In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

358 Chapter 15 Catholic and American The NCRLC over Eight Decades It remains to assess the important effects of the National Catholic Rural Life Conference—both intended and unintended—and the main themes of its development. Three important areas of the Conference’s effects were the Catholic rural population problem, the NCRLC’s role in the Catholic social action movement, and the Conference as an “identity group” for rural Catholics. The effects in all three areas involved the “Catholic” in the NCRLC assimilating itself to the “American.” The original purpose behind the founding of the NCRLC was to strengthen the American Catholic Church numerically in the countryside. Although this was hardly mentioned as a goal of the Conference by the end of the twentieth century, it was still important for a long enough portion of its history (at least through the 1950s) that it will be worthwhile to see how far the NCRLC was successful. For the NCRLC, solving the Catholic rural population problem involved first increasing the proportion of Catholics in the total American rural population, and second (through the high birthrates of rural people), increasing the proportion of Catholics in the total American population. Although the Conference knew it was facing an uphill battle, it thought it was making at least some progress. In 1950, Monsignor Ligutti wrote: “If the NCRLC by its education and propaganda could retard the cityward movement it might be said to have accomplished the unexpected. While no scientifically accurate studies have been made it is the firm conviction of its leaders that the cityward trend of Catholics has been retarded through the persistent educational campaign of the NCRLC.” Population statistics confirm that the goals of the NCRLC in this area were attained, at least relatively. While in 1900 the American Catholic population was 20.4 percent rural (2.9 million out of 14.2 million), and in 1920 Father O’Hara Catholic and American 359 estimated that it was 19 percent rural, in 1974 (the last date for which rural Catholic data is available), the American Catholic population was still 17.7 percent rural (8.5 million out of 48 million). When one compares that to the fact that from 1900 to 1980 the rural percentage in the total American population dropped from about 60 percent to 26.3 percent, the Catholic population appears to have done remarkably well in preserving its rural component.1 During the NCRLC’s existence, Catholics as a whole also more than maintained their proportion of the total American population. Studies using different methodologies resulted in varying numbers, but they revealed the same overall trend. Will Herberg’s Protestant—Catholic—Jew (1960) showed that from the 1920s to the 1950s, when the NCRLC was most concerned about the Catholic rural population problem, Catholics in the United States actually increased relative to Protestants, as demonstrated in table 4. Over this period, Americans increasingly affiliated with both Protestant and Catholic churches: the Protestant gain was 32 percent, the Catholic gain 42 percent. In their well-known study of American religious population, The Churching of America (1992), Roger Finke and Rodney Stark calculated that from 1940 to 1985, Catholics increased from 33 percent of all American church members (not all of the American population) to 36.8 percent, a gain of 12 percent in “market share.” A survey cited by the Pew Forum found that from 1974 to 2004, the Catholic share of the American population remained steady at about 25 percent while the Protestant share declined from 64.3 percent to 50.4 percent. Thus the religious/demographic goals of the NCRLC appeared to be met.2 How much the NCRLC itself was responsible for the vitality of the American Catholic population is debatable. It may indeed have had a substantial impact, as Ligutti claimed, on keeping Catholics in the countryside. But there are many other possible reasons for the increase in the proportion of the overall Catholic population, such as immigration from abroad, the 1. Luigi G. Ligutti, “National Catholic Rural Life Conference,” in “Belleville Convention, A Review of the Past, 1950,” NCRLC 8-7, 6; David Steven Bovée, “The Church and the Land: The National Catholic Rural Life Conference and American Society, 1923–1985,” (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 1986), 25–27, 85; U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, Statistical Abstract of the United States: 1985, 105th ed. (Washington, D.C. Government Printing Office, 1984), 22; “National Catholic Rural Life Conference, Paid Memberships in...

Share