Rev Charles Owen Rice:
Gibbons, Russell W
MONSIGNOR ON THE MARGINS REV. CHARLES OWEN RICE Apostle of Contradiction Patrick J. McGeever Duquesne University Press $28.95, 312 pp. Russell W. Gibbons ometime in the early phase of his...
...McGeever seems hung up on labels...
...The headline proclaimed an anomaly characteristic of this "troublesome priest" who traveled both the middle and left side of the American political road during six decades of reform, change, and reaction: "CATHOLICISM vs...
...Commentator Sherley Uhl, the savvy, longtime political editor of the Pittsburgh Press, once said of Rice, "He was the most active apostle of controversy in town (and) a consistent defender of the underdog...
...McGeever, like many of the citizens of this era of categorization and superficiality, strains to find an acceptable description for Rice, using phrases usually found only in the ideological prints: "liberal reformist," "secular revolutionary," etc...
...he made his mark in the course of American labor politics, later adding an influential voice to the civil rights and Vietnam antiwar movements...
...His chapters reflect his frustration with being unable to place Rice into either a round hole of social activism or a square receptacle of traditionalist clergyman-as-liberal-reformer...
...but he) helped to move the American Catholic church toward greater involvement in American social and political life than was the case a half century ago...
...Russell W. Gibbons ometime in the early phase of his career as a social activist, I first encountered Charles Owen Rice on the front cover of a long-defunct Marxist ideological journal, The New International...
...Newspaper files of the one-time Steel City reflect the delight of headline-writers who capsuled his public roles: in Depression days, "labor priest," "flophouse father," "pastor of the poorest...
...a greeter of presidents, governors, and union presidents through the New Deal to the Fair Deal...
...If not an "apostle of contradiction," as Patrick McGeever suggests in his subtitle, he was at least a practitioner...
...Rice attained a national reputation as an agitator for social justice early in his career...
...Max Schachtman...
...Though never a part of the church establishment, Rice knew the boundaries of acceptable protest...
...Charles O. Rice vs...
...However one finally sees Rice, the fact remains that he was in the forefront of a lonely band of clerics who championed the cause of unions seeking the economic democracy promised them under the New Deal...
...To those who observed Rice closely over these years, there was a remarkable consistency to his career...
...This support would help consolidate the New Deal-Fair Deal domination of American politics for most of the thirties and forties...
...Rice also helped break the stereotype of aloof priests distant from public service by becoming administrator of World War II rent control in Pittsburgh, and later by serving as a labor arbitrator...
...This led to the passionate judgments of many (including McGeever) that saw Rice as a paramount hunter of Communists within the ranks of the CIO in the postwar years...
...Perhaps his well-credentialed anticom-munism of that time served to insulate him from the brush...
...1908) said in the forgotten essay forty years ago is not so important as the fact that as a regular clergyman of the pre-Vatican II church He was a highly effective battler for numerous liberal reformist causes, and sometimes a law-defying rebel, but never a revolutionary...
...What Charles Rice (b...
...Unlike others who entered the public dialogue, Rice was willing to admit error of style and tactics, and always was mindful of his critics...
...Patrick J. McGeever Rev...
...Rice's biographer accords him a questionable distinction as "the fomenter of the crusade which expelled the left from the CIO...
...He may have exaggerated the Stalinist presence in the U.S...
...Rice straddled two generations of clerics who dissented...
...a "rent czar" in the wartime New Deal...
...Rice soon became one of those priests who saw in the Roosevelt administration an appropriate response to the devastating unemployment and poverty of the Depression...
...But he never reassessed his politics according to changing times...
...labor movement, but on balance he agitated for a progressive America and gave inspiration during a sea change of conflict...
...and finally, a "born-again radical" in the Nixon-Vietnam-civil rights era through the Reagan counter-revolution...
...Those years of confrontation found a conservative, immigrant church uncomfortable about implementing social justice when it challenged the power structure...
...To many in both the incumbent and insurgent union politics of the CIO, he was overly involved...
...Like Mother Jones (1830-1930), he prayed for the dead, but fought like hell for the living.ll for the living...
...Although he allied himself at times with secular and Christian radicals, he always stopped short of the revolutionary outlook or personal commitments that would have made him one of their number...
...Charles Owen Rice he did not hesitate to appear under the covers of a Marxist theoretical journal...
...MARXISM: A Debate: Msgr...
...Whatever, Charles Rice was not reluctant to enter the fringes of the political left to debate...
...an alleged "red-baiter" in the heady days when American labor had organized one out of every three workers...
...That mass expulsion forty years ago is still a matter of debate among labor historians, some of whom maintain that it sapped the militancy from a progressive labor movement that would subsequently align itself with the witch hunt at home and the cold war abroad...
Vol. 116 • November 1989 • No. 20
