American Catholics through the Twentieth Century: Spirituality, Lay Experience and Public Life (review)

Numerous lay Catholics in the twentieth-century United States participated actively in the life and mission of their church, often through efforts to express and live their faith in the public arenas of U.S. society. Claire Wolfteich's concise and wide-ranging analysis of Catholic organizations, movements, and leaders provides an engaging panorama of lay struggles and contributions, accentuating their often-implicit efforts to forge a spiritual path consistent with the lay vocation.

After a brief introduction that includes a summary treatment of the laity from medieval times to the present, Wolfteich examines lay-led movements and publications through which U.S. Catholics in the pre-Vatican II era sought to infuse the social order with gospel values: Commonweal, Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker, the Grail Movement, the Christian Family Movement, Opus Dei, and Integrity, a magazine published for a decade after Catholic Action advocate Carol Jackson and former Catholic Worker Ed Willock co-founded it in 1946. Even more extensive treatment is given to developments after Vatican II, with particular attention to figures like John F. Kennedy, John Courtney Murray, César Chávez, Daniel Callahan, Mario Cuomo, and Geraldine Ferraro, as well as the issues that shaped U.S. Catholics' sense of lay vocation and Catholic identity such as Civil Rights, ecumenism, Humanae Vitae and the birth control debate, and abortion. Two growing trends since the Council are the insistence that the clerical state does not represent a higher calling than the lay vocation, and the increasing calls for recognition of single and divorced Catholics as viable members of the church. Still, the sense of lay life as an authentic vocation needs further development among U.S. Catholics, particularly the ongoing challenges of fostering lay spiritual formation while also effectively engaging Catholic faith in the public life of a pluralistic society. Wolfteich's analysis of the U.S. bishops' 1986 pastoral message on economic justice and significant lay-led efforts like the Catholic Charismatic Renewal and Call to Action ground discussion of these challenges, though other predominately lay groups receive little or no treatment, such as the influential Cursillo movement, Marriage Encounter, and the Black Catholic Congresses initiated by lay leaders in the late nineteenth century and revived in 1987.

For this reviewer, the highlight of the book is the final chapter in which Wolfteich probes the theological and pastoral dimensions of lay spirituality and apostolic endeavors. Highlighting the importance of living Christianity within specific contexts—in the case of the United States a milieu marked by democracy, pluralism, secularity, and debates about the separation of church and state—Wolfteich outlines five approaches to the lay vocation which emerge from her analysis of twentieth-century Catholics: elected politicians, prophets, implicit evangelizers who act as a "leaven" in their places of work and other public arenas, dialoguers who engage in the role of bringing opposing sides into conversation and reconciliation, and the publicly-oriented domestic church as exemplified in groups like the Christian Family Movement. She offers specific challenges for all of these models or approaches. For example, though she recognizes that Catholicism does not provide a clear position on all issues of public policy (in contrast to Kennedy, Cuomo, and Ferraro), she urges elected officials to accept that faith and integrity require they do not create too sharp a divide between their private religious convictions and their public actions as legislators. Wolfteich notes that these five models imply an ecclesiological emphasis on the pilgrim people of God or the Mystical Body of Christ as images for the church; these images illuminate that the lay calling is not to participate in the mission of the hierarchy, but in the mission of the church. In the daily decision-making and lived reality of the lay vocation, Wolfteich argues that Catholics need to...