Professor William L. Portier, the Mary Ann Spearin Chair of Catholic Theology in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Dayton (Ohio), has written a biography of Thomas A. Judge, a Vincentian missionary priest. The author contextualizes Judge's life and mission within the development of Catholic and national life in the United States in three eras: post-Civil War era (Beginnings: 1868–1915), the development of Judge's promotion of lay leadership (Creative Center: 1915–1926), through the Great Depression of the 1930s (Trial and Loss: 1926–1933).

Thomas A. Judge, born of Irish immigrants in Boston at the end of the Civil War, became a priest of the Congregation of the Mission (C.M.), founded in France in 1625 by Vincent de Paul. Judge followed de Paul's emphases on clergy as pastors (not a change in social status) and preachers among those not being tended, especially poor people. After ordination in 1899, Judge was assigned to the Vincentian mission band in New England and then the U.S. northeastern coast. He directed his attention to Italian and other immigrants in New Jersey and Brooklyn. As part of preached missions, he promoted devotion to the “Holy Agony of Jesus,” the sentiments of which shored Judge's conviction of the need to develop lay apostles. Before a Catholic lay mission movement gained prominence in the late 1940s and 1950s, Judge gathered lay women and eventually men in “Cenacles” to work for “the preservation of the faith” and formation of other “lay apostles” (4, 3). The Cenacle model reflected the Apostles’ experience in the room of Jesus’ Last Supper and to the coming of the Holy Spirit upon them after the death of Jesus. James Norris, a former Cenacle brother, decades later addressed the Second Vatican Council on the role of laity “to secure full Catholic participation in a worldwide attack on poverty” (3).

Judge was sent to the Vincentian mission in Opelika, Alabama (1915) and invited Cenacle leader Amy Croke (later Sister Baptista), Ella Lonergan and Lulu Keasey (later Mother Boniface) to assist in the mission. The Cenacle women opened an elementary school for poor persons. Nurse Susan Downes began a nursing facility that grew into a hospital for those lacking medical care. The Cenacle women eventually formed a congregation of women religious, Missionary Servants of the Most Blessed Trinity, while some Cenacle men later formed the Missionary Servants of the Most Holy Trinity as Brothers or clergy. They aimed to develop Catholics as lay apostles, forerunners of the lay apostle movement in the late 1940s and 1950s. Cenacle mission in Alabama challenged northerners in multiple ways, at a time when Catholics in the eastern and central part of the country especially were solidifying themselves as a national group after World War I.

Judge also considered a “Spanish Province” of Cenacle members after the Spanish American War ended. He saw Puerto Rico as a gateway to Latin America. George J. Caruana, a Maltese priest Judge had met while preaching missions on Long Island, was made bishop in Puerto Rico after the Spanish American War. He extended an invitation to Judge to begin a branch of the Cenacle in that country. Not only would the Cenacle live out the scriptural exhortation, “Go, teach all nations,” wrote Judge, the “Cenacle is living up to its traditions, to be zealous about an abandoned people” (189).

Portier develops Judge's story in relation to myriad contexts the missionary faced: the relationship between mission and church, between Catholic and other Christian communities who reached out to immigrants and the underserved, lay mission, and the “nationalization” of Catholics in the United States. He unfolds the role of devotion and scripture in relation to mission, catechetical instruction, and their connections with social work. The story provides an interface of Christian missionaries from various denominations in the southern region of the United States and provides an example of how particular religious movements interact with larger social, political, and national developments.

Portier's short “Epilogue” indicates more recent developments in the three Cenacle groups who formed religious congregations. There is now a “Common Rule of Life” (1985), which embodies Judge's emphasis on the “evangelical burning” Christ desired (536).

Using material from the Vincentian archives in France and the United States, the holdings of Cenacle women and men and the three religious congregations that grew from the Cenacle missionary movement, Portier has meticulously plumbed diocesan and other archives where Judge and the missionaries served: Boston, Washington, DC, Brooklyn, Mobile, Alabama, and Cleveland, Ohio. He tackled a daunting, though fascinating source to understand Judge's intent and mission approaches: 15,000 pages of Judge's letters, many penned while riding the train to or from the East Coast and Alabama!

The strength of the biography, in addition to the points already noted, is judicious use of voluminous archival sources perused and the contexts in which Portier places the Judge biography: after the Civil War, the “nationalization” of Catholics in the United States, the effects of the Great Depression. While the amount of detail in the 536 pages of text will be of most value to members of the three communities and the laity associated with Father Judge and the Cenacle movement, others might find it a challenge to keep on top of the main story and its importance especially for the development of the lay apostolate. However, scholars who have written about Protestant missions and particularly about women in mission in the southern part of the United States will gain insight on one way in which U.S. Catholics have appropriated mission and how Catholics and Protestants actually interacted.