The Middle Way: The National Catholic Rural Life Conference and Rural Issues in the 20th and 21st Centuries

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/ajes.12155
• Date: 01 May 2016
• Published date: 01 May 2016

The Middle Way: The National Catholic

Rural Life Conference and Rural Issues

in the 20

th

and 21

st

Centuries

By DAVI D S. BOVE

´E*

ABSTRACT. This article explains how the National Catholic Rural Life

Conference (NCRLC), from its founding in 1923 to the present, applied

basic Catholic principles in response to a succession of changes in

American rural society. In doing so, it proposed a middle way between

capitalism and socialism and between the Democratic and Republican

parties. In the 1920s, the Reverend Edwin V. O’Hara founded the

NCRLC mainly to bolster the demographically weak rural Church. In

the 1930s, the NCRLC turned to economic concerns in response to the

Great Depression. It supported many New Deal programs that helped

farmers as well as cooperatives and a “back-to-the-land” movement.

The Conference consistently supported the family farm as the basic

institution of a morally and economically sound rural society. In the

1940s and 1950s, the Conference entered the realm of international

affairs under Monsignor Luigi G. Ligutti and addressed problems of

world hunger, land reform, and underdeveloped countries. Under

Monsignor Edward W. O’Rourke, who became director in 1960, the

NCRLC joined in the movement for social justice and campaigned for

the rights of the rural poor and migrant farm workers. Starting around

1970, the Conference became increasingly interested in environmental

and energy issues. The NCRLC is in harmony with the 21

st

-century

pope, Francis, on ruraland ecological issues.

The Catholic Church has a tradition of social teaching that goes back

for two millennia. Sincethe industrial age, that teaching is usually dated

as starting with Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical Rerum Novarum in 1891

*David S. Bov

ee is Associate Professor of History, Fort Hays State University

(Kansas). He is author of The Church and the Land: The National Catholic Rural Life

Conference and American Society, 1923–2007 (2010), from which passages in this

article are excerpted, with the kind permission of Catholic University of America,

Washington, DC. Website: www.fhsu.edu/history/faculty/bovee/

American Journal of Economics and Sociology, Vol. 75, No. 3 (May, 2016).

DOI: 10.1111/ajes.12155

V

C2016 American Journal of Economics and Sociology, Inc.

(Schuck 1991; ZieRba 2014). The task of interpreting this teaching for

rural America was taken up by the National Catholic Rural Life Confer-

ence (NCRLC) in 1923. From then until the present day, this organiza-

tion, which in 2013 changed its name to Catholic Rural Life (CRL), has

set out a consistent, searching perspective that has made it one of the

most prominent organizations representing the interests of rural Amer-

ica in the United States. The NCRLC’s approach to American rural life

exemplifies Catholic social teaching’s middle way between unregulated

capitalism and socialism and between the Democratic and Republican

parties. This article traces the historical development of the NCRLC’s

social and economic ideasconcerning rural America.

Background Ideas

The National Catholic Rural Life Conference drew on the Catholic

Church’s long tradition of thought on social justice. However, until the

late 19

th

century, the Church in America was mainly concerned with

individual morality rather than the structure of society. Thus, Catholic

concern for social problems was expressed largely in charitable institu-

tions that dealt with the results of poverty rather than social reform that

aimed at its causes. At the same time, many American Catholics, espe-

cially immigrants, disapproved of individualistic American society,

which they criticized from the point of view of a corporatist ideology

derived from German and French romantic theories of an organic soci-

ety, which stressed the importance of institutions such as church, com-

munity, and family as intermediaries between the individual and the

state. Many rural Catholics in the late 19

th

century lamentedthe immoral

influence of urban, capitalist, secular America on Catholic immigrant

families (Moody 1953: 849–852; Abell 1960: 7–54, 139–140; Nuesse

1945: 250–251, 286;Gjerde 1997: 15–16, 164, 251–281, 311–316).

The decisive event in awakening the concern of Catholic

Americans—indeed, of Catholics all over the world—to modern social

problems was the appearance of Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical Rerum

Novarum, “On the Condition of Labor,” on May 15, 1891. The encyclical

was the first papal statement to respond in a comprehensive way to the

Industrial Revolution. It applied to the rural economy in several ways: it

upheld the right of private property, it legitimized workers’

The Middle Way 763

organizations, and it supported the right of workers to a “living wage”

(Abell 1945: 464–495; Abell 1960: 73–78).

Four aspects of Leo’s doctrine of private property were striking and

of importance for the future of Catholic land policy in America. First,

Leo’s commitment to private ownership (he called the right to private

property “sacred and inviolable”) was more absolute than the more

flexible approach to the subject taken by St. Thomas Aquinas and Pope

Clement XIII before him and Popes Pius XI and John Paul II later on

(Gilson 1954: 210, 230–231; Schuck 1991: 29, 81, 82, 101n45, 110n97;

United States Catholic Conference 1989: 9; Ryan 1927: 26; Speltz 1945:

14–15). Second, from the principle of private property, Leo derived his

call for the wider distribution of land. Maintaining a large class of land-

owning family farmers would be a key aspect of future NCRLC policy.

Third, the encyclical argued that the spread of land ownership would

have the “excellent results” of bridging the gulf between the rich and

poor classes and increasing agricultural production. Fourth, Leo taught

that governments should encourage private ownership. Thus, although

the Church opposed government ownership of property, as in social-

ism, it supported government intervention to assure a more equitable

distribution of property (Gilson 1954: 230–238). All of these four points

would be controversial aspects of future Catholic rural policy.

Besides support for widespread private property, Rerum Novarum

was also important in giving the Church’s sanction to labor unions and

the “living wage.” The former implied support for such rural organiza-

tions as cooperatives and credit unions, a later emphasis of the NCRLC.

The latter inspired future Catholic efforts on behalf of poor rural laborers,

especially migrant farm workers (Gilson 1954: 229–238). Overall,

although American Catholic liberals greeted Rerum Novarum with great

applause, it was opposed by conservatives in the hierarchy and else-

where, who prevented it from being used as the basis of a Catholic

reform movement at that time (Abell 1945: 467, 478–479, 480–483, 492–

495; Abell 1960: 76–78).

Later in the 1890s, the Populist Party rose to prominence by offering

many proposals aimed at bettering the lot ofrural Americans. However,

it attracted little official Catholic support, in part because of the radical

nature of many of its proposals and in part because Populism was often

linked with anti-Catholicism. In some rural areas, nevertheless, Catholic

The American Journal of Economics and Sociology764