Catholicism and the Tensions of Identity in Progressive-Era America

Deirdre M. Moloney. American Catholic Lay Groups and Transatlantic Social Reform in the Progressive Era. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2002. xiii + 267 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index. $49.95 (cloth). $19.95 (paper).

U.S. Catholics, Deirdre M. Moloney informs us, "struggled to reconcile the advantages that upward mobility brought to their minority position in American society with a desire to preserve their distinctive ethnic and religious traditions. The dual focus of Catholic efforts distinguished them from Protestant ones, even when their activities shared common characteristics" (p. 1). In tracing the development of Catholic laic reforms, Moloney deftly weaves issues of ethnicity, gender, and class through her narrative, illustrating the complex, often competing tensions that have defined human identity. By reminding readers of the persistent centrality of religious faith in American life, she makes important contributions to scholarship that has reinvigorated the historical study of the Progressive Era. Given a contemporary environment in which lay Catholics have challenged the authority of their bishops, Moloney's timely investigation expands our understanding of the Catholic Church beyond the works of the clergy or female religious by opening a window on the dynamic, transatlantic world of lay activism. ¹

Moloney joins historians such as Daniel T. Rodgers and James J. Connolly in broadening the chronological and physical boundaries of the Progressive Era. She locates antecedents of reform before the 1890s and follows activities well into the 1930s. Her exploration of progressivism also carries her across the ocean, a journey similar to the one taken by Rodgers in Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in the Progressive Age (1998). Rodgers attributes new social reforms in the United States at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the next to the "movements of politics and ideas throughout the North Atlantic world that trade and capitalism had tied together." ² In doing so, Rodgers contests the ideology of American exceptionalism by demonstrating the international system of activists, institutions, and philosophies that transcended national boundaries and enervated reforms across the United States. Although neither as ambitious nor as strident as Rodgers's challenge, American Catholic Lay Groups and Transatlantic Social Reform in the Progressive Era adds substantially to this historiographical landscape. Moloney argues that "not only did Catholic reforms in the United States appropriate established models of reform from Europe, but concurrent European social and political movements also shaped the activities undertaken by the American Catholic laity" (p. 2). Moreover, because the Catholic Church was, and remains, a global institution, Moloney's narrower study possesses great credibility and persuasive force.

In Rodgers's story, college-educated American liberals began to take sociological tours of Europe in the 1890s. In doing so, they learned of the ills associated with industrialization there and in the United States and, in seeking common remedies, became immersed in ideas that circulated across borders. ³ Moloney's work, however, suggests another foundation for this pan-Atlantic exchange. Many Catholic reformers were immigrants or children of immigrants; their experiences with Europe were more immediate, perhaps even lineal. Their ethnicity mattered to them and to the larger society. Yet, in Moloney's careful analysis, neither ethnicity nor religion, for that matter, acts as an independent variable determining the course of the reforms that followed. Rather, and although she does not privilege ethnicity to the extent that James Connolly does in The Triumph of Ethnic Progressivism: Urban Political Culture in Boston (1998), she joins him in arguing the social construction of ethnicity. ⁴ Complex religious, class, and gender roles shaped ethnic identities and responses to the conditions that garnered the reformers' attention.

Moloney begins her trek through the Catholic lay reforms by returning readers to familiar territory—the Columbian Exposition of 1893—and revealing aspects of the event that few historians have appreciated. If indeed the White City represented an attempt by the United States and by the city of Chicago to...