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  • The Church and the Land: The National Catholic Rural Life Conference and American Society, 1923–2007
  • Mark Graham
The Church and the Land: The National Catholic Rural Life Conference and American Society, 1923–2007. By David S. Bovee. Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2010. 399 pp. $79.95.

Followers of matters agricultural in the United States have come to know the National Catholic Rural Life Conference (NCRLC) as a progressive voice on agricultural policy and a staunch supporter of family farms. Interestingly enough, the NCRLC was founded on a different set of objectives and concerns. As Bovee writes, the NCRLC began in response to the perceived weakening of Catholicism in rural areas. In the latter half of the nineteenth century, Catholicism was primarily an urban phenomenon, and the statistic that worried church officials was the consistently declining birth rate among urban Catholics, which paled in comparison to the equally consistent rising birth rate among rural Catholics. If Catholicism was to become firmly entrenched in the United States, its future would lie within rural areas, according to the conventional wisdom.

Accordingly, the NCRLC’s early mission was to bolster rural Catholicism through a number of strategies including founding cooperatives, various types of agricultural education programs, and increasing property ownership, among others. The Great Depression proved to be the watershed event in the NCRLC’s early life, as it not only drove hordes of farmers from the countryside to the city, but also inaugurated a new era of federal involvement in agriculture. Given the proclivity of federal agricultural programs to favor large, corporate [End Page 86] farms, which frequently undermined the economic viability of the family farms supported by the NCRLC, the NCRLC’s focus shifted markedly toward legislative initiatives.

The remainder of the book treats various directors of the NCRLC, its internationalization after World War II, its role in world hunger relief, its response to the emergence of agribusiness, various antipoverty initiatives, and the way in which it recently supplemented its concern for economic matters with environmental considerations.

This book is wide ranging, well researched, and very informative, although I found the chapters to be uneven at times. In any book such as this, which aspires to be an exhaustive account, there is a tendency to overreach, either by glossing over important strands of thought or by tackling too many topics. While one cannot help admiring Bovee’s adventurous undertaking, I was sometimes disappointed with the cursory treatment of certain topics, and the painstaking attention given to others. The sections on various directors of the NCRLC, while sometimes interesting because of the iconoclastic personalities involved or the finessing of intra-church politics, did not add much to the overall narrative. Likewise, given the NCRLC’s intense lobbying efforts at the federal legislative level ever since the Great Depression in order to protect the family farm, it would have been very interesting for Bovee to consider thoroughly whether the NCRLC’s policy positions actually might have unwittingly undermined the economic viability of the family farm, or whether the NCRLC might have misdiagnosed some of the salient forces pitted against family farming.

Mark Graham
Villanova University
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