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85 Chapter 4 The Great Depression In the 1930s, America’s Great Depression propelled the National Catholic Rural Life Conference into a new era in its development. The severity of the Depression’s impact upon Catholic farmers made it imperative that the Conference address economic issues in a serious and consistent way. In doing so, the Conference participated in the effort by the entire American Catholic Church to define its positions on the economic issues posed by the crisis of the day. As the Conference did this and as the economic crisis continued through the decade, the rural economy began to replace the rural population problem as the NCRLC’s paramount concern. Although the NCRLC did not officially trumpet the shift in emphasis, some Conference officials referred to it at the time. By 1933, Conference president W. Howard Bishop saw that the organization had evolved as a result of “the greatest agricultural depression in the history of our country” from devotion “primarily if not exclusively to missionary and educational problems in the small country parishes of America” to concern with “the economic and social phases of the rural problem.”1 Similarly, in 1939, the Conference’s newly elected president, Vincent J. Ryan, declared that “a brief seventeen years ago, Bishop O’Hara of Kansas City called the Conference into existence as an instrumentality for the transfer of the advantages of religion to the spiritually underprivileged in rural America.” Since then, however, “circumstances have forced an enlargement of the original sphere of Conference concern. While holding tenaciously to its essential purpose of serving the spiritual needs of the nation’s agricultural population , it has taken to itself, as a matter of necessity, the task of interpreting the Christian principles of justice and charity to rural economists, governmental authorities, educators and social workers of every category.”2 The 1. [W. Howard Bishop], “Milwaukee 1924 and 1933,” Landward 1 (Autumn 1933): 1. 2. Vincent J. Ryan, “A Statement by the President,” Catholic Rural Life Bulletin 2 (November 20, 1939): 1. 86 The Church and the Land NCRLC’s concern with economic and social justice issues that thus began in earnest during the Depression years did not cease with the abatement of the crisis but carried on until the present. The NCRLC and Rural Economics in the 1920s Although the rural life movement had been primarily concerned with the rural demographic problem in the 1920s, it had given some attention to rural economic issues. The Rural Life Bureau and the NCRLC, like the rest of the Church, was only slowly developing a “social gospel” to justify branching out from purely spiritual concerns to tackle moral issues that existed in secular society.3 The Social Action Department of the National Catholic Welfare Conference, led by John A. Ryan, was the spearhead of this movement, and the department’s Rural Life Bureau, under O’Hara, to some extent shared in it. The NCRLC, with its backbone of old-fashioned rural pastors, was more reluctant in expressing interest in such rural “social action.” In addition, some of the episcopal sponsors of the Conference were loath to let it branch out to consider social and economic topics.4 In the 1920s, the NCRLC—like most Catholics, and, indeed, most other Americans at the time—was committed to voluntarism in the economic sector. For many Catholics, government intervention in the economy was associated with dangerous “socialism,” which meant, from a religious point of view, “atheism” as well.5 The NCRLC followed this trend in its utterances on rural economic matters. Despite the severe economic depression that was afflicting American agriculture in the 1920s, neither the Conference nor the Rural Life Bureau formulated a short-term program aimed at mitigating it. Insofar as Catholic rural leaders responded to economic problems, they thought in terms of long-range methods for improving farmers’ economic lot. These would afford little immediate relief to the hard-pressed farmers, but they were the theoretically correct ways for gradually bringing about a better rural economic order. In keeping with the dictates of voluntarism, the three main means the Conference proposed were co3 . David J. O’Brien, American Catholics and Social Reform: The New Deal Years (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968), chap. 2. 4. For example, Archbishop Glennon of St. Louis would not endorse statements on “Capital and Labor, State Ownership and Individualism, and similar subjects,” at the first NCRLC convention . August F. Brockland to Frederick P. Kenkel, September 19, 1923, “Clippings,” CU. 5. Abell, American...

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