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129 Chapter 6 Inside the NCRLC Interlocking Conflicts While the NCRLC grappled with the economic problems of the Great Depression in the 1930s, it suffered from a series of organizational difficulties and personal squabbles that interacted in a complex manner throughout the decade. These problems can be looked at from three major perspectives . First was the conflict between autonomy and higher direction of the Conference. The NCRLC and its “grass roots” of rural pastors were constantly involved in a struggle for control of the Catholic rural life movement with the bishops and “social action” priests of the NCWC. By the 1940s, when Luigi Ligutti became executive secretary, the NCRLC was, at least for a time, completely victorious in this struggle. Second, the thirties witnessed a constant tugging back and forth within the Conference between religious and economic concerns. In the 1920s, there was no question that the Conference had been more concerned with the Catholic rural population problem than with economic issues. But with the onset of the Depression, economic problems suddenly became so urgent that they threatened to sweep the NCRLC off its feet, to the detriment of religious concerns. A “mid-course correction” in 1935 involving the dropping of an economically oriented president established a fairly stable equilibrium between the two concerns that persisted in the following decades. Finally, unlike the 1920s, when Father O’Hara was the unchallenged head of the movement, and the 1940s and 1950s, when Ligutti gathered all of the reins into his hands, no single leader of the movement emerged in the 1930s. A number of strong personalities vied for the title, and their struggles created a third source of conflict. The first precipitating event that broke the relatively tranquil state of the NCRLC leadership in the 1920s was O’Hara’s appointment as bishop of Great Falls, Montana, in 1930. To take the episcopal post, O’Hara had to give up his dual positions of director of the NCWC Rural Life Bureau 130 The Church and the Land and executive secretary of the NCRLC. This left the Conference with the problems of filling these offices and also of coping with O’Hara’s residual influence upon NCRLC direction. For after O’Hara’s appointment as bishop , the Conference named him honorary president, and as such he continued to attend most NCRLC conventions. His prestige as founder tended to make the others defer to him when he cared to express an opinion. In the later thirties, O’Hara was chairman of the NCWC Social Action Department and thus became involved in the NCRLC–Rural Life Bureau controversy of that time. Some of the NCRLC’s new leadership thought that O’Hara’s continued involvement held the Conference back. In 1936, Executive Secretary James Byrnes wrote President William Mulloy that it would be in the interest of the Conference to “break away from the setup of past years wherein Bishop O’Hara was the everything and all in the Conference.” Byrnes said that “the organization is now proceeding under its own steam,” and that O’Hara need not be involved in all decisions, but might be informed, “with all dignity and respect,” of decisions the Conference had arrived at on its own.1 O’Hara’s influence gradually declined as the decade went on and the NCRLC’s new leaders became more experienced in directing the Conference . But no one of these new leaders emerged as the clear successor to O’Hara. Certainly O’Hara’s immediate replacement as Rural Life Bureau director/NCRLC executive secretary, the Reverend Edgar Schmiedeler, O.S.B., did not meet with everyone’s approval. Schmiedeler was a stockily built, square-faced man of middle age who had been teaching sociology at St. Benedict’s College in Atchison, Kansas, since 1919. One reporter said that Schmiedeler’s “personality evades analysis.” He was described as a “cross between Mussolini and Mr. Milquetoast”; he exhibited a “dogged perseverance” but also a “well-informed, optimistic diffidence” that—according to the writer—impelled others to help him in his work.2 Some colleagues in the rural life movement viewed him less positively as narrowminded , self-righteous, and stubborn. Schmiedeler officially took over as director and executive secretary on August 1, 1931. Thus there was a gap of a full year between O’Hara’s departure for Great Falls and the installation of his successor. Enter a third per1 . NCRLC minutes binder (1923–32), NCRLC 8-1, 79, 80, 81; NCRLC minutes binder (1933...

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