Empowering the People of God gathers eleven studies into a multifaceted picture of Catholic Action in the United States in the twentieth century. The book is divided into two parts. Part 1 presents five chapters focusing on Catholic Action–related initiatives in the pre-Vatican II era, while part 2 offers six studies of postconciliar events reflecting the aims of, if not explicit affiliation with, Catholic Action. Each chapter provides a detailed study narrowly focused on a particular community or figure in American Catholic history. In each case, the narrow focus allows an attention to detail and nuance in telling the story of a small piece of a much larger picture. Whether dealing with well-known figures such as John Courtney Murray and John Cardinal Dearden or movements less familiar outside their own moment in history, such as the Grail and the Extension Lay Volunteers, each study illuminates a vignette in American Catholic history that is rich with implications for today. As a collection, the studies bring to life the opportunities and struggles of generations past and, by extension, compel the reader to reflect on how the current generation is responding to challenges of identity, structure, and theological support for social action in the church today. The undertaking of Catholic Action, as an ecclesially structured initiative, in the United States in the twentieth century laid the groundwork for action by Catholics in the twenty-first century, operating beyond that structural framework but still in response to their baptismal vocation.

The studies in part 1 take the reader from the Catholic Club of the City of New York, a social club begun in the late nineteenth century, to the intersection of the preconciliar liturgical movement with women's movements across America (including the National Council of Catholic Women, the American Grail movement, and the intellectual movement epitomized by Maisie Ward of the Sheed & Ward publishing house), to San Francisco's substantial Catholic Action program. From there, it pauses to consider the genius of John Courtney Murray's theological argument in support of Catholic Action, achieved through heightened reflection on the historicity of the church and the breadth of its life in the world, before heading to Washington, DC, and Boston to close with an examination of the role of Catholic Action as a means of formulating and expressing the collective identity of Catholic Italian immigrants in America. As a whole, these studies bring to the fore the uniquely American qualities of the practices of Catholic Action in the United States, recovering along the way little-heard voices from the American Catholic experience.

In part 2, three chapters focus on the experience of women claiming a more active role in the life of the church in the wake of Vatican II. The chapters address the experiences of the VISTA-like and predominantly female Catholic Extension Lay Volunteers program, Chicago's Sisters of Mercy, and the National Council of Catholic Women in the decade after the council. The women highlighted in these studies grappled with responding to the Vatican II call for active, engaged laity and religious within the dual construct of the church structures and secular movements, such as feminism and the quest for social transformation. Taken together, the three studies demonstrate the futility of attempting to define a single feminist perspective in that era, much less an experience common to all American Catholic women.

The chapters in the second half of part 2 address issues of ecclesial governance, from the rise and fall of parochial and diocesan pastoral councils, to John Cardinal Dearden's program to foster episcopal consultation of the laity, to the establishment of the Community of Christ Our Brother, an experimental and ultimately failed nonterritorial parish in Atlanta. Together, the chapters reflect on the challenges that an active and (theoretically) empowered laity pose for church structures that continue to operate according to a chain of command that places ultimate authority for approval only in the hands of ordained leaders. The examples in these studies come from the 1960s and 1970s, but resonate with issues that persist today.