All at once, it seemed, American Catholics in the early twentieth century enthusiastically began using the phrase “Catholic Action.” Across the landscape, there were study groups, college courses and textbooks, and new parish organizations, all claiming to march under that banner. In 1930, the standard library bibliography covering the popular Catholic press needed five densely packed, double-column pages of small print to account for all the stories that had been published on the subject. The concept meant many things to many people, and it had derived vaguely from a pronouncement by Pope Pius XI, who had spoken of the “participation of the laity in the apostolate of the hierarchy.” Bishops and priests were still in charge, but lay people, increasingly well-educated and moving out of their old ethnic neighborhoods, had their own role to play in advancing the religious and social mission of the church. In Europe, this might include overt political activity, but in the United States its fruit was a burst of organizational energy. There was an Association of Catholic Trade Unionists, a Catholic Rural Life Movement, a Christian Family Movement, a Catholic Youth Organization, a Catholic Interracial Council, and scores of other associations, formed under official auspices but run and sustained by ordinary Catholics. While some of the larger, national groups have received due scholarly notice, the virtue of this collection is that it looks at smaller, local efforts, thereby demonstrating the protean nature of the movement. These essays are also helpful for two other reasons. They lengthen the time frame, stretching both before and after the pivotal Second Vatican Council, which formally redefined the relationship of lay people to their church in the 1960s; they also expand the map, offering case studies in places outside the Catholic heartland of the northeast and midwest.

As with any collection, some of the essays speak more directly to the matter at hand than others. The Catholic Club of the City of New York, for instance, first organized in the 1890s, consisted largely of businessmen who had made it, and their form of Catholic Action was perhaps the kind that hierarchs liked best: lay men would raise the money, and bishops would spend it. Elsewhere, Catholics studied church documents closely and defined for themselves a broad role in church and public square. In San Francisco, for example, labor organizers, women's groups, and political leaders worked together to promote civic reform, culminating in the mayoral terms of Joseph Alioto, a Catholic Action alumnus of long standing. (One enthusiast there had even used the phrase “the priesthood of the layman”—move over, Martin Luther.) Several of the essays in the volume address the role of women in the movement, and these are particularly welcome. The Grail, a rural community of lay women in Ohio, was not alone in forging links between reform of society and reform of the liturgy, hoping to enhance lay understanding and participation in both. The Sisters of Mercy in Chicago—technically, religious sisters were always considered part of the laity—redefined their mission, coming to rely more and more on lay people to run parish schools while they themselves concentrated on other ministries. The National Council of Catholic Women, a nationwide umbrella for traditional parish devotional societies, is perhaps the most interesting case study here. Though it came to oppose many particular items on the modern feminist agenda (the Equal Rights Amendment, for example), its leaders consistently used the emerging language of feminism to promote what one officer referred to as “an adult role” for women in the church.

Some of the essays here describe interesting attempts at the restructuring of local churches in the aftermath of Vatican II. In such widely scattered locales as Detroit, Pittsburgh, and Oklahoma City, bishops encouraged new forms of substantive lay involvement in church governance, while an experimental parish in Atlanta combined liturgical innovation, interfaith outreach, and a commitment to civil rights. Ultimately, all four were failures, whether victims of their own enthusiasms or simply out of step with the retrenchments of the papacy of John Paul II (1978–2005), which reasserted fundamental differences between clergy and laity and sought to check any impulses on the part of the latter to go their own way. That these had even been attempted, however, shows just how much lay Catholics had, over the course of a century, gotten used to the idea of “acting,” of being the principal characters in their own religious drama.

In the end, the disparate nature of these cases raises the question of whether this long historical trend should be characterized as Catholic actions (lower case and plural), rather than Catholic Action (upper case and singular). However that may be, the variety of these studies is a sign of historiographical vitality in American Catholicism. They are also helpful pointers that these authors and others might follow in pursuing future research and adding to the store of what we know about the ancient church in the New World.