Fluent in Faith: The Gift of Mary McCormick by Donald J. Mueller & Jacqueline Hansen Maggiore (review)

Fluent in Faith charts the exceptional life and ministry of Mary McCormick, a woman who made the most of one of the new opportunities for Catholic laity to minister in the name of the church that emerged in the 1950s and 1960s. The Papal Volunteers for Latin America (PAVLA) program was inaugurated in 1960 at the behest of the U.S. bishops in response to Pope John XXIII's desire to see more cooperation between Catholics in North and South America. The venture was further shaped by a church-wide perception of the need to combat the looming specter of communism during this zenith of Cold War tensions. PAVLA was the best known of many lay-missionary organizations that began to populate the landscape of American Catholicism in the years following World War II.

It was within this larger context that Mary McCormick in 1968 felt called to leave her home in Milwaukee for Bogotá, Colombia, as a PAVLA volunteer. As a fifty-six year old widowed Irish-Catholic Wisconsin native mother of seven, with no working knowledge of Spanish, and her three youngest daughters in tow, McCormick does not fit the stereotype of the young idealist that often comes to mind when one thinks of an international volunteer. But as the authors emphasized throughout the text, Mary McCormick defied stereotypes throughout her life.

McCormick served in the barrios of Bogotá for almost a quarter century until health reasons forced her back to Milwaukee for good in the early 1990s. Particularly inspired by the example of Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker movement, with a tireless work ethic and cheerful spirit, McCormick crafted a truly remarkable ministry that is the heart of this book. She created education and nutrition programs, built a network of American donors, started a micro-finance program, was a pivotal source of support and hospitality for other American volunteers who came to Bogotá, and even helped one man begin a new religious community, the Brothers of Divine Providence.

This is a narrow study that at times borders on hagiography. It may not be fitting for use in a course, but for the individual reader it does shed light on the understudied lay missionary movement and the need for more research in this area. As McCormick's years in Colombia show, lay missionary and international service programs like PAVLA provided Catholics a new and unique way to actualize their faith in service to others largely outside the directives of traditional ecclesial authority. Programs like the Jesuit Volunteer Corps continue in this role today, providing critical support staff, and shaping a dynamic post-institutional Catholicism as the ranks of priests and nuns continue to decline. In this regard, the exceptional life of Mary McCormick represents one small inspirational glimpse of a larger critical transformation that is still very much in motion.