Lost innovation
Campbell, Debra
be felt. Voluntarism has made the exercise of arbitrary author- word "Catholic," to strengthen 'and reinvigorate Catholic ity less and, less tenable, but in exchange it imposes new ...
...The Rosary College street preachers utilized the College Guild with mixed feelings...
...This is not a problem of left or right, but of public life and must include taking seriously the need to give substance to the genuine shared responsibility within the church...
...Perhaps a timely look at an experi- emboldened O'Brien and his followers...
...Mary's and Faith of Our Vatican 11 than it did in the midst of the convert crusade Fathers...
...One could point to the their parochialism and obsession with the moment...
...They peer out at us from their photographs, a tornohiles parked in the highways and byways...
...Voluntarism has made the exercise of arbitrary author- word "Catholic," to strengthen 'and reinvigorate Catholic ity less and, less tenable, but in exchange it imposes new organizations for research, teaching, writing, dialogue...
...The meetpartakes of the spirit of Aimee Semple McPherson along ing confirmed the impression that the Guild's public aposwith that of Sister Theresa Kane without surrendering the tolate looks more radical two decades after the close of distinct aura of The Bells of Sr...
...Apparently they College in late 1934 that stimulated an interest in outdoor were never tempted to stray from a strict doctrinal party evangelization and led to the establishment of a branch of line, or to grapple with the controversies related to the the Evidence Guild at the college the following spring...
...On the one hand...
...She long characterized certain segments of the American recently compared her college activities with those of her Catholic church, from the early lay trustees to the Knights children who grew up in the post-Vatican 11 church...
...It was Ward's lecture at Rosary the saints to motley crowds of passersby...
...It ing...
...tieth century, signifying a new awareness that evangelizaAs recently as the late 1940s...
...Guild members boldly upheld their revivalistic street preachers became incredible - in fact, '-pretty methods in the confident tones we now tend to associate weird'' - to the generation raised on the teachings of with American Catholicism just prior to the council...
...to social service agencies and to the poor .. . Today a retrospective glance at the former street through missions during their college years, I can= preachers from Rosary Co1lc3e remains poignant, even not envision any of them standing up on street timely...
...Catholic enormous contribution Catholic scholars are making to con- experience contains wisdom about things like marriage and temporary Christian theology and Scripture studies, to public family, community and work, which could bring hope and a dialogue on the ethical issues of contemporary medicine, renewed sense of personal and historic possibility to our fellow biomedical research, nuclear arms, and social policy for evi- citizens...
...church's moral and social teachings which have so preocPost-Vatican II Catholics who are familiar with cupied subsequent generations of Catholic college feminist concerns within the church approach the Rosary women...
...Dorothy Golden wrote for The Catholic World in 1938: "We women missionaries are strong advocates of revivals fDefra Campbell, a church historian with a special of the right sort, and the spread of Catholicism is undoubt- interest in modern Catholicism, is an assistatu professor edly the only thing that will revive this country fsic] so of religion Lit Gerrvsbarg College...
...the late 1940s: The Witnesses of Jehovah increased their memberLOST INNOVATION ship in America from 44,000 in 1940 to 500.000 by WHEN CATHOLIC WOMEN PREACHED the end of 1946 --- an increase of more than 1,000 percent...
...Evidence Guild in London's Hyde Park shortly after the These women sacrificed the leisurely...
...Martha dignified company clad in light summer dresses and specMoore Avery, a convert from socialism and Unitarianism, tator pumps, clutching their white gloves as they brave thee did similar work in Boston beginning in 1917...
...purgatory, and devotion to the Blessed Virgin and both sides of the Atlantic...
...The flaming missionary zeal of their memT HREE IMPORTANT questions raised by the National bers...
...the council...
...The church, with its global reach and long and hopes, griefs and anxieties of the men and women of this memory, has the potential to help Americans break through age" of which Vatican II spoke...
...6 June 1986: 335...
...Like the Catholic Workers, it serves as a The irony implicit in a retrospective assessment of the reminder that courageous innovation can issue forth from work done by the Rosary College street preachers shines a profound appreciation of the abiding certainties of the through the following statement of Mary Virginia Doyle Catholic faith...
...We didn't think of ourbefore Vatican II, the Evidence Guild represents the best selves as part of the women's ministry in the church, but features of American Catholicism just before and just after perhaps we were," admitted some...
...States and England...
...Cathoobligations...
...the more one is struck by the probability that the the important questions at hand...
...If we are to determine street preaching activities of the students raised fewer how to apply the spirit of Vatican II to the problems and eyebrows within the church in the mid-thirties than they challenges facing the church in the 1980s, we need to pay might today...
...church which categorically denied women the right to Perhaps the most important - and most haunting preach...
...The Rosary College Evidence Guild, a bold experi- A group of former street preachers from Rosary College mental laywomen's ministry, remains an enigma which congregated in Chicago in the spring of 1985...
...Although it died a natural death over a decade which preceded the council...
...the hierarchical system which permitted them to speak with Rosary College street preachers represent the vanguard of the consent of the bishop...
...While they may and peaked in the 1950s under the leadership of Father not provide a model of female dissent within the church John A. O'Brien of Notre Daire...
...They were among the today, they do represent a precedent, an example of tine first to hear the challenge trumpeted by father O'Brien in women's ministry approved by the hierarchy...
...As Vatican 11...
...of Columbus and the pioneers in the Grail to the Christian Although several of my own children gave service Family movements...
...People of God" and the laity's obligation to assume the and Louisiana with the blessing of the local bishops and burdens of a church bursting its ghetto walls...
...the overworked mission priests...
...She is present/v workyou are all invited to rake part in the big religious revi- ing on a history of latCatholic evangelism in the United val...
...In one sense one Chicago...
...They constituted mental women's ministry to the American unchurched, a significant departure from the stereotypical "pay, pray, launched three decades before the council, might provide and obey" ethos of the American laity in the early twenfood for thought...
...If Catholics who are intellectuals ignore the lic colleges and universities, Catholic journals and magazines, church, or deal with it only in private terms, and if they share Catholic research centers and a whole range of institutions for no responsibility for reforming the church and its structures exchange between scholars, artists, diocesan and parish staffs, and renewing its faith and community life, they can hardly are all necessary if mutual disaffiliation is to be overcome and complain if they find no hospitable home...
...Their responsibility the words "Catholic intellectual" are to take on historic meandoes not end with raising questions and opening up debate...
...doing, the Rosary College Guild continued to describe its Although those at both poles of the Catholic spectrum cork as street preaching, and the veterans still use the might enlist the aid of popular stereotypes which emword today...
...They took for granted their right the transitory Catholic convert crusade which gained to be street preachers but never dreamed of extending their momentum in the American Catholic church in the 1920s ambitions to the sacramental priesthood...
...members of the Catholic Evidence Guild of might see the Rosary College Guild as a precursor of the Rosary College (River Forest, Illinois), to spend their spirit of Vatican It with its emphasis on the church as the summers street preaching in Oklahoma, North Carolina...
...If our Catholic laymen and women display Conference of Catholic Bishops in their prepara- similar zeal, we shall win for Christ the vast bulk of tory report for last year's synod underscored the the churchless 80.000.000 people in our land within increasingly problematic role of women in the church, the a few decades...
...What is the secret of their incredible growth...
...phasize the salubrious or tragic impact of the council upon The longer one contemplates the Rosary College exper- the church, most of us know that such generalizations beg iment...
...it was possible for a small tion represents a lay, as well as a clerical, obligation, a cadre of self-styled "women missionaries from duty for laywomen as well as laymen...
...Although at least one priest-advisor tried to per- aspect of the little-known story of the Rosary College suade the young women that "street speaking" or "teach- Catholic Evidence Guild is encapsulated in the final ing., were more appropriate terms for what they were clause: it seemed quite normal and ordinary at the rime...
...sociable summers end of the First World War, and subsequently worked to enjoyed by their classmates in order to explain the !sacrapopularize the Guild idea among lay women and men on rnents...
...One way to begin this process is to ask how the nity of the church and sinking to the level of the Salvation ..normal and ordinary" ministry of the Rosary College Army...
...waning of popular interest in evangelization since Vatican The Rosary College street preachers embodied the 11, and the growing need to clarify the meaning of ministry same nascent confidence and competitive spirit which in a changing church...
...When more attention to the changing mind of the American some Catholics accused them of compromising the dig- laity...
...a half century later, despite Vatican 11...
...Surveying the articles written by Guild members corners preaching...
...Commonweal: 334 Solution of the problem of Catholic intellectual life, then, dence that the Catholic tradition has great constructive redemands the reinvigoration of public dialogue within the sources to bring to bear on crucial issues of national and church, not for its own sake, but for the sake of all those "joys international life...
...In fact, they think I was pretty for the Catholic press during the thirties and forties, one is weird to have done this --- and there are times I can't struck by how comfortable the Rosary College students believe f did it myself, although it seemed quite appear to have been with the title "street preacher'' in a normal and ordinary at the time...
...It catalyzed a latent activism which had Gorman, an active veteran in the Guild in the #940s...
...Maisie gawking rural Southern Protestant crowds gathered outWard first mounted the outdoor platform of the Catholic side Bennett's Drug Store or Waldren's Hotel and trill...
...Moreover, these young On the other hand, the Rosary College street preachers college women were not the first laywomen to propagate now lurk in the shadows of the church we have lost since the faith on the pavement or from the tailgates of au- the council...
Vol. 113 • June 1986 • No. 11
