A Worldwide Heart: The Life of Maryknoll Father John J. Considine by Robert Hurteau (review)

Fr. John J. Considine is arguably the most influential and prolific United States Catholic to write on missiology and what he termed “World Christianity” from the years after World War I to the Vietnam War era. In 1915, Considine entered the Catholic Foreign Mission Society of America (Maryknoll), an organization of Catholic priests and brothers founded in 1911 and devoted entirely to overseas missions. From 1924, when Considine began his work at the Vatican’s office for mission, until 1968, when he completed his tenure as director of the U.S. Bishops’ Latin American Bureau in Washington, DC and retired, Considine promoted the Catholic missionary enterprise through church and state bureaucracies, in over a dozen books and one hundred articles, and as editor of Maryknoll’s popular publication, The Field Afar.

Robert Hurteau has contributed the first comprehensive biography of Considine’s life. Hurteau is a former Maryknoll missioner in Peru and currently directs the Center for Religion and Spirituality at Loyola Marymount University. Hurteau’s research at the Maryknoll archives, in the private collections of the Considine family, and at Propaganda Fide and the Vatican Secret Archives in Rome, along with his careful study of the secondary literature and Considine’s own writing (some of which Hurteau helpfully includes in an appendix), provides many insights into the life of a towering but seldom studied figure in the history of the Catholic Church in the United States.

Hurteau asks, “Who was John Considine?” at the outset of his study and over the course of eleven chapters, he provides a detailed, if at times anecdotal, account of Considine’s early life, career, and legacy.

The chapters move systematically through Considine’s life: family in New Bedford, Massachusetts in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; high school years and vocational discernment (1911-1915); Maryknoll seminary in Clarks Summit, Pennsylvania (1916-1917); ordination and graduate study at Catholic University of America (1917-1924); ten years in Rome, which included a fourteen-month mission study tour of Asia and Africa (1924-1934); service in Maryknoll leadership (1934-1946); editorship of The Field Afar, promotion of mission education, and study tours to Latin America, Asia, and Africa (1946-1960); service as director of the Latin American Bureau and involvement in a Washington circuit of church and political elites (1960-1968); post-retirement writing projects (1968-1982).

Hurteau includes two “Excurses” on missiology and on ecumenism and interreligious dialogue, but questions remain about the cultural, political, and geopolitical terrain that Considine navigated. For example, Hurteau tackles Considine’s largely negative reaction to Ivan Illich’s infamous 1967 essay, “The Seamy Side of Charity.” Did anyone outside of the Catholic world pay much mind to their debate?

A Worldwide Heart provides the reader with a strong sense of Considine’s personality and vision for his own life’s work and for the direction of the United States Catholic missionary movement, in which he was a crucial player for over half a century.