American Crusade: Catholic Youth in the World Mission Movement from World War I through Vatican II (review)

Summary Review

Unless unusually devout, university-age U.S. Catholics today dislike considering themselves missionaries. In fact the dichotomy between their keen interest in international service, often with the church—some programs offering such opportunities have many applicants—and their aversion to self-description as missionaries is striking. This study of the Catholic Students’ Mission Crusade (CSMC, or Crusade), which counted a million members in 1969, thus feels like a window on a lost world. Yet as David Endres shows, the movement faced transformations between its 1918 founding and its dissolution in 1970 that were also wrenching. By making his theme those changing circumstances and the CSMC’s corresponding adaptations, Endres connects its story to U.S. Catholic history more generally.

As Endres recounts the rise and decline of the CSMC, each chapter condenses different themes as the Crusade faced new realities: World War I, the 1920s boom followed by the Great Depression, World War II, anti-communism as a staple of Catholic public life, and the upheavals of the 1960s. Endres notes changes in the Crusade’s style and important figures in the movement, connecting its unfolding to ecclesial and other contexts. In his introduction he rightly calls the CSMC a “passkey to multiple worlds” (x).

Chapter 1 describes American Catholic missionary consciousness arising in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Early impulses were imbued with both typical national self-understandings—as a country with distinct global destiny—and a wariness of identifying with extant and similar U.S. Protestant missionary orientations. Like Protestants, U.S. Catholics oriented toward mission touted instinctive American pragmatism as a gift to the world. They also linked the missionary impulse to monetary collections for “pagan babies.” The huge Student Volunteer Movement (SVM), founded by evangelical Protestants in the 1880s, inspired the eventual CSMC. Yet Protestants were also competitors and some Catholics saw in incipient Protestant decline Catholic missionary opportunities.

The book’s heart lies in chapters 2 through 5, each organized around one of four generations Endres discerns in CSMC history. The founders, described in chapter two, acted in the wake of World War I, seeking to cooperate with the church’s response to upheavals in mission lands where missionaries from warring countries endured unrest and occasional expulsion. The post-war period saw the formation of many U.S. Catholic organizations, and several prominent priests established student groups, notably Daniel Lord, S.J., who founded the sodality movement among students at Jesuit schools. A group of university students gathered in 1917 to encourage foreign missions interest and the next year Clifford King, a Divine Word seminarian at Techny, Illinois, conceived a Catholic counterpart to the SVM. Members of the CSMC pledged to commit themselves to prayer, education, and service on behalf of Catholic foreign missions. Most of the movement’s early chapters existed at Catholic seminaries, but the crusader ideal motivated every participant, all of whom were encouraged to consider a formal missionary vocation. Though King and other inaugural leaders soon went abroad as missionaries, the movement began briskly. Notably, an early effort to have separate chapters for men and women was rebuffed.

Chapter 3 recounts the years up to World War II, during which CSMC headquarters moved to Cincinnati, home of “Crusade Castle.” Various clergy and onetime seminarians provided leadership as the movement grew to include a majority of non-seminarians as well as students in primary and secondary schools. The Crusade notably developed a neo-medieval culture linked to a broader neo-scholastic Catholic revival. Endres describes in detail two elaborate “mission pageants” prepared by Father Lord, both performed in St. Louis and attended by thousands. Eventually Lord, loyal to the sodality movement, moved away from the CSMC, but not before developing an anthem and creating an initiation ritual, modeled on supposed medieval oaths of fealty. In this period the Crusade overcame the Holy See’s...