About this Issue

This issue of American Catholic Studies includes essays that nicely complement one another—a pair of pairs. Two articles address the scholarship on women religious and two address Catholic responses to poverty in the developing world and at home.

The articles by Joseph G. Mannard (Indiana University of Pennsylvania) and Deirdre Raftery (University College Dublin) focus on discrete dimensions of the scholarship on women religious in the United States. Mannard examines the proliferation of communities of women religious in antebellum America. He speaks of a “convent revolution” to argue that the three decades between 1830 and 1860 can be viewed as the starting point of the growth and influence of women religious in the United States. Raftery’s article turns readers’ attention to the future of scholarship on the history of women religious. The coming “third wave” of scholarship in this field will include advanced technological methods, equipping historians with new tools and, one anticipates, fresh insights into the lives of women religious.

Edward T. Brett’s (La Roche College) article on Oscar Romero and Mary Elizabeth Brown’s (Marymount Manhattan College) cover essay on archival resources pertinent to U.S. Catholic immigrant aid societies both address matters of pressing contemporary concern, namely American Catholic attitudes toward poverty in the developing world and the U.S. Catholic reception of people fleeing poverty, violence, and political oppression. Brett investigates the contrasting views of Romero held by traditional, conservative elites and those who were influenced by Vatican II’s people of God ecclesiology and the preferential option for the poor. Brown provides an overview of archival collections available at the Center for Migration Studies in New York City, including papers of the Italian Saint Raphael Society, the National Catholic Welfare Conference (NCWC), and the American Committee for Italian Migration (ACIM). Scholars can use these important collections to track the various responses of U.S. Catholics to immigration.

Taken together, the articles in this issue provide readers with fresh insights into and methodological resources for the study of subjects that remain pressing contemporary concerns.