The Road to Renewal: Victor Joseph Reed and Oklahoma Catholicism, 1905–1971 road to renewal: Victor Joseph Reed and Oklahoma Catholicism, 1905-1971

12. Out of the Ghetto: The Conscience of the Catholic Layman

Out of the Ghetto The Conscience of the Catholic Layman The declaration of this Vatican Council on the right of man to religious freedom has its foundation in the dignity of the person, whose exigencies have come to be fully known to human reason through centuries of experience. What is more, this doctrine of freedom has roots in divine revelation, and for this reason Christians are bound to respect it all the more conscientiously. Revelation does not indeed affirm in so many words the right of man to immunity from external coercion in matters religious. It does, however, disclose the dignity of the human person in its full dimensions. It gives evidence of the respect which Christ showed toward the freedom with which man is to fulfill his duty of belief in the word of God and it gives us lessons in the spirit which disciples of such a Master ought to adopt and continually follow. Thus further light is cast upon the general principles upon which the doctrine of this declaration on religious freedom is based. In particular, religious freedom in society is entirely consonant with the freedom of the act of Christian faith. Second Vatican Council, Declaration on Religious Freedom, Dignitatis Humanae, December 7, 1965 On March 11, 1960, the Oklahoma Courier published an editorial entitled “Rights without Fear.” American Catholics, the editor concluded, needed to take a stand based on their own experience, not that of Catholics in Europe: “We Catholics know that our full rights as citizens are not being respected. One of the great tasks we face is to find a method for making these rights respected —a method not based on favor, but on the fairness of our position � chapter 12  and our ability to sweat out our demands. This could be a significant contribution to a Christian development of Church-State relations.”1 The notion that the American Catholic experience had been somehow unique was to be an essential ingredient in the transformation of the perceptions of the laity. Such a notion had been reinforced by the writings of theologians like George Tavard of Assumption College in Worcester, Massachusetts , who warned in 1959 of the dangers of seeking to transplant the European model of Catholic Action to American soil. Catholic Action in Europe , Tavard declared, had derived from a set of national traditions in which the Church had, until recent years, been a powerful social force and where the laity had, for some time, been performing a variety of important social functions within the Church. The American lay movement, by contrast, “is made up of small, informal groups, loosely connected by their reading of Catholic lay periodicals like Jubilee or Commonweal. It exists in the exact measure in which sound theology has become available to the laity. In other words, the lay movement in the United States is not yet marked, as in Europe , by a special method of evangelization, the apostolate to laymen by laymen of the same milieu. It is rather characterized by a strong desire for a deeper, more vital, more existential grasp of the faith.”2 During the 1940s and 1950s, a shift took place both in the institutional Church’s perception of the role of the laity and in the laity’s perception of the authority of the Church. With the end of mass immigration in 1924, educated American Catholics became increasingly aware of the popular perception that their faith tradition neglected personal intellectual development. Such non-Catholic condescension fueled the steady expansion of Catholic higher education and the emergence of journals like Commonweal and Orate Fratres. After Pope Pius XI championed Catholic Action in 1929, the layman was provided with an organizational framework that—whatever the intent of its clerical founders—frequently operated independently of established Church structures. “Members of the small-group social apostolates,” writes historian Debra Campbell, “along with their clerical midwives gained a sense of critical distance from mainstream ‘parish Catholicism’ that empow-  The Human Church 1. Oklahoma Courier, March 11, 1960. 2. Tavard, The Church, the Layman, and the Modern World, 8–10 (quotation on 10). At the Second Vatican Council, it was clear that classical Catholic Action remained more popular with the prelates of the Latin countries than those of northern Europe and the English -speaking world. See Rynne, Vatican Council II, 323–28. ered them to dream new dreams and glean a new vision of the responsibilities of the...