Saving the Heartland: Catholic Missionaries in Rural America, 1920-1960

Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society, Autumn 2002 by Cornelius, Janet Duitsman

Saving the Heartland: Catholic Missionaries in Rural America, 1920-1960. By Jeffrey Marlett (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2002. Pp. xi, 228. Notes, bibliography. $40.00).

A white trailer rolls onto the deserted main square of a quiet Midwestern town. Two priests emerge and assemble from the trailer a platform, podium, portable altar, and a sound system that can be heard "as far away as ten blocks" to reach "people sitting on their lawns, clerks in stores, the sick in their beds. ... " (140) For five or six consecutive evenings, the platform is the focus of activity: "blaring music to attract a crowd," (137), one or two brief scriptural messages, and a question and answer period. For area Catholics, services are held before the portable altar in full view of the nonCatholic public. These were the "motor missions," conducted during the 1930s-1950s and reaching their peak in the mid-1940s. In this rewarding study, described on the flyleaf as the "first comprehensive picture of the Catholic missionary experience in rural America," Jeffrey Marlett highlights the motor missions and other earnest efforts made by twentieth century urban Catholics to connect with rural life.

Marlett, who currently serves as a professor of religious studies in the College of St. Rose in Albany, has researched diligently in the archives of the National Catholic Rural Life Conference and publications aimed at rural Catholics, including St. Isidore's Plow, Land and Home, and The Christian Farmer. He also interviewed and explored the archives of some of the Glenmary Home Missioners and other motor missioners-and community-based missionary groups, including Missouri's Rural Parish Workers of Christ the King. His extensive detail and his familiarity with secondary works on rural society and history as well as Catholic history and theology, produce a work that demands and deserves a careful reading.

Saving the Heartland requires some concentration because the topic is so complex and ambiguous. Like other American opinion-shapers, the Catholic media portrayed rural America in contradictory ways. Early in the twentieth century it was primarily viewed as "a place in social, cultural, economic, and religious peril." (17) Like the Protestant-oriented Country Life Movement of the Theodore Roosevelt era, the National Catholic Rural Life Conference founded in 1923 was based on the concept that America had a "rural problem" in need of improvement through community-building and "modernization": new kitchens, paved roads, more farm equipment, and education through extension advisors. To these secular perceptions Father Edwin V O'Hara, the founder of the NCRLC, and Francis Clement Kelley, organizer of the Catholic Extension Society, added the need for better Catholic education among rural members of the faith.

Americans also continued to view the family farm in Jeffersonian terms as the heart of American culture-the repository of traditional values and of political freedom. Catholic theologians added an organic component: farming provided a pathway to salvation through its simplicity and closeness to the land. In the 1920s Catholic intellectuals embraced the concept of "bio-dynamic farming" as the epitome of this natural, organic process. Biodynamic farming discouraged the use of artificial fertilizers or animal feed purchased off the farm and encouraged humane animal care and environmentalism because of its respect for conserving and perpetuating the land.

"Living in right relation with the land best prepared one for an equally right relation with God and humanity."(46) This idealization of subsistence farming by urban intellectuals had little in common with the reality of American rural life, but it was very attractive during the Great Depression, when a few colorful leaders encouraged Catholics to reject city life and form rural colonies for correct cooperative living. Marlett puts these colonies and their leaders in historical context and in the larger framework of Depression era homesteading encouraged by federal funds. Monsignor Luigi Ligutti, colorful and outspoken leader of rural outreach, founded the Granger Homesteads in Iowa in 1933. Ligutti bought 225 acres with New Deal money, divided it into small plots, and settled on it a community of mostly Catholic urban miners who could work the plots to supplement their seasonal mining incomes. Granger Homesteads developed an agricultural school and a horticultural field laboratory as well as farmer cooperatives. Most colorful though less successful were the communes established by Catholic Worker leaders Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin in Illinois, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, and, later, ten other states. Communes were based on Catholic doctrine, open admission (sometimes interracial), cooperative living, and rejection of modern farming techniques. With the motto of "ora et labora"-prayer and work-Maurin also advised self-sufficiency: "eat what you raise and raise what you eat." (71-72) Marlett has fun chronicling the resulting disasters from the inexperienced, motley group of communal experimenters: "they were trying to farm by reading out of a book." (73) In intellectual circles, the communes are seen as a brave and idealistic endeavor, but Marlett also notes the damage done by the communal experiments to the rural Catholic communities themselves. Scornful of the fumbling farming attempts by the naive colonizers and suspicious of their unorthodox social behavior, rural Catholics felt neglected by the national church.