Twenty years ago, Eugene McCarraher proposed that American Catholicism might have taken a more radical path if Paul Hanly Furfey (1896–1992) had been championed more than John A. Ryan (Eugene McCarraher, “The Church Irrelevant: Paul Hanly Furfey and the Fortunes of American Catholic Radicalism,” Religion and American Culture 7 [1997]: 163–194.) Ryan (1869–1945), the Minnesotan who attended the new Catholic University of America and then returned to teach there, influenced New Deal policies by defending the need for a minimum wage in the U.S., derived from his doctoral dissertation, “A living wage.” A prolific writer and moral theologian interested in economic justice, Ryan's professorship at The Catholic University of America overlapped with Furfey's tenure there in sociology. Both Ryan and Furfey were associated with the American bishops’ National Catholic Welfare Conference, and both supported progressive economic, racial, and social reform. However, McCarraher suggested that Furfey and his countercultural allies never fully actualized their radical potential and became co-opted into the “knowledge class.” Ryan's liberalism held sway over most Catholic policy-makers and prelates and paralleled the upward mobility and optimism of post-immigrant Catholics. And yet, Furfey's admirable and prescient observations, actions, and publications on economic, racial, and social inequality should be as familiar as Ryan, Walter Rauschenbusch or Jane Addams in the roster of admirable American reformers.
Noting the alternative interpretations of Furfey, Rademacher picks up the threads to weave a more nuanced life of Furfey, utilizing archival collections at Catholic University, Boston College, Marquette University, archdiocesan collections, and elsewhere to give a rounded portrait. Rademacher's biography, ten chapters plus epilogue, is thorough and straightforward. The first three chapters trace Furfey's roots in Irish Catholic Massachusetts. When Furfey was born in Cambridge in 1896, Protestants still controlled the powerful sectors of the region's economic and cultural life and a new separatist Catholic subculture was about to emerge as a strategy to counter Catholic subordination. Furfey graduated from Boston College in the first class that enjoyed its new Chestnut Hill campus where he subsequently joined the Catholic Truth Guild. He was drawn to the Jesuits but attended the Sulpician seminary of St. Mary's (1919–1922), and he was ordained as a diocesan priest in Baltimore in 1922. Furfey found the Sulpician seminary to be a sterile, isolated environment (36), limited to the dogmatic textbooks of the day and seemingly determined to prevent young men from developing independent opinions on pressing social and moral questions. Fortunately, he also completed a master's degree at Catholic University in 1918–1919 in psychology, mentored by the Paulist, Thomas Verner Moore, and Edward Pace, who were friendly toward the new field of psychology and desirous for Catholics to have a hand in shaping it. Furfey gained from a premier education with the best mentors in several fields: Moore, Pace, and William Kerby. He was able to visit Italy, where he was inspired by the Company of St. Paul to develop lay movements in social work, and to study in Germany, experiences that catalyzed his determination to fight for social justice, before becoming Chair of Sociology department at CUA following the departure of his mentor Kerby.
Wary of social scientific research that had begun in the early decades of the twentieth century, the Catholic Church and Furfey tried to formulate themselves as a third way that kept Catholic morality and ethics integral to programs for social reform. One instructive moment discussed here is the debate about whether Catholics could join the Boy Scouts, which highlights the suspicions harbored by Catholic clergy about any secular organizations (65). Some Catholics adopted the term “supernatural sociology” to describe their intentions as reformers, meaning that while statistics and social data may be valuable, reform must be guided by spiritual principles rather than positivism. The end of World War I led to the founding of the NCWC and the pioneering efforts of the American church hierarchy to pursue their own “Plan for Social Reconstruction” along more centralized lines. This departure produced another division among Catholic reformers: those opting for a “personalist” approach relying upon voluntaryism, versus those seeking to coordinate and professionalize charitable efforts across parish, diocesan, and state-wide groups up to the national level.
As Rademacher details, Furfey contributed not only as an author of academic social science research across five decades, but also in concrete ways that produced community-building efforts and attempts to diminish racial segregation. In these endeavors, Furfey enjoyed remarkable collaborations with several of the most radical and eccentric Catholic women of his lifetime: Dorothy Day and Baroness Catherine de Hueck. Inspired by them, and with the help of other female associates, including Mary Elizabeth Walsh and Gladys Sellew, Furfey founded residences in Washington to aid the poor, including Il Poverello House, Fides House and Friendship House. These “spiritual settlement houses” made their own adjustments to urban conditions and regarded themselves as distinct from “liberal” models such as Catholic Charities, and from the “radicalism” of the Catholic Worker.
Much of Furfey's life illustrates the tensions facing Catholic reformers who had to justify Catholic cooperation with Protestant and secular reformers in order to appease more conservative constituencies, and who were faced with internal conflicts among Catholics about the church's embrace of the social sciences. Here, the book falls short a bit in failing to offer a broader context for the internal Catholic debates of the era, namely the lack of interaction with non-Catholics; and the impact of the Modernist controversy that kept Catholics aloof from “scientific” reform, from the social sciences in general, and from any program of social engineering that was not directly controlled by the Catholic Church and its clergy. Though seen by fellow Catholics as “revolutionary,” Furfey's evolution in thought seems a natural consequence of his experiences and training. He was that rare priest who remembered that Catholic Action was a lay movement, and he supported psychology and the use of scientific data in promoting better society, without giving the final nod to the sole use of empirical data to resolve social problems.
From the 1960s and up to his death in 1992 at 95, and consistent with his commitment to the Gospel's message of radical love and uplift of the poor, Furfey endorsed liberation theology, opposed the Vietnam War, and became a founding member of the International Committee of Conscience on Vietnam in 1973. Rademacher nicely sums up his career: “. . . he sought to determine the proposed relationship between social scientific analysis, philosophy, theology, and spirituality and to put them into concrete application for the common good” (8).
