Description
Book SynopsisA collection of essays tracing the development of selected Catholic lay apostolates in the decades before and after the Second Vatican Council. Contributors demonstrate how Catholic Action that functioned as an auxiliary of the American bishops gave way to groups more inclined to challenge episcopal authority during the 1960s and 1970s.
Trade Review"Empowering the People of God is a major contribution to the "lived history" of Vatican II for the American Catholics. Catholics changed and the changes made a difference for the country as well as the Church. These thoroughly researched essays demonstrate that lay empowerment was taking place before the Council. The Council persuaded lay leaders that "the shaping of the Church's future was in their hands". How they handled those rising expectations is then the theme of six well chosen case studies. Anyone who wants to understand American Catholics must consider the history provided by this excellent book." -- -David O'Brien Professor Emeritus, College of the Holy Cross, and Distingusihged Visiting Professor at Large, University of Dayton "I think a broad audience will enjoy this book about the practice of Catholic Action in America. It deals with Pope Pius Xl's call for the laity to engage in "Catholic Action" by assisting the clergy in carrying out the Vatican's definition of the Church's worldly mission, including its commitment to social justice. Millions of the faithful responded to this call, dutifully in he 1930s and 1940s and zealously after mid-century. The introduction to the book deftly contextualizes both periods of Catholic Action, and the essays explore the diversity of the activists reactions to this opportunity. Briefly put, the activists before mid-century conformed to the Pope's charge without challenging the Vatican's authority to define their options. But after 1950, in the new age of cultural individualism in American society and its institutions, the activists opted for the maximum feasible participation of the laity in the definition and implementation of the mission of the Church, a phenomenon that yielded todays' tripartite struggle, laic and clerical , among conservatives, liberals, and moderates for ascendancy in America's largest and perhaps its most quintessentially urban branch of Christianity." -- -Zane Miller Charles Phelps Taft Professor of History Emeritus, University of Cincinnati, and co-editor, The Urban Life, Landscape, and Policy Series "Empowering the People of God gives a nuanced, complicated, insightful portrait of Catholic Action as a spectrum rather than a monolith. The volume is timely, not just for historians of American Catholicism, but also for those seeing to understand the deeper backstory to the contesting definitions of authority in the Church in the present moment." -- -Amy L. Koehlinger Oregon State University
Table of ContentsContents Acknowledgements List of Contributors Introduction: Jeffrey Burns Part One: Catholic Action 1. Catholic Action in the Archdiocese of New York: The Case of the Catholic Club of New York City (Patrick J. Hayes) 2. The Liturgical Movement and Catholic Action: Women Living the Liturgical Life in the Lay Apostolate (Katharine E. Harmon) 3. "The Priesthood of the Layman": Catholic Action in the Archdiocese of San Francisco (William Issel) 4. From Participation to Community: John Courtney Murray's American Justification for Catholic Action (Christopher Denny) 5. Azzione Cattolica in an American Setting: The Society of Saint Charles-Scalabrinians and Catholic Action (Mary Elizabeth Brown) Part Two: The People of God 6. Relevant Transformations: The Young Women of the Extension Lay Volunteers, 1961-1971 (Elizabeth Duclos-Orsello) 7. Reaching Out to the People of God: The Implications of Renewal for the Sisters of Mercy in Parish Schools (Mary Beth Fraser Connolly) 8. "This is Our Challenge! We will Pursue It": The National Council of Catholic Women, the Feminist Movement, and the Second Vatican Council, 1960-1975 (Mary Henold) 9. Who Will Guard the Guardians? Church Government and the Ecclesiology of the People of God, 1965-1969 (Jeremy Bonner) 10. Empowering the People of God: John Cardinal Dearden's Church of Tomorrow (Samuel J. Thomas) 11. Christian Unity, Lay Authority, and the People of God: The Community of Christ Our Brother in the Archdiocese of Atlanta, 1967-1969 (Andrew Moore)
