A Progressive Voice in the Catholic Church in the United States: Association of Pittsburgh Priests, 1966–2019 by Arthur J. McDonald (review)

The Association of Pittsburgh Priests (APP) was formed in 1966 in order to implement the reforms of the Second Vatican Council. Its members embraced the reforms that the Council made and sought to accelerate those changes, especially as they related to social justice, liturgical reform, and the democratizing of the church. Arthur McDonald’s A Progressive Voice in the Catholic Church in the United States provides a clear and sympathetic history that locates the organization at the center of progressive efforts to live out the Gospel in the decades that followed Vatican II. Though the story takes place mostly in the counties surrounding Pittsburgh, it touches on the broader story of the U.S. church when the APP joined movements and organizations outside the Diocese of Pittsburgh.

The story begins with the efforts of mostly younger ordained priests to organize to speed the diocese’s embrace of the Second Vatican Council. Though Bishop John Wright had been a strong supporter of progressive causes and established structures to advance the Council reforms in the diocese, he moved at a deliberate pace. The newly formed APP sought deeper and faster implementation. They recognized that Wright might see their efforts as a challenge to this authority, and so they obscured the names of participants in the minutes of their first meeting. This precaution proved unwarranted, as Wright professed to welcome the new group. But he more tolerated than empowered them, and his successors did the same. None of them sought or adopted the APP’s counsel on diocesan policies or public stances and some of them, such as Bishop Anthony Bevilacqua, saw the APP as an adversarial challenge to their authority.

The APP consisted originally of ordained priests who sought each other’s assistance in understanding and advancing reforms. They were mostly younger priests, assistants rather than pastors of the parishes in which they labored, and this position of relative powerlessness informed much of their work. They addressed questions of power within the church, racial justice within and outside church walls, and a broadening array of other social justice concerns as they navigated the twentieth century’s last decades. Though they never purported to represent the entire Pittsburgh priesthood, they drew significant support and membership from its ranks. They served as an unwavering voice in support of social justice and even pushed their bishops publicly to embrace positions those men often resisted taking.

In recent decades the APP extended membership to those outside the formally ordained priesthood. McDonald presents this as the result of a new understanding of the priesthood, but he acknowledges also that it also derived from necessity. For just as the priesthood, overall, declined dramatically in the last half century, so too did the APP. Opening membership to all with an interest in joining has kept it alive even to today. To what end though? McDonald concludes his history with a reflection on the group’s impact on the church and society. They had little success in turning powerful church officials and the broader populace toward the social justice vision that the APP promoted. But, he suggests, the APP’s major contribution “lies in its enduring hope-filled and prophetic vision focused on the coming kingdom of God” (179).

McDonald’s work falls somewhere between traditional academic history and personal memoir. He relies on familiar historical research, as he worked extensively in the APP archives and interviewed relevant participants in APP meetings, programs, and initiatives. Readers will recognize in his presentation the contours of the standard historical narrator. Interspersed within that narrative McDonald includes his own memories of events, as his life intersected with the APP for a number of years. In still other places he shares his responses to developments in his first-person voice, and even engages the reader in conversation. For example, he begins chapter four with a long...