This is a canny and useful survey of nearly every progressive movement among American Catholics in the last century. The author is a sociologist with a distinguished publication record in the forms of nonviolent protest and resistance in the Americas. Here she turns attention to the varying and often short-lived movements and organizations formed or joined by activist Catholics, guided by their faith to promote social justice. That their faith took many forms, especially after Vatican II, is a tribute to the multifarious ways in which Catholics interpreted the Gospels, embraced an expanded role for the laity, and embodied the Council's definition of the church as “the people of God.” Some Catholics embraced pacifism; others sheltered immigrants. Still other programs emphasized the integrity of couples who wished to take responsibility for their own married lives and families.
The seven chapters follow six key themes in progressive Catholicism: labor; peace, war, and militarism; gender equality; poverty and political repression; immigrants; and environmental crisis. Sharon Nepstad regards Catholic involvement in these movements as examples of lived religion, which helps readers to understand them not only as top-down efforts imposed by popes and bishops but also as independent efforts among the laity.
It has often been said that the Catholic Church's best kept secret is Catholic social teaching, a body of papal and episcopal documents stemming from the papal encyclical of 1891, Rerum Novarum. It heralded a switch in church allegiance from the elites to the working masses, and critiqued capitalism as well as socialism. Forty years later, a subsequent encyclical letter, Quadragesimo Anno, reaffirmed the church's support for labor, improved labor conditions, collective bargaining, nonviolent strikes, child labor laws, and so on. The document appeared during the Great Depression, which led lay convert Dorothy Day to found the Catholic Worker movement, a direct engagement with the poorest poor. Nepstad follows numerous other labor groups, including the United Farm Workers (UFW), who learned their techniques of community organizing from Saul Alinsky's methods, and often integrated them with Catholic religious rituals such as the use of shrines and pilgrimages. The UFW mobilized produce pickers nationally, and later internationally, to effect boycotts of table grapes in hopes of upgrading the situation of largely migrant labor.
From these beginnings in labor issues, Catholic social activism flowed in many directions: nonviolent witness was at the heart of such organizing, and after 1945, led some Catholics to protest the buildup of nuclear weapons in addition to rejecting ongoing conventional wars in Korea and Vietnam. The emergence of chemical and nuclear weapons made traditional Catholic positions on “just war” untenable, hence the encyclical Pacem in Terris responded to the new situation by addressing issues that Augustine and Aquinas could not have imagined.
Catholics were represented in anti-Vietnam war efforts notably in episodes of religious theater: draft card burnings, draft board raids, and even self-immolation. The Catonsville Nine burned draft files to protest the Vietnam War, while the Plowshares Eight hammered nuclear warheads being assembled at a General Electric plant in Pennsylvania in an effort to draw attention to the government's alarming shift to creating first-strike nuclear weapons. The tactical choices of activists divided Catholic pacifists: did the use of blood, property destruction, and illegal entry into military sites constitute the very violence they despised? In the 1980s, the American bishops took prophetic stances against the Reagan administration in two pastoral letters that resulted from a novel process that sought advice from many experts. One statement, The Challenge of Peace, contested the morality of the arms race and the huge sums spent on national defense at the expense of social welfare programs.
Since Catholic social teaching and the Vatican II documents rarely discussed women, Nepstad suggests that their tactics ended up being unlike those of other progressive movements. The Grail and Catholic Family Movement, the “new nuns,” and Vatican II produced some feminist stirrings—mostly seen in an avalanche of books about religions and sexism—and eventually led to the Women's Ordination Conference and Womenpriests initiatives. Church positions prohibiting birth control and rejecting family planning divided laywomen in the post-Humanae Vitae decades, and in 1973, Catholics for Choice emerged as a lobbying group defending individual conscience in these matters and pointing to the fact that most Catholics did not agree with Vatican teachings on sexuality and reproduction.
The hemispheric reach of Catholic activism peaked in the 1970s and 1980s with the involvement of North American priests and nuns in Latin America. Sent there as missionaries to address the clergy shortage, many of them learned instead of the desperate income inequality, widespread poverty, and the need for structural change in society and in the church. They spearheaded efforts to fashion the church into a horizontal, localized institution, using the new theology of liberation and base communities. Liberation theology, however, was not endorsed by John Paul II, who feared that it endorsed Marxism and spent his papacy rebuking and silencing liberationists.
The conjunction of labor, political, and immigration issues have dominated recent years as large numbers of minors, often younger than twelve, crossed the U.S. southern border, fleeing violence from gangs or organized drug cartels in their nations. Catholic social teaching prompted Catholics to respond with compassion and assistance, not always in sync with national and state administrations opposed to immigration and immigrant aid. The interfaith Sanctuary movement emerged in the 1980s to protect refugees from the civil wars in Central America, and Catholics have joined its ranks, especially since its revival in 2007 as the New Sanctuary movement.
The final topical chapter suggests why Catholics have been slow to engage environmental issues, either in sermons or in social action groups. Since Pope Francis's Laudato Si in 2015, however, this pattern may be changing, as the Vatican's support for ecological initiatives and care for the planet are being mirrored in local efforts to support the Green Revolution.
With a nice blend of anecdote, ethnography, sociological and theological reflection, Catholic Social Activism is informative and necessary reading for undergraduate and graduate students and for those who can only regard the Catholic Church as bound by an archaic conservatism. This work demonstrates the significant challenges that progressive Catholics have made against labor injustice, just war theory, militarism, gender ideology, a male-only clergy, colonialism in Central and South America, and environmental degradation.
