic solution to the “social question”….
“The proverbial German talent for organization was turned to good account by these Catholics, who mobilized all classes of society into specialized organizations for rural folk, workers, employers, professional people, and intellectuals. The annual Catholic congresses were great mass meetings at which representatives from all these groups gathered for mutual encouragement and to examine the pressing problems of the day . . .
German-American Catholics, Dr. Gleason continues, “held less sanguine views on the excellence of American society and the easy compatibility of Catholicism and American civilization” that such Americanists as Baltimore’s James Cardinal Gibbons, Bishop John J. Keane [founder of the Catholic University of America and later Archbishop of Dubuque) and St. Paul's Archbishop John Ireland. "[T]he German Catholics retained the conviction that the liberals were too complacent, too satisfied with the status quo; they glossed over the defects and shortcomings of American life and were insufficiently critical of the blemishes on the American scene. The liberal Catholics, according to this interpretation, were so bedazzled by the supposed excellencies of the American way that they believed ‘We have no Social Question’ . . .
“If anything were needed to persuade the German-American Catholics that we most
assuredly did have a social question, nothing could have served the purpose more
admirably than the conviction that the Americanizers denied its existence. Thus, the Germans later took great pride in their entry into the field of social reform at a time when other Catholics were indifferent to the need for such activity . . . “
What was this “social question”? Was there only one?
I have often wondered why German=Americans have not been as conspicuous in American politics as Irish-Americans given their numbers in 19th century America. In New Orleans they didn’t even have a political organization, though they were a very large portion of the immigrant population. In fact, Germans were the original settlers of the New Orleans area, settling here decades before the French. They certainly have participated in politics, but they haven’t acted as a group, and I often wondered why. There was/is one German social group, and there were many German musical organizations in the past, but so far as I know, those were about it.
What else happened in other parts of the country? What a bout the other large groups — the Italians and the Poles, for instance? This is the first I’ve heard of those national organizations.
The great social question here, of course, was slavery/segregation. And it is notable that it was ended in the Church here by the German-born bishop, Joseph Francis Rummel.
“Regarding abortion: perhaps – perhaps – progressives can teach the institutional church more about what it means for a woman to be pregnant.”
So long as the teaching is done by progressive women and not men, that might be feasible. But will entrenched church me actually be willing to listen to and learn from women? History doesn’t bode well for this to be.
Ann, I highly recommend Dr. Gleason’s book. In short, the “social question” centered around “labor” and Rerum Novarum: In particular, it was the German Catholics who pushed for Sunday as a day of rest (no work), the 40-hour week, a “family wage,” health and unemployment insurance, work safety rules, an end to child labor (in industry and mining), public funding for Catholic schools, etc.
If you are interested in more on Der Wanderer’s first 60 years, your can read the series I did on Der Wanderer, thanks to the invaluable assistance of Fr. John Kulas, OSB, of St. John’s Abbey, who translated from the German many of the lead editorials from 1867-1932 by Joseph Matt, most of which dealt with the “social question.” Fr. Kulas, by the way, is the author of Der Wanderer of St. Paul, which only dealth with the paper’s first few years, up to Vatican I. (By the way, Fr. Kulas is also the author of a book on St. Hildegarde and her natural health remedies). The full series is available online at: http://www.catholicculture.org/culture/library/view.cfm?recnum=8896
Paul L. –
Thanks for the information and recommendation. I didn’t realize that the German-Americans were such an organized force in American labor, though given the great industrial centers in the mid-West where so many German-Americans lived and with names like Walter Reuther so conspicuous in the labor movement it shouldn’t be surprising.
Ann: You might find this interesting. It really is a story to be told:
This is from: Bridging the Atlantic: The Question of American Exceptionalism, by Elisabeth Glaser, Hermann Wellenreuther, Cambridge University Press, 2002
Der Wanderer, the new German Catholic paper in the state capital was founded by one of Stearns County’s Benedictines and read by dozens of households in every Stearns County parish, defined the issue of the 1868 presidential elections in terms that were unmistakably resonant to anyone who had lived through the war in the country. The issues, the Wanderer insisted, were “too much governance, arbitrary exercise of power, political corruption” (Zuvielregieren, Willkuhrrschaft, politische Faulnis). The purpose of the U.S Constitution was to secure completely the “local interests” of each state, thereby also insuring the flourishing and prosperity of the whole nation and the enjoyment of freedom, creating a nation where the immigrant, “instead of taxes and oppression,” would find “a simple, cheap, almost unnoticeable, yet powerfully protecting and beneficial government. The true functions of a government are few and simple.” Instead, German readers learned, the Republicans were offering not only high taxes, shoddyism and bribery, but the same militarism that had led to the downfall of the Roman Republic. Paraphrasing a familiar German nationalist poem, a correspondent asked, “What defines the Union as a free nation?” (“Was ist der Union freis Land”?) His anser” A country where everyone does his duty and does not waste his time shouting about Negro suffrage, where the law has a free hand, where rich and poor have the same rights, where subjugation is banished and factory owners and bondholders have to pay cash when the tax collector comes — in short, the old Union without slavery.
The post war German Catholic political order, it quickly became clear, would rest on two fundamental principles: absolute refusal to support at the polls anyone or anything that looked Republican, and tenacious control of those areas of county government that Germans required to shape and defend their distinctive way of life. This meant continued control of tax assessment and collection procedures — “the Germans of the country should never underestimate the advantage of having a fellow countryman as a county assessor,” the new German-language Democratic news editorialized in 1876 (St. Coud Nordstern, Oct. 12 1876.) It meant control of justice of the peace courts, juries, and the probate court where family property was settled; it meant control of welfare measures at both the town and county level; it meant control of the sheriff’s office; and fundamentally, it meant control of the schools, through local school boards that could effectively convert public into parochial schools, and through the county supervisor of schools less than two years after that position was established in 1867. Germans never demanded a total monopoly of local offices; village values imported from Germany demanded a certain level of dignity, of ability to participate in higher affairs of state, from those who held higher office……..Germans after the Civil War aggressively utilized certain powers of local government — road building, taxation, education, justice, and public welfare in particular — to shape the world they wanted…..”
In the end, they lost, of course.
Thanks, Paul. They sound like the ultimate states rights advocates. I must say I think that that position has some strong merits, especially since the country has gotten so big and complex. I’m starting to wonder whether it is too complex for the ordinary citizen to be aquainted with everything of importance that is going on.