Sent: Wednesday, February 18, 2004 10:49 AM
Subject: H-CATHOLIC REVIEWS: Wittern-Keller on Moloney, _American Catholic
Lay Groups_


H-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by H Catholic@h-net.msu.edu (February 2003)

Deirdre M. Moloney. _American Catholic Lay Groups and Transatlantic
Social Reform in the Progressive Era_. Chapel Hill and London: University of
North Carolina Press, 2002. xiii + 267 pp. Illustrations, notes,
bibliography, index. $49.95 (cloth), ISBN 0-8078-2660-X; $19.95 (paper),
ISBN 0-8078-4986-3.

Reviewed for H-Catholic by Laura Wittern-Keller, Department of History,
University at Albany, State University of New York

Lay Catholic Social Reform Groups Get Their Due

Speak of Progressive Era reform groups and most people will reflexively
think of Protestant efforts like settlement houses, charitable aid
societies, and temperance crusades.  In the Progressive Era, though,
Catholic laity also formed active voluntary organizations to work for
temperance, rural colonization (resettlement of urban immigrants to
rural areas), port programs (assistance for newly arrived immigrants),
charitable aid, and urban neighborhood improvement (settlements).  The
considerable contribution of Catholics to social reform and charitable
works has been neglected in much of the scholarly literature about
Progressive Era reform groups.  Even the literature on temperance
advocacy mentions the sizable Catholic Total Abstinence movement only in
fleeting
references, if at all.  Moreover, the few works that have discussed
Catholic lay reform efforts have concentrated on single lay groups
(Philip Gleason's _Conservative Reformers_ and Christopher Kauffman's _Faith
and
Fraternalism_) or a single city (Paula Kane's _Separation and
Subculture_).  The 1997 study by Brown and McKeown, _The Poor Belong to
Us_, examines Catholic social reform but focuses on that organized by
the Church, not by the laity.

This scholarship void Deirdre M. Moloney has effectively filled in her
study of Catholic lay reform movements of the Progressive Era.  But
Moloney's goal is not just that we "recognize the diverse origins of the
American social reform" to include Catholics (p. 11). She also points
out the autonomy of many Catholic lay groups in the Progressive Era, the
role played by both gender and ethnic nationalism in Catholic lay reform,
and
the Catholic response to Protestant reformers, which Moloney calls the
"Catholic critique" (p. 10).  The book provides us a fascinating glimpse
into the charitable goals chosen by Catholic lay groups in the period
before the consolidation of effort under the Church after World War II.

Her main thesis is that as Catholics began to move into the middle class
toward the end of the nineteenth century, they desired respectability as
Americans, rather than the second-class status of hyphenated Americans.
Striving for acceptance, they pursued charitable and reform efforts.
However, while they accepted upward mobility, they also struggled with
both the materialism that social mobility had conferred and the anxiety
created by the unavoidable dilution of their ethnic and religious
heritage.  These tensions distinguished Catholic lay reform movements
from their Protestant counterparts.

Moloney begins with a chapter on the impetus given to lay reform work by
the Catholic Congress at the Columbian Exposition of 1893, then moves to
the neglected topic of Catholic temperance work.  Unlike its Protestant
counterparts, the Catholic Total Abstinence movement acted as a positive
alternative, stressing moral suasion rather than mandates, and offering
a less dogmatic alternative to the "temperance zealots" (p. 68). Moloney
next moves to Catholic efforts to ease the transition of the newly
arrived, first through rural colonization programs, and later, by
providing assistance for young women in urban areas.  Moloney then turns
to lay Catholic charitable works, positing the differences between
Protestant and Catholic efforts as more than differing theology.  She
maintains that Catholic differences in charitable work stemmed from
their outsider status where Protestants could rely on their inclusion in the
dominant social class for validation.  In her final chapter, she looks
at the charitable work of the Catholic women's organizations.  While
Catholic women may have come to the social reform movement later than their
Protestant peers, they came to embrace what Moloney calls "activist
domesticity," the view that while women's foremost role was within their
own homes, they would be wrong to let their energies stop at their own
"four walls" (p. 180).  Originally begun as charity organizations at the
parish level in the 1890s, some Catholic women's groups grew into
regional and national groups working on a variety of goals, such as
entertainment
standards, probation work, and Americanization programs.  Developing
controversies over the women and their goals reflect gender roles in
flux within the laity of the Church. "Because women often symbolized
Catholic
upward mobility, their behavior reflected both an expanding sense of
noblesse oblige among Catholics and a deep ambivalence about the
implications of improved economic status among some American Catholics"
(p. 204).

Moloney's contribution to the extant scholarship goes beyond the story
of these neglected lay movements in the United States: she also reveals and
analyzes their transatlantic ties.  She shows that Catholic lay social
organizations often turned to their European predecessors for guidance
and methods.  The Catholic Total Abstinence movement took its cues not from
the WCTU or the Anti-Saloon League, but from the Irish temperance
movement.  The Society of St. Vincent de Paul, which eventually grew to
five hundred parish-level groups, originated in France and most of its
members lived outside the United States. The Catholic Women's Union
modeled itself on a German group.  One of the first to seek immigrant
aid for young women was not an American, but an Irish woman who lobbied for
American port programs.

Moloney also contributes to the still small but growing body of
scholarship on Catholic social work by extending the research beyond
Boston and New York.  Her study is national in scope and delves into
rarely used resources in the Midwest which add to our knowledge of
ethnic and class patterns of social reform.  This archival research
authenticates her contention that motivation for social reform works could
be found in
the desire of the newly emerging Catholic middle class to prove itself
to the Protestant majority.  However, even while seeking acceptance through
social charity and reform work, these lay groups used distinctly
old-world methods, rejecting many of the techniques used by American
Protestants.

While offering valuable information to fill a scholarly gap, the book
might be difficult for non-Catholics without explanation of terms such
as "women religious." And, since Moloney's motivation for writing the book
is to bring to light the considerable contributions of Catholics to social
causes in the Progressive Era, she might have included some background
information on what she calls a significant inspiration for that work,
the 1891 papal encyclical _Rerum Novarum_.  She mentions it frequently and
persuasively as a major influence on lay Catholic charity workers, but
she gives little insight into exactly what _Rerum Novarum_ said.

That quibble aside, Moloney has written a credible book that clearly
transmits an overriding theme of tension.  The adherents of the religion
widely feared at the time for its non-democratic, communal philosophy
sought by charitable works to prove themselves worthy Americans as they
progressed toward the American middle class.  They were torn between the
conflicting goals of establishing their own Americanization by
accomplishing good works for their less fortunate coreligionists, yet
remaining true to an international Church and their own ethnic
heritages.


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