One in Christ: Chicago Catholics and the Quest for Interracial Justice by Karen J. Johnson (review)

Karen Johnson's history of Catholic interracialism in mid-twentieth-century Chicago takes its name from one of St. Paul's letters to the early Christians: "There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free person, there is not male and female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus (Galatians 3:28; New American Bible, Revised Edition).

Nearly two millennia later, Roman Catholic theology continued to affirm Paul's idealized vision of Christianity. Yet, the social, political, and economic conditions of twentieth-century American racism in Chicago and other northern cities tested the church's claim of universality. By the First World War, Catholic Chicago, like the city at large, was sharply segregated by race. Johnson bookends her narrative with two iconic incidents of racial conflict on the streets of Chicago—the deadly race riot in the summer of 1919 and the vitriolic attacks on Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and his Freedom Movement allies marching for civil rights during the summer of 1966. Johnson notes that many white Catholic Chicagoans took particular offense at Catholic nuns and priests participating in the marches (204). Such critics adopted a position articulated a half century earlier by Archbishop George Mundelein, whose 1917 decision to exclude white Catholics from attending Mass at St. Monica's—the city's original African American parish—drew not only a color line in the Archdiocese but also a line between the spiritual and political. "Mundelein," Johnson argues, "failed to see racial injustice as a theological issue" (22).

Yet Johnson demonstrates in this deeply researched book that Catholic Chicago, like the church writ large, was not monolithic. Beginning in earnest during the 1930s, a small but committed group of mostly lay Catholic activists took part in a Catholic version of what historian Jacquelyn Dowd Hall has called the "long civil rights movement" (5).

Johnson introduces readers to a fascinating cast of characters and organizations, including the Federated Colored Catholics, Dorothy Day's Catholic Worker movement, the Chicago Inter-Student Catholic Action (CISCA) program led by Father Martin Carrabine, SJ, Catherine De Hueck's Friendship House led in Chicago by Ann Harrigan and Ellen Tarry, Ed Marciniak's Catholic Labor Alliance, and Chicago's chapter of the Catholic Interracial Council, founded by, among others, Marciniak, CIO labor union leader John Yancey, and Father Daniel Cantwell, its first chaplain.

Johnson emphasizes that black and white Catholic laypeople, along with a small cadre of progressive priests and nuns, led the Catholic interracial movement from the ground up. Nevertheless, she acknowledges that some members of the hierarchy supported racial justice efforts, including the Chicago auxiliary bishop and Catholic Youth Organization founder Bernard Sheil. Chicago's hierarchy—enjoying what historian Steven Avella has called its "Confident Church" era—often allowed interracial advocates and reformers, including Father Reynold Hillenbrand, to do their work. In 1936, Cardinal Mundelein appointed Hillenbrand to serve as rector of St. Mary of the Lake Seminary, where he influenced a generation of archdiocesan priests (71–72).

Johnson's most significant subject and the protagonist of the story, however, is Arthur G. Falls (1901–2000), a lifelong Chicago Catholic, physician, and African American, who fought tirelessly for racial justice during most of the twentieth century. Johnson makes use of Falls's extensive memoirs to weave together the story of twentieth-century interracialism in Chicago through his eyes. She describes Falls as "the midwife of the Catholic interracial movement in the 1930s" (10). Committed to a "one in Christ" faith community, Falls continually is disappointed by the shortcomings of Chicago's institutional church.

Johnson successfully argues that Falls and his fellow interracialists were profoundly influenced by the Pauline notion of the "Mystical Body of Christ," a phrase made popular by Pope Pius XII in his encyclical Mystici Corporis Christi (1943). One of the most fascinating individuals in the book is Sister Cecilia Himebaugh, a white Benedictine nun who [End Page...