The Church and the Land is a comprehensive study of the most important Roman Catholic organization dealing with rural issues in the United States. David Bovée traces the National Catholic Rural Life Conference (NCRLC) from its founding to the present, combining vivid biographical sketches of major leaders, careful dissection of institutional dynamics, and contextual analysis of the conference's policy statements into compelling and authoritative narrative.

Bovée's story begins with a single priest, Edwin O'Hara, and his slightly idiosyncratic preoccupation with population trends. While working for the National Catholic Educational Association in 1919, O'Hara learned that rural populations tend to have higher birthrates than urban ones. Since Catholics were more likely than Protestants to live in cities, O'Hara worried that the imbalance would soon extinguish the faith. This led him to build an organization that would soon shift its focus to the preservation of a vital agricultural economy for people of all faiths. During the Great Depression, the NCRLC promoted cooperatives and federal policies to keep people on the land, and it soon expanded its roster of causes to include global poverty, fair trade, and environmental sustainability. This provided the context for some of the more colorful and charismatic ecclesial leaders in U.S. Catholic history, most notably the globetrotting Monsignor Luigi Ligutti. Bovée's choice to tell the entire story, including very recent events, pays off marvelously in allowing readers to see both continuity and dramatic change in a single enduring organization.

Though the book's greatest strengths are its clear narrative and comprehensive scope, Bovée also uses the NCRLC as a case study of Catholic Americanization. Embracing a broader argument articulated by such scholars as David O'Brien and Philip Gleason, he argues that the NCRLC “changed the focus of its activities over the years in response to changes in American society as a whole” (xi). It took on global concerns when the United States became a world power and followed the lead of other Americans when it “developed a concern for the earth's environment” (xii). Such changes made the NCRLC less distinctly Catholic and more typically American.

I was only partly persuaded by this argument. Certainly, the NCRLC's early population agenda was not shared by non-Catholics, while virtually all of its subsequent causes involved coalition-building. But Bovée's evidence suggests that the NCRLC did not assimilate so much to the United States as a whole as to a particular wing of U.S. culture that included the mainline Protestant leadership and the liberal wing of the Democratic Party. Like the mainliners, the NCRLC shifted its emphasis from evangelism to social justice during the Depression, embraced a more conservative and nationalist vision in the years after World War II, tacked left during the 1960s, and stayed there while the rest of the country shifted rightward after the election of Ronald Reagan.

Rural Catholics also Americanized over the course of the twentieth century, but not all of them followed the NCRLC's specific trajectory. Bovée argues that the NCRLC enabled rural Catholics to see themselves as “a social group with a unique value and a special message to give to the rest of society” (362), but he provides little evidence that the majority of rural Catholics either knew about or were significantly influenced by the NCRLC. NCRLC membership peaked at 10,000 in 1958, and its publications never attracted as large an audience as the decidedly non-mainstream Catholic Worker. NCRLC leaders were often disappointed that their conferences attracted more priests and sisters than farmers. And while the NCRLC enthusiastically embraced the changes of Vatican II, resistance to those changes was especially intense in many rural communities.

The divergence between the NCRLC and the constituency it ostensibly represented may explain why it perhaps achieved its most significant victories during the early years. In the conclusion, Bovée cites statistics that suggest the NCRLC was remarkably successful in its initial goal of maintaining Catholic strength by keeping Catholics on the farm. Between 1900 and 1974, the portion of total U.S. population living in rural communities declined from 60 percent to 26 percent, while the rural share of Catholic population dropped less than four percentage points, from 20.4 to 17.7. Over the same years, the Catholic share of overall population increased somewhat relative to Protestantism—though that may have had more to do with immigration than farm fertility. By contrast, over the past fifty years the NCRLC has been remarkably unsuccessful in persuading Congress to enact agricultural policies oriented to family farmers rather than agribusiness.

The fact that the book is exhaustively researched and yet cannot explain the divergence between the NCRLC and the practices and attitudes of ordinary rural Catholics suggests that there is much social history yet to be done. I lived for a decade in the most homogeneously Catholic rural county in the United States, the site of the NCRLC's single most successful event. Sixty years after that event (a conference that attracted 18,000 people in 1940), I knew many Catholics who shared the current worldview of the NCRLC. But most of those Catholics saw themselves as a beleaguered minority. They believed (I think correctly) that they were outnumbered by coreligionists who were hostile to the changes of Vatican II and too preoccupied with the issue of abortion to give sustained attention to other sociopolitical issues. (Though concern over abortion certainly fits with the founding vision of the NCRLC, today's organization studiously avoids any mention of it on its website, even in the section defining the principle of “human dignity.”) In 2008, my former neighbors elected one of the most conservative members of the House of Representatives, a politician whose agricultural approach emphasizes the abolition of estate taxes rather than the ecological policies preferred by the NCRLC.

The Church and the Land makes no claim to be a social history, and a full accounting of the fissures in American Catholicism over the past generation is well beyond its scope. Instead, Bovée has given us a stunningly complete picture of one significant piece of the American Catholic puzzle.