American Catholic Lay Groups and Transatlantic Social Reform in the Progressive Era.

• Author: Griffin, Charles J.G.
• Position: Book Review

American Catholic Lay Groups and Transatlantic Social Reform in the Progressive Era. By Deidre M. Moloney. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002; pp. xii + 267. $49.95; $19.95 paper.

Moloney has written a lucid and helpful study that should prove of interest to students of public address and social movement rhetoric in the progressive era. Moloney's work, which grew out of her dissertation in history at the University of Wisconsin, examines the efforts of lay Catholic reformers in a variety of causes, including temperance, immigration, rural colonization, charity and settlement work during the period 18801925. Broadly speaking, she argues that Catholic social reform efforts during the Progressive era merit consideration on their own terms, rather than as mere extensions of their better-known Protestant counterparts.

Moloney begins with the observation that academic historians have all but ignored Catholic contributions to Progressive era reform. One reason for this, she suggests, is the "social control" paradigm that, until recently, has dominated historical scholarship on the period. On this view, charitable reforms generally are construed as mechanisms employed by a dominant elite for the purpose of controlling the lower classes. Moloney holds that such a model is ill suited to explaining the work of Catholic reformers, many of whom were themselves men and women of modest circumstances with few social connections.

Moloney offers an alternative thesis for the array of Catholic social reform movements that flowered during the late nineteenth century, one grounded in the distinctive mix of ethnic, religious, class, and gender-related influences that characterized American Catholicism at that time. The interplay of these elements, she argues, spawned a number of dilemmas whose presence both motivated and shaped the efforts of Progressive-era Catholic reformers. Among those she explores in this study are: 1) The growing Americanization of European Catholic immigrants by the late nine teenth century (particularly those of Irish and German descent) and their consequent struggle to "reconcile the advantages that upward mobility brought for their minority position in American society with a desire to preserve their distinctive ethnic and religious traditions " (1); 2) Inherent conflicts between culturally sanctioned practices of Catholic immigrants and the dominant themes in American social reform. For example, longstanding...