Empowering the People of God: Catholic Action before and after Vatican II ed. by Jeremy Bonner, Christopher D. Denny, Mary Beth Fraser Connolly (review)

The editors and contributors to Empowering the People of God have woven an engaging history of twentieth century Catholicism in the United States through tightly focused examinations of specific groups, theologians, prelates, and dioceses. Though each contributor’s particular concern often narrows to a specific group or individual at a particular moment, Jeremy Bonner, Christopher Denny and Mary Beth Fraser Connolly argue that reading the entire collection enables one to better see “the growing confidence of the Catholic laity, which proclaimed a new understanding of the Church and the laity’s role within it” (6). The book’s early chapters are rich, insightful, and engaging, and one can see in them – however faintly at times – signs of a coming transformation in the People of God. But it is in the book’s second half that readers will find the most powerful evidence of lay empowerment. These chapters best reveal the transformative promise that Vatican II held for so many, and the ways that lay men and women sought to make that promise real.

Chapters on pre-Vatican II Catholics form the book’s first half, and they focus mostly on the ways that church officials sought to galvanize lay energies through a program called Catholic Action. The goals varied from nation to nation, and even from diocese to diocese within nations, but they generally coalesced around efforts to spur lay Catholics to reform society, to conform it to Catholic ideals.

At times these efforts seemed to aim fairly low, such as when The Catholic Club of the City of New York (CCCNY) – an organization of the city’s male Catholic economic elite that flourished in the pre-Great Depression decades – leavened its focus on cultivating a cultured Catholic upper class with acts of charity toward poor immigrants. Similarly, Sacred Heart parish in Boston and Holy Rosary Parish in Washington, DC devoted their Catholic Action energies to preserving post-World War II Italian-American culture – hardly a transformative enterprise. And even John Courtney Murray’s theology of Catholic Action sought to create space for an American version of the initiative that reflected the nation’s cultural pluralism and eschewed unified clerical prescriptions for action. But church officials proved more ambitious and the laity more determined in other contexts. Proponents of liturgical reform in the pre-Vatican II decades wanted the Mass to propel Catholics into social action. Perhaps most significantly, city officials in early twentieth century San Francisco followed Catholic social teaching when they supported workers’ efforts to wrangle dignified lives in the face of business and industrial leaders’ efforts to crush those ambitions.

But the real progress toward lay empowerment occurred during and after the Second Vatican Council. At this point readers can better appreciate the editors’ thesis, and see the “People of God” rising to greater and more transformative roles in society and in the church itself. Here we see the Catholic laity not only participating in the “apostolate of the hierarchy,” as Pope Pius XI defined Catholic Action, but pushing the hierarchy to live out the ideals affirmed so powerfully in Vatican II. Young Catholic laywomen joined the Extension Lay Volunteers to implement Catholic social justice imperatives while working in some of the nation’s poorest neighborhoods. The Sisters of Mercy taught in Chicago’s Catholic schools for a century before Vatican II, began a process of renewal through the 1950s Sister Formation Movement, and re-imagined their vocations independent of chancery preferences in light of Council. Even the National Council of Catholic Women, long considered to be a champion of traditional women’s roles and the cult of domesticity, pushed for expanded responsibilities and stature in the church. Mary J. Henold concludes that they were, for a short while, feminists who rejected the label. Lay men and women in Tulsa and...