John Lafarge and the Limits of Catholic Interracialism, 1911–1963

John Lafarge and the Limits of Catholic Interracialism, 1911–1963
Author: David W. Southern
Publisher: LSU Press
Total Pages: 472
Release: 1996-07-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780807119716

Before Vatican II, before the race riots of the 1940s, the white Jesuit priest John Lafarge decried America’s treatment of blacks. In the first scholarly biography of Lafarge, David W Southern paints a portrait of a man ahead of his church on the race issue who nevertheless did not press hard enough in ridding it of an institutional bias against African-Americans. Southern follows Lafarge from his birth into the Social Register in Newport, Rhode Island, in 1880, to his death in 1963, just months after his participation in the March on Washington. According to Southern, Lafarge was the foremost Catholic spokesman on black-white relations in America for more than thirty years. In a series of books and articles—he served on the staff of the influential Jesuit weekly America from 1926 until his death—he significantly improved the image of the Church in the eyes of black, Jewish, and Protestant leaders. In 1934 he founded the Catholic Interracial Council of New York, the most important Catholic civil rights organization in the pre-Brown era. His declaration in 1937 that racism is a sin and a heresy so impressed the pope that he employed Lafarge to write an encyclical on the subject. Although lauded in his time for his achievements in race relations, Lafarge, Southern contends, espoused too gradualist an approach. Southern maintains that Lafarge was fettered by a fierce loyalty to the Church, a staunch clericalism, an intense concern with the image of Catholicism in Protestant America, an aristocratic background, and Eurocentric thinking—producing in him an abiding paternalism and lingering ambivalence about black culture, and a tendency to conceal the Church’s discriminatory practices rather than reveal them. Moreover, he was too slow to condemn segregation and approve the nonviolent direct action of Martin Luther King, Jr. Still, Southern sees in Lafarge a redeeming capacity for liberal growth, citing his inspiration of a younger, more militant generation of Catholics and his joining in the 1963 march. Based on extensive archival research, John LaFarge and the Limits of Catholic Interracialism fills a serious gap in Catholic social history and race-relations history. An impressive, engrossing biography, it also casts light on the broader historical issues of the Church’s attitudes and practices toward African-Americans since the Civil War, Catholic liberalism before Vatican II, and the seeds of unrest that manifest themselves today in the rapidly growing black Catholic community.

Black Catholic Studies Reader

Black Catholic Studies Reader
Author: David J. Endres
Publisher: CUA Press
Total Pages: 302
Release: 2021-04-16
Genre: History
ISBN: 0813234298

This first-ever Black Catholic Studies Reader offers an introduction to the theology and history of the Black Catholic experience from those who know it best: Black Catholic scholars, teachers, activists, and ministers. The reader offers a multi-faceted, interdisciplinary approach that illuminates what it means to be Black and Catholic in the United States. This collection of essays from prominent scholars, both past and present, brings together contributions from theologians M. Shawn Copeland, Kim Harris, Diana Hayes, Bryan Massingale, and C. Vanessa White, and historians Cecilia Moore, Diane Batts Morrow, and Ronald Sharps, and selections from an earlier generation of thinkers and activists, including Thea Bowman, Cyprian Davis, and Clarence Rivers. Contributions delve into the interlocking fields of history, spirituality, liturgy, and biography. Through their contributions, Black Catholic Studies scholars engage theologies of liberation and the reality of racism, the Black struggle for recognition within the Church, and the distinctiveness of African-inspired spirituality, prayer, and worship. By considering their racial and religious identities, these select Black Catholic theologians and historians add their voices to the contemporary conversation surrounding culture, race, and religion in America, inviting engagement from students and teachers of the American experience, social commentators and advocates, and theologians and persons of faith.

What's Left?

What's Left?
Author: Mary Jo Weaver
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Total Pages: 316
Release: 1999
Genre: United States
ISBN: 9780253213327

"What's Left? employs a thoroughly in-house approach in which self-identified liberal Catholics examine various facets of liberal Catholicism.... this book explores some of the most prominent threads of leftist Catholic aspiration and dissent." --Choice What's Left? is the most comprehensive study to date of liberal American Catholics in the generation following the second Vatican council (1962-65). The main features of liberal American Catholicism--feminist theology and practice, contested issues of sexual conduct, new social locations of academic theology, liturgy, spirituality, ministry, race and ethnicity, and public Catholicism--are presented here in their historical and social contexts.

On the Irish Waterfront

On the Irish Waterfront
Author: James T. Fisher
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 389
Release: 2011-01-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 0801457343

Site of the world's busiest and most lucrative harbor throughout the first half of the twentieth century, the Port of New York was also the historic preserve of Irish American gangsters, politicians, longshoremen's union leaders, and powerful Roman Catholic pastors. This is the demimonde depicted to stunning effect in Elia Kazan's On the Waterfront (1954) and into which James T. Fisher takes readers in this remarkable and engaging historical account of the classic film's backstory. Fisher introduces readers to the real "Father Pete Barry" featured in On the Waterfront, John M. "Pete" Corridan, a crusading priest committed to winning union democracy and social justice for the port's dockworkers and their families. A Jesuit labor school instructor, not a parish priest, Corridan was on but not of Manhattan's West Side Irish waterfront. His ferocious advocacy was resisted by the very men he sought to rescue from the violence and criminality that rendered the port "a jungle, an outlaw frontier," in the words of investigative reporter Malcolm Johnson. Driven off the waterfront, Corridan forged creative and spiritual alliances with men like Johnson and Budd Schulberg, the screenwriter who worked with Corridan for five years to turn Johnson's Pulitzer Prize-winning 1948 newspaper exposé into a movie. Fisher's detailed account of the waterfront priest's central role in the film's creation challenges standard views of the film as a post facto justification for Kazan and Schulberg's testimony as ex-communists before the House Committee on Un-American Activities. On the Irish Waterfront is also a detailed social history of the New York/New Jersey waterfront, from the rise of Irish American entrepreneurs and political bosses during the World War I era to the mid-1950s, when the emergence of a revolutionary new mode of cargo-shipping signaled a radical reorganization of the port. This book explores the conflicts experienced and accommodations made by an insular Irish-Catholic community forced to adapt its economic, political, and religious lives to powerful forces of change both local and global in scope.

Crossing Parish Boundaries

Crossing Parish Boundaries
Author: Timothy B. Neary
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 305
Release: 2016-10-14
Genre: History
ISBN: 022638893X

Controversy erupted in spring 2001 when Chicago’s mostly white Southside Catholic Conference youth sports league rejected the application of the predominantly black St. Sabina grade school. Fifty years after Brown v. Board of Education, interracialism seemed stubbornly unattainable, and the national spotlight once again turned to the history of racial conflict in Catholic parishes. It’s widely understood that midcentury, working class, white ethnic Catholics were among the most virulent racists, but, as Crossing Parish Boundaries shows, that’s not the whole story. In this book, Timothy B. Neary reveals the history of Bishop Bernard Sheil’s Catholic Youth Organization (CYO), which brought together thousands of young people of all races and religions from Chicago’s racially segregated neighborhoods to take part in sports and educational programming. Tens of thousands of boys and girls participated in basketball, track and field, and the most popular sport of all, boxing, which regularly filled Chicago Stadium with roaring crowds. The history of Bishop Sheil and the CYO shows a cosmopolitan version of American Catholicism, one that is usually overshadowed by accounts of white ethnic Catholics aggressively resisting the racial integration of their working-class neighborhoods. By telling the story of Catholic-sponsored interracial cooperation within Chicago, Crossing Parish Boundaries complicates our understanding of northern urban race relations in the mid-twentieth century.

An Image of God

An Image of God
Author: Sharon M. Leon
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 237
Release: 2013-06-05
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 022603903X

During the first half of the twentieth century, supporters of the eugenics movement offered an image of a racially transformed America by curtailing the reproduction of “unfit” members of society. Through institutionalization, compulsory sterilization, the restriction of immigration and marriages, and other methods, eugenicists promised to improve the population—a policy agenda that was embraced by many leading intellectuals and public figures. But Catholic activists and thinkers across the United States opposed many of these measures, asserting that “every man, even a lunatic, is an image of God, not a mere animal." In An Image of God, Sharon Leon examines the efforts of American Catholics to thwart eugenic policies, illuminating the ways in which Catholic thought transformed the public conversation about individual rights, the role of the state, and the intersections of race, community, and family. Through an examination of the broader questions raised in this debate, Leon casts new light on major issues that remain central in American political life today: the institution of marriage, the role of government, and the separation of church and state. This is essential reading in the history of religion, science, politics, and human rights.

America's Religions

America's Religions
Author: Peter W. Williams
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Total Pages: 706
Release: 2008
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 025207551X

A panoramic introduction to religion in America, newly revised and updated

Handbook of Research on Catholic Higher Education

Handbook of Research on Catholic Higher Education
Author: Kendall Hunt
Publisher: IAP
Total Pages: 376
Release: 2003-08-01
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1607527669

The Handbook of Research of Catholic Higher Education provides an important and timely overview for scholars and students interested in understanding this important sector of private higher education. More importantly, it is an important resource for those faculty, staff, and administrators interested in shaping the distinctiveness of Catholic colleges and universities. The Handbook provides chapters presenting a thematic overview of a particular element of Catholic higher education and in addition provides an extensive bibliography resource of further reading. While some of the chapters will appeal to those with specialized interests, e.g. legal affairs, finance, and community relations, the chapters on mission and religious identity, history, and the documents on Catholic higher education provide an important perspective on the challenges facing Catholic higher education and should be read by everyone involved in Catholic colleges and universities. The Handbook of Research of Catholic Higher Education is an important resource for understanding and shaping the distinctiveness of Catholic higher education.

The Holocaust and Catholic Conscience

The Holocaust and Catholic Conscience
Author: Suzanne Brown-Fleming
Publisher: University of Notre Dame Pess
Total Pages: 256
Release: 1994-02-16
Genre: History
ISBN: 0268076219

American-born Cardinal Aloisius Muench (1889-1962) was a key figure in German and German-American Catholic responses to the Holocaust, Jews, and Judaism between 1946 and 1959. He was arguably the most powerful American Catholic figure and an influential Vatican representative in occupied Germany and in West Germany after the war. In this carefully researched book, which draws on Muench’s collected papers, Suzanne Brown-Fleming offers the first assessment of Muench’s legacy and provides a rare glimpse into his commentary on Nazism, the Holocaust, and surviving Jews. She argues that Muench legitimized the Catholic Church’s failure during this period to confront the nature of its own complicity in Nazism’s anti-Jewish ideology. The archival evidence demonstrates that Muench viewed Jews as harmful in a number of very specific ways. He regarded German Jews who had immigrated to the United States as "aliens," he believed Jews to be "in control" of American policy-making in Germany, he feared Jews as "avengers" who wished to harm "victimized" Germans, and he believed Jews to be excessively involved in leftist activities. Muench’s standing and influence in the United States, Germany, and the Vatican hierarchies gave sanction to the idea that German Catholics needed no examination of conscience in regard to the Church's actions (or inactions) during the 1940s and 1950s. This fascinating story of Muench’s role in German Catholic consideration—and ultimate rejection—of guilt and responsibility for Nazism in general and the persecution of European Jews in particular will be an important addition to scholarship on the Holocaust and to church history.