5 Questions with David Endres

I corresponded recently with Fr. David Endres about his new book, Many Tonges, One Faith: A History of Franciscan Parish Life in the United States. Fr. Endres is Associate Professor of Church History and Historical Theology at the Athenaeum of Ohio where he also serves as Dean. He is also the hardworking  editor of the US Catholic Historian.


(1) Writing a history of Franciscan parishes is a huge undertaking. As you note, at the height Franciscan parish ministry in 1968, the order ran around 500 parishes and missions in the US. Tell the blog how you approached this challenge and why you settled on writing the history of fourteen specific parishes. 

Unlike the Jesuits and Dominicans, among other religious communities, there have been almost no studies of US Franciscanism to date. That was the impetus for the United States Franciscan History Project under the direction of Jeffrey Burns and the Academy of American Franciscan History: to bring together scholars to reflect on different aspects of the US Franciscan story. In addition to my book on Franciscan parishes, there has been one other monograph published in the project series: Ray Haberski’s Voice of Empathy: A History of Franciscan Media in the United States. Hopefully, additional forthcoming volumes will address other topics.




One 1950s survey of the Franciscans’ US presence blamed factionalization within the Franciscans on the lack of national or international studies that go beyond a given Franciscan province or branch of the order. He (a friar himself) lamented that he would never be able to please his confreres -- the Conventuals, Third Order Regular, and Capuchins would feel overlooked if he concentrated on the more numerous OFMs (Friars Minor) and all the priests and brothers would resent being chronicled along with the secular Franciscans and the numerous women’s branches.

I tried to keep some balance, and perhaps since I am not a Franciscan myself, I was a bit freer to shape the book around specific parishes – no matter the branch or branches of Franciscanism represented.  I looked for compelling stories that related to broader developments in the history of the Church and nation, but also attempted to provide a diverse representation of parishes – ethnically and geographically, large and small, active and now closed or merged. I knew that to tell such a large story, I had to be selective in choosing parishes to detail. The number “fourteen” was somewhat arbitrary, but I think it provides enough case studies to derive some general conclusions.

To achieve this diversity of place and kind, I made use of numerous archives. The archives of the St. Barbara Province in Santa Barbara, California and the St. John Baptist Province here in Cincinnati provided a wealth of information. Even though Cincinnati is 800 miles from New Orleans, friars from the Cincinnati province ministered in Louisiana (along with Michigan, Indiana, Kentucky, Arizona, and New Mexico) so archives helped extend my research reach. Other holdings were consulted in person or with the help of kind archivists and librarians.

(2) You show how Franciscans very much became tied to place in America. Tell the blog how the order was shaped by American realities. 

I think that too often scholars (who do not necessarily focus on religious history), see Catholic history in particular as not having much to do with the US historical narrative. But in addition to being tied into major developments in American Catholic history, the book, I hope, helps explore major demographic and social trends that transcend the US Catholic experience.

Those developments included the realities of frontier life, massive European immigration, and the emergence of ethnic-predominate cities. These geo-demographic shifts propelled Franciscans into pastoring parishes in the nineteenth century, though this was not part of their experience in Europe.

In the latter half of the twentieth century, the Franciscans were again shaped by new American realities – the interstate highway system, growth of suburbia, the Baby Boom, feminism, and protest movements of the 1960s and beyond. All of these impacted parish life, affecting how Franciscans ministered and how they assessed their ministries.

By engaging some of these broader developments in American life and the American religious experience, I hoped to situate Franciscan parishes within the US historical narrative, not as an aberration, but as a nexus of local institutions and communities that help compose the “American story.”

(3) Many Tongues, One Faith is as much a global story as it is a national story. How does the story of the Franciscans compare to other orders? I'm thinking here of John McGreevy’s work on the Jesuits. Both orders were shaped by the secularization policies of Europe and their coming to the US, but did they respond in different ways? 

It is certainly a global story. The first Franciscans to the US – whether Irish, Italian, German, or Polish – all came from European provinces, bringing with them their own ideals and expectations about being Catholic, being Franciscan, and being ministers of the Gospel. This was not unique to the Franciscans, but I think that friars and religious sisters responded in different ways from the Jesuits and others, partly because of the distinctiveness of their charism.

In the conclusion of the book, I discuss the Franciscan charism: to be poor among the poor; to foster fraternity and community; to be ministers of reconciliation, healing, and peace; and to serve where there is the greatest need, often among those on the margins of society. Their charism, especially the commitment to ministering to the underserved, impacted the locus of their ministries. While the Jesuits had a lively Euro-American exchange of personnel among their colleges, the Franciscans were missioned to the frontier, or urban centers, or Native American missions. Though some returned home later in life, most stayed in America.  Consequently, their lives were significantly shaped by their local experiences of ministry and the people they encountered. More so perhaps than other orders, the Franciscans seemed to stay close to the people, identifying with them, no matter if their own ethnic, racial, or socioeconomic backgrounds were dissimilar.

The work of John McGreevy and others now provide some interesting possibilities for inter-“religious order” comparisons. The Jesuits, more so than the Franciscans, traveled to and from Europe – even after many years of ministry in America – and maintained a close connection to the Jesuit superior general in Rome. The order overall maintained a greater top-down, military model. Overall, my reading of the Franciscan story is that they were more decentralized in their identities and decision-making. The provinces and the semi-autonomous Franciscan “custodies” emphasized local governance. This helped them to respond to local situations and needs in ways different from other orders.

(4) Of the fourteen parishes you wrote about, do you have a favorite? 

Of those that I detail in the book, the one that has resonated most with me is the Shrine of Our Lady of Consolation in Carey, Ohio, located about three hours north of my home. As a Marian shrine that remains popular among pilgrims, it is a place where the present is linked to the past. In Carey, an image of Our Lady of Consolation was imported from Luxembourg and brought in procession to its new home at the church in 1875. On the day of the procession, rain threatened on all sides but did not fall on the statue or procession. The safe passage of the statue through the storm was viewed as miraculous. At the same time, unbeknownst to those in the procession, a little girl whose family had taken part in the procession was healed from an incurable illness. It was the first of many miraculous healings, which many believe continue at the shrine today. Dozens of artifacts lining the shrine’s walls stand as testimony to the claims: crutches, casts, splints, and even a six-foot-long wicker basket.
The history of the shrine is full of fascinating stories – some of which are outside the scope of Many Tongues, One Faith or could only be discussed briefly therein. I am particularly interested in the healings said to have occurred there and how they were publicized, especially in the first decades of the twentieth century. The healings shed light on ethnic and devotional Catholicism and how “holy places” operated within the psyche of American Catholics. And as much as believers venerated the location as a place of special intercession by the Blessed Virgin Mary, the shrine also has been the target of anti-Catholicism: a Ku Klux Klan demonstration, an arson attempt, and a successful theft of the famous statue. The vacillations of belief and doubt provide an interesting lens to view religious devotion, reported miracles, and the advancement of science.

My study of the shrine has developed into a near book-length manuscript, “America’s Lourdes: Devotion and Healing at the Shrine of Our Lady of Consolation.” I hope to further develop the topic over the coming years and ready it for publication.

(5) Your book builds on the social history tradition of Jay Dolan and Patrick Carey’s classic studies of parish life. One might say the parish is where “the rubber meets the road.”  Why is the parish still a great lens to use to study US Catholic history?

I am indebted to earlier scholarship that helped focus on lay Catholics and their involvement in parish life. Today, as in the past, most Catholics’ experience of the Church is at the level of the parish.  More so than any diocesan structure or specialized Church-run institution, the parish is primary to a community’s religious experience. The correspondence of bishops, their sermons, and financial ledgers readily available at diocesan archives tell part of the story, but only part of it. Getting beyond institutional records to tell the stories of communities is the challenge and also the benefit of researching parishes.

I attempted to use various sources to find the “voice” of friars, women religious, and lay Catholics, utilizing local and parish histories, newspapers, bulletins, and occasionally, interviews. My hope is that it has helped flesh out the lived experience of everyday “people in the pews.” Of course, a selective, case-study approach offers some insights into that experience, but also implicitly points to the need for further studies. If my research has provided an impetus or avenues for future research, it will have achieved part of the goal of the United States Franciscan History Project.

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Racialized Christianity's Roots: Willie Jennings's The Christian Imagination

Racialized Christianity's Roots: The Christian Imagination

As historians, you all know this, but it's worth stating anyway: we are shaped by our contexts – theological, geographical, class, race, family, gender, national, etc.  Sometimes we begin to really see the water in which we swim by stepping into another stream.  Other times, reading about our stream's origins, its headwaters, can help us see our stream more clearly.  I study American history, my research is primarily in the twentieth century, and I don't read outside my field nearly enough.  But this summer I had the opportunity to do so with a group of Wheaton College colleagues when we read Willie Jennings's The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race.  Jennings, a theologian, has written a historical piece that explores the interconnections between western Christianity, racial hierarchies, capitalism, commodification of bodies and places, and pedagogy.  Those who study religion in American history and have been shaped by – and shape – the academy will benefit from the book (although, if you're an Americanist, the only character that may be familiar is Olaudah Equiano).

Jennings shows how the racial hierarchies westerners imagined in the 15^th century as they interacted with people living in South America and Africa, hierarchies that were inseparable from a theological pedagogy that assumed a one-way transfer of knowledge from the educated to the ignorant, deformed what he called "the Christian imagination."  For Jennings, "Christian imagination" refers to the possibilities of what could constitute Christianity.  These racial and pedagogical hierarchies developed in the context of mercantile capitalism, and the combination commodified bodies and land in new and detrimental ways.  

As a theologian, Jennings argues that this complicated history has mangled the Christian imagination, leading Christians to imagine that God's call on their lives is to relate primarily to Him, not to one another, and so has limited the possibilities of Christians from different backgrounds joining together in intimacy, being with one another in what he calls "spaces of communion."  Jennings reads Olaudah Equiano, for instance, as longing for communion with the white captors and freemen who were his brothers in Christ, as well as his mostly white readers.  Equiano, who controlled the presentation of his book, included an image of himself looking out at the reader on the cover of his The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano (1789), which contrasted the stylistic standards of the book's genre, but invited people into relationship.  Nonetheless, when he failed to find intimacy with his fellow Christians, Equiano sustained himself by telling himself that God was all he really needed.  For Jennings the theologian, this theological narrative (common in western Christianity) is wrong.

Jennings grounds his arguments in particular places, with particular people, and pays careful attention to how western Christians commodified places, and thus were able to ignore the details of those places, imagining themselves as transcending place.  I have written about place before.  I learned the importance of where one lives when I moved to Chicago's Austin neighborhood, which was radically different from the wealthy suburb in which I grew up.  In Austin my husband and I attended Rock of Our Salvation Evangelical Free Church, a neighborhood interracial church, and attended closely to what it meant to live in as white people in a black neighborhood with many people living at or below the poverty line.  We were pleased when families moved into vacant houses, we paid attention to who was standing on the corner, and we knew the impact of a homeowner dying, potentially leaving a house vacant.  Perhaps because living in Austin was such a cross-cultural experience, we became immersed in the place, aware of how different it was from our home towns every time we came back into our neighborhood.  We bought a house, and, in my own mind, my identity became intricately tied up in the place we were putting down roots.  When I saw other white people in the neighborhood (besides those I knew), I wondered what they were doing there because they didn't belong.  Perhaps they were up to no good.  I walked the neighborhood daily, either with a neighbor to exercise or going to the bus or the train.  When people asked me in casual conversation why I was there, I responded that we went to church in the neighborhood, we owned a house.  We belonged. 

Chicagoland's racial geographies play a prominent role in my own scholarship, and I know – and want to teach others – that the segregation I experienced growing up and in the Austin neighborhood was created.  It did not just happen.  Its consequences, for wealthy and poor people, Latino, Native American, white, black (and every other racial/ethnic group) are significant.  As Soong-Chan Rah (another theologian) argues in TheNext Evangelicalism, segregated Christianity leads segregated groups to be held in cultural captivity.  Rah explores white evangelicalism in particular, arguing that we – my tradition, my people – are held captive to the broader American culture's history and practice of racism, individualism, and consumerism and materialism.  

For Jennings, Christians must identify as Gentiles, as people grafted into Israel, outsiders adopting a new way of life, submitting themselves to that life.  When we were at Rock Church in the Austin neighborhood, we were part of one of those rare spaces of communion, spaces where people from different backgrounds loved and valued one another as they lived together.  There, my academic work mattered, but was not the only source of knowledge and wisdom.  There I flourished as I submitted to those different from me.  

After Wheaton College hired me, my husband and I moved to Wheaton.  I was pregnant and we left not because we wanted to raise our child in the suburbs, but because I am a working mom, and if we lived close to where I worked, we could integrate our lives our lives more easily with work and neighborhood.  People sometimes think we left because we thought it was dangerous in Austin.  I think it might be more dangerous in Wheaton.  Here, delightful, loving people can easily, and sometimes unintentionally, require those different from its powerful inhabitants to conform.  There are fewer spaces of communion.  Here, what might appear to be flourishing may too often ignore the history of American places, which is a history of race.

In our conversation with Willie Jennings, he called our college to account for its place, to not hover above Wheaton, Chicagoland, and the Midwest, but to be in it.  Why does accounting for place matter?  It's first of all good for our souls.  I am reading a new book, Wendell Berry andHigher Education: Cultivating Virtues of Place by Jack Baker and Jeffrey Bilbro (University of Kentucky Press, 2017) that exegetes Wendell Berry's work for colleges and universities (secular and religious alike), arguing that institutions of higher education ought to form students' "imaginations and affections . . . so that rather than desiring upward mobility, they can imagine healthy, placed lives," because "contentment is a virtue that is particularly difficult for those of us in higher education to practice; universities exist to prepare students to lead better lives in better places, and this obsession with something better erodes our ability to be content" (1).  Universities' and colleges' accounting for place also can help reckon with - and perhaps right - the racial histories of their particular places.  Perhaps I am at Wheaton in part to help my students, my colleagues, myself, other evangelicals, to reckon with our racial past, and the ways it can be mapped on to places and spaces.  In doing so, we might be able to live better in this place that is Wheaton.  After all, as the black author James Baldwin wrote in 1963, "to accept one's past – one's history – is not the same thing as drowning in it; it is learning how to use it."*


*James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time (New York: Random House, 1992), 81.

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Six Questions With Kyle Roberts: The Rise of Evangelical Gotham

Kyle Roberts is Associate Professor of public history and new media at Loyola University Chicago and director of the Jesuit Libraries Provence Project. I recently interviewed Kyle about his new book, Evangelical Gotham: Religion and the Making of New York City, 1783-1860 (University of Chicago Press).



PC: What happens to early American Religious History – and American history – if we locate evangelical revivals in New York City rather than at Cane Ridge? What should we rethink?

KR: In graduate school in the early 2000s, the scholarship that I found most engaging was about evangelicalism and urban religion. Yet the two rarely overlapped. Antebellum evangelicalism was often told as a rural story – more likely to focus on camp meetings on the frontier than on outpourings of the spirit in urban churches. We knew more about Cane Ridge in 1801 than Allen Street in 1832. Works of urban religion tended to be post-Civil War studies of religious groups moving into urban environments created by others and trying to make them their own. I wanted to know what role the religious played in building the modernizing city in the first place. No city grew at a more transformational rate than New York in the first half of the nineteenth century, so I thought I would look there.




New York City turned out to have played a significant role in the expansion American evangelicalism. It became a national, and later international, center for evangelical cultural production. The printing presses of the American Bible Society, the American Tract Society, the Methodist Book Concern and other evangelical ventures produced the materials that were read across the country. Every May, the leaders of these societies came together in the city to plot their strategies for the coming year. New York’s place as the nation’s commercial center opened up access to both funding and distribution routes that brought these works across the country and around the world. 

These institutions, while nationally supported, would not have existed without the growing evangelical community in New York. They provided the financial resources, wrote the tracts, and ensured the distribution of these works. As the writings of Michael Floy, Phoebe Palmer, and others show, urban revivals energized evangelical New Yorkers in their national – even international – project.

My hope in Evangelical Gotham is ultimately to recover the vibrancy (and the tensions) within New York’s urban religious community, but also to restore its place to the larger national and international story that we tell about the spread of evangelicalism.

PC: Your work brings a cast of fascinating characters to our attention: Isabella Marshall Graham (widow activist), Ezra Styles Ely (urban missionary and social reformer), Phoebe Palmer (theologian and missionary), and Michael Floy (prolific reader of urban evangelical texts). Tell the blog about your favorite character and explain how he or she illumines the broader story you tell in Evangelical Gotham.

KR: Phoebe Palmer was, perhaps, the story that surprised me the most. I remember going to major research libraries and finding so few of her works in their collections. How is it that someone who had such an impact on mid-nineteenth century evangelical theology been so forgotten? 

What fascinates me about Palmer’s story is the question of what happens when you get your wish. The post-revolutionary generation of evangelical New Yorkers had the chance to create in the city a world that certainly wasn’t there when they arrived from destinations around the Atlantic World following the American Revolution. Palmer represents the first real generation of native-born evangelical New Yorkers. She grew up in a world where evangelicals put into practice their ideals for promoting conversion and social activism. Yet rather than easing the course of their spiritual journeys, this world created new anxieties for the rising generation, especially about their inability to live up to what was expected of them. In Palmer’s case, it proved to be a remarkably productive tension, inspiring her to reach back to early generations to recover ideas about holiness that set the theological agenda for many evangelicals of her generation and those who followed.

There is far more to be written about the children of nineteenth-century evangelicals!

PC: In addition to a roundtable on your own book, the Religion in American History blog recently celebrated the twentieth anniversary of John T. McGreevy’s Parish Boundaries. Do the urban evangelicals you study have a “idiom” about space? Or are they defined by a constant crossing of space into other spaces?  How does evangelical theology clash or sync with urban spaces in a rapidly expanding city?

KR: Great question. On the one hand, I would argue that the evangelical approach to urban space was dynamic and flexible. Evangelicals thought very creatively about the ways in which secular urban spaces could be put to sacred uses. What made a space sacred was the preaching of the Word to a gathering of engaged people. All they need for that was a place for the preacher to stand and some benches. This allowed storefronts to become churches without much trouble. When they encountered a new kind of space, they thought about what it meant to the audiences that inhabited it. For example, when they preached on board a ship, they respected the meaning ascribed to different places on a deck and positioned people relative to them (see the illustration of the Bethel Meeting on the Receiving Ship Fulton in the New York Navy Yard). In boardinghouses, a different dynamic (and hence type of participation) unfolded. For urban evangelicals, spaces could move easily between sacred and secular uses and meanings.

On the other hand, evangelicals certainly understood the importance of branding and marking the landscape within the urban marketplace. The first John Street Methodist church in lower Manhattan (erected 1768; seen in the illustration here) is exemplary of what I call the evangelical vernacular that proliferated across not only New York, but much of the East Coast in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century. These structures are often three-bays wide, one-and-a-half stories tall, their gable ends face the street, and they purposely do not have steeples (although they might have a cupola).  This is an extraordinarily effective urban form, one that can be built as easily at the back of lots as on the corner of an intersection, as large or small, with as expensive or as cheap materials they could afford. But most of all, it all those unfamiliar with the city (which was most people in New York in the nineteenth-century) to quickly identify an evangelical congregation.

PC: One of the key areas where your book helps us to see the dynamism of the city in stoking religion is print culture. How did the city promote religious reading? How did the city help evangelicals as readers and producers of print? How does Evangelical Gotham fit in with the history of print culture in the early republic?

KR: Evangelical New Yorkers appreciated that they lived in a city that was competing with Philadelphia for supremacy in the growing nation. The race to be a national center for print production was one of many such competitions. At the turn of the nineteenth century, London evangelicals had suggested the efficacy of the organized production and distribution of religious print through associations like the Religious Tract Society and the British and Foreign Bible Society. Within a decade or so, New Yorkers followed their lead.

By the second quarter of the nineteenth century, evangelical print was being produced by non-denominational, denominational, and even commercial printers across New York. Non-denominational societies such as the American Tract Society and American Bible Society relocated to the city and made it their base of operations. Denominational publishing houses, such as the Methodist Book Concern, also set-up shop. Both sought to produce as much print and to make it as affordable as possible. Realizing the money to be made from the evangelical market, commercial publishers also began to publish a range of religious works. Harper Brothers, for example, was founded by four brothers who had grown up in the John Street Methodist Church. Commercial publishers kept their secular titles, but also profited from the religious ones they sold. Evangelicals made it very difficult to avoid their printed works; they even distributed tracts to every household in the city in 1835! 

Not only were evangelical New Yorkers surrounded by religious print, but they also had the opportunity to contribute their own voices to it. A small tract written by the nurseryman and Sunday school teacher Michael Floy was picked up and printed in the national Methodist magazine, The Christian Advocate and Journal, soon reaching audiences across the nation.  

I think we have underappreciated the extent to which evangelical adoption of new printing technologies, their experiments with the organization of wide scale production, and their innovative thinking about distribution not only benefited their own objectives, but also advanced printing more broadly in the city and nation.

PC: Explain for the blog what you meant on page 7 of the introduction: “Evangelicals did not just live in New York; they lived through it.”

KR: Early on I took to heart Robert Orsi’s admonition that urban religion was not simply religion that took place in cities, but religion that existed at the intersection of religion and the city. Taking seriously that intersection opens up the realization that the faith of evangelical New Yorkers was dependent, in both conscious and unconscious ways, on the city around them. Every walk through city streets, experience in the marketplace, and interaction in the workplace had the potential to be just as formative as services in their churches and Bible reading in the family parlor. 

As I note at the end of the first chapter, at some point in the construction of their spiritual autobiographies, evangelical New Yorkers invariably reflected on the place of New York in their journeys. For the Baptist preacher Charles Lahatt, New York was just one of many stops along a lifetime’s journey that began in the German states and ended as a missionary in western New York. Freed slave George White saw New York City as a land of deliverance, especially compared to the Virginia of his enslavement. And for Divie Bethune, New York was the Celestial City, to which the Lord had directed him “from that sink of iniquity, that blackness of darkness, Tobago” where he had been a clerk on a plantation. New York was many things to many people: a safe harbor in a storm, a conflicted land of deliverance, and even a heavenly reward. To tell the story of urban evangelicals we need to focus on both the urban and the evangelical.

PC: What’s next?

KR: I’m just back from a research trip across the Midwest to a variety of nineteenth-century Catholic settlements. My Loyola students and I have been working on the Jesuit Libraries Provenance Project (https://jesuitlibrariesprovenanceproject.com/) for several years now, and as I move towards writing a book about what we’ve uncovered, I feel the need to see their churches, communities, and homes. As you’ve noted in your questions about my focus on space, I find it difficult to write about a subject if I haven’t seen the physical place in which they lived, moved, and had their being. Writing about New York while a graduate student in Philadelphia and living in Boston was relatively easy: I could hop on a bus or train and be there in a few hours. The Catholic world of the Missouri, Mississippi, and Ohio River valleys is a much broader space.  Westphalia, Hermann, Perryville, and Teutopolis are a little more difficult for me to ordinarily reach from my academic home in Chicago. But it was worth it. Logging over 2000 miles in a rental car gave me plenty of time to reflect on how the landscape of the Midwest might shape not only the economic, political, and social worlds of Catholics, but also inform their spiritual worlds as I gear up to start writing about them.

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Crossing Parish Boundaries: An Interview with Tim Neary

Karen Johnson

Tim Neary's recent book Crossing Parish Boundaries: Race, Sports, and Catholic Youth in Chicago, 1914-1954 traces the decades of interracial contact between Chicago's youth in Bishop Bernard Sheil's Catholic Youth Organization (CYO).  Tim complicates the argument that working-class white ethnics were some the most anti-black people in the urban north at mid-century, situates black Catholics' experiences squarely in the Black Metropolis, illuminates how black Catholics created their own places, and speaks to the civil rights movement historiography, as it merges urban and religious history wonderfully.  Recently I interviewed Tim, and I have posted our conversation below.  You can also see a recording of Tim's recent talk the Cushwa Center here.

KJ: I’m fascinated by your arguments that Sheil and black Catholics assumed that social change would come by working “within the system,” rather than challenging it.  Could you speak to this dynamic in and beyond your book's time frame?

TN: When I first started doing research in the late 1990s on African American Catholics in Chicago, I began noticing that disproportionate numbers of Chicago’s African American political and business leaders during the twentieth century were black Catholics—or at least educated in Catholic schools. While only a small percentage of African Americans were Catholic, they seemed to pop up everywhere in the historical record as civic leaders. The first African American elected to citywide office in 1971—City Treasurer Joseph Bertrand—for example, was a Catholic who attended Corpus Christi grade school and St. Elizabeth’s high school in the Bronzeville neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side before attending the University of Notre Dame on a basketball scholarship. And there were many others like him, including the first African American president of the Cook County Board, John Stroger, a black Catholic who grew up in Arkansas and moved to Chicago in 1953 after graduating from the nation’s only African American Catholic university—Xavier in New Orleans. Ralph Metcalfe, a Chicago native, was another example. Metcalfe attended Marquette University in Milwaukee on a track scholarship, starred in the 1932 and 1936 Summer Olympics, and rose through the political ranks to become a U.S. Congressman representing the Illinois First Congressional District during the 1970s.

In addition to sharing the same race and religion, each man was a product of Chicago’s Irish Catholic Democratic Party political machine.

Political scientist and Harold Washington campaign advisor William Grimshaw dubbed them Mayor Richard J. Daley’s “loyalist black elites.” Daley, not known for racial enlightenment, needed African Americans to represent political wards in the city’s segregated, all-black neighborhoods. He chose black Catholics, because they were “part of the system” by virtue of attending Catholic schools and participating in Catholic parish life. In this symbiotic relationship, a premium was put on loyalty and knowing one’s place in the system. Blacks were supposed to serve the machine and not rock the boat, what activist and historian Timuel Black has called “plantation politics.”

Within this arrangement, it was difficult for the loyalist black elites to challenge the white power structure on the issue of civil rights. Metcalfe, for example, remained a faithful foot soldier for the machine in 1966 when Martin Luther King came to Chicago. Publicly siding with Daley, Metcalfe said Chicago could work out its race problems without the presence of King, encouraging the civil rights leader to return to the South. Even after the rise of the Black Power movement and King’s assassination, Metcalfe remained within the fold. When Metcalfe ran for Representative William Dawson’s vacated Congressional seat in 1970, for example, he campaigned on a “law and order” platform, fully aligning himself with Daley. 

Metcalfe finally broke with Daley in 1972 over the issue of police brutality in the African American community, transforming himself from machine loyalist to black activist. Infuriated, Daley stripped Metcalfe of his Democratic Party ward leadership positions and ran an opponent against him in the 1976 primary, but Metcalfe won the primary and held on to his seat. In a 1976 Chicago Tribune Sunday magazine feature entitled “Docile No More,” the black Catholic Congressman is quoted saying, “It’s never too late to be black,” and “I am the same Ralph Metcalfe. The only difference is that I no longer represent the 3^rd Ward and the 1^stCongressional District but all oppressed people.”

I think Metcalfe’s story speaks to the difficulty that many African American Catholics had embracing civil rights and black pride movements. While black Protestant churches in the South and North produced significant numbers of African American clergy who led on the issue of civil rights, most Catholic clergy were white Euro-Americans who failed to challenge publicly the status quo of race relations during the civil rights era. There were notable exceptions, but they were in the minority.

KJ: You do a wonderful job describing the places black Catholics created in worship. Could you speak broadly to the importance of paying attention to place for scholars of religion, as well as scholars of race?

TN: Karen, I agree with you and other scholars of race and religion—like historians Arnold Hirsch, John McGreevy, Robert Orsi, Ellen Skerrett, and Thomas Sugrue, among others—that place is essential to understanding people’s experiences and subsequent worldviews. Where we live, work, learn, and play shapes us in so many ways.

In the book, I try my best to recreate the world in which African American Catholics grew up during the 1920s and 1930s in the parishes of St. Elizabeth, Corpus Christi, and St. Anselm in Chicago’s Bronzeville. This is the same neighborhood described by sociologists St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton in the 1945 classic, Black Metropolis. Bronzeville has received significant attention by scholars of African American history and culture during the past 50-60 years, including works on religion. Catholicism, however, has been virtually absent from the literature, despite the major institutional presence of the Catholic Church in the neighborhood during the mid-twentieth century as noted by Drake and Cayton. More recently, some historians—like Suellen Hoy, who has written on the ministry of Catholic sisters in Bronzeville—have begun to fill the gap. It is my goal to place Catholicism side-by-side other well-known Bronzeville institutions, like the Savoy Ballroom and Wabash YMCA, so that readers can see that neighborhood kids who participated in the Catholic Youth Organization (CYO) lived lives as blacks and Catholics simultaneously. That is, when they stepped into Corpus Christi’s grand, Cathedral-like church building at 49^th and South Parkway (today Martin Luther King, Jr. Drive), they brought their “Bronzeville-ness” with them. In the same way, when they walked out of Corpus Christi onto the streets of Bronzeville, they carried with them their Catholic sensibilities.

We have a tendency as scholars to separate and isolate various aspects of our subjects’ lives. While difficult, I think it is well worth the effort to try to understand, as best we can in a holistic way, the entirety of their lived experiences.

KJ: The CYO had an impact in that it provided hundreds of thousands of Chicagoans and Americans opportunities for interracial contact that were outside their jobs and often in settings that could be seen as pretty intimate (i.e. swimming pools – the cover is so suggestive!). But the CYO ultimately declined, and its message did not persevere in the broader culture. What is its significance, then, for us as historians? For people who might want to speak to racial and religious issues in contemporary life? You say it can offer a model for us – can you speak further to that?

TN: I believe that the story of the CYO—which served as a national model for youth ministry between 1930 and 1954 under the direction of its founder Bishop Bernard Sheil—is instructive for us today. In February, I spoke to a national gathering at Notre Dame of Catholic youth sports directors. While many of their Catholic programs use the name “CYO,” most of them had never heard of Sheil or the organization’s origins during the Great Depression in Chicago. Like other audiences whom I’ve addressed, they were surprised to hear that a Catholic bishop ran a nationally-known, large-scale youth sports and educational organization which was interracial and ecumenical a generation before the modern civil rights movement and the Second Vatican Council. At a time when segregation—racial, spatial, and economic—is stark and continues to grow, Sheil’s expansive and inclusive approach is worth reexamining.

As an auxiliary bishop of the Archdiocese of Chicago, Sheil understood his responsibility for pastoral leadership to extend to every resident of the 350 parishes within Cook and Lake Counties—whether they were Catholic or not. In this particular case, Catholicism’s parochial system ironically served to cross boundaries of race, religion, and class throughout the Chicago metro region. Parish boundaries replicated neighborhood boundaries, which demarcated segregation, but Canon Law recognized each parish as equal. Therefore, when CYO boxers competed before tens of thousands of fans at Soldier Field, CYO basketball teams played before hundreds in gymnasiums across the city, or CYO swimmers met in Washington Park before much smaller crowds, blacks and whites, as well as Catholics and non-Catholics, participated as competitors on an even playing field. The winners then went on to travel on interracial squads to compete against CYO champions in other cities.

In creating the CYO, Sheil followed four simple principles: 1) respond to an urgent need (the rise of juvenile delinquency, secularism, and materialism during the era of Al Capone); 2) be pragmatic (choose a glamour sport like boxing to attract tough kids); 3) include everyone (in the spirit of Catholic universalism and New Deal pluralism); and 4) meld religious virtue with civic engagement (e.g., holding summer vacation schools in public parks staffed by both Catholic nuns and New Deal government workers).       

Today, we might use terms like public-private partnerships, faith-based initiatives, youth mentorship, community engagement, social responsibility, and social capital to talk about such a model. Not unlike the 1920s when Bishop Sheil’s boss Cardinal George Mundelein charged Sheil with developing a comprehensive program to respond to the social ills plaguing young people, cities today—in particular Chicago—face high levels of poverty, violence, and racism. I think we need a model that works in a coordinated way on both the macro (citywide/diocesan-wide) and micro (neighborhood/parish) levels. While by no means a panacea during its time, Sheil’s CYO did improve lives, and I believe that we can learn from it.

KJ: Your book has opened up so many research possibilities for future scholars.  What subjects do you think are ripe for research?

TN: There is so much that we still do not know about the intersection of African American life and Catholicism in U.S. history. Historians of black Catholicism, like the late Cyprian Davis, Cecilia Moore, and Dianne Batts Morrow among others—have filled in many of the gaps in what religious studies scholar Albert Raboteau has called the “minority within a minority.” And scholars of Catholic interracialism—including R. Bentley Anderson, John McGreevy, and Stephen Ochs, among others—have taught us much about the history of African Americans’ encounter with the “white” Catholic Church. Yet, there is much more work to do. Part of the challenge is avoiding the parochialism of our respective scholarly fields. It shouldn’t just be religious history scholars but urban, labor, sports, cultural, and political historians who “take religion seriously” as a category of analysis. We’ve seen tremendous growth in this area over the last generation, and I’m cautiously optimistic about the future.

The impact of Catholic schools on African Americans, particularly in northern cities during the twentieth century, is just one example where further research could pay big dividends. How did parochial education affect African Americans? In what ways did it help? In what ways did it hurt? What effect did it have on the economic status, political views, and interracial interactions of black alumni from Catholic schools? Likewise, how did Catholicism’s large-scale encounter with African Americans during the twentieth century affect the Catholic Church? Did it alter teachings on racial justice, liturgical practices, or political party affiliation? The potential number of research questions appears to be endless.  

KJ: You had to do a lot of creative searching for your sources.  Tell us about them, especially for Sheil and black Catholics.

TN: In his time, Bishop Sheil was a nationally-known figure, meeting with President Franklin Roosevelt at the White House, featured in national publications like the New York Times and Time magazine. When Cardinal Mundelein died in 1939, many thought Sheil, his second-in-command, would become Chicago’s next archbishop. He was passed over for the job, however, and, although he remained a popular public figure through World War II and the immediate postwar years—speaking out on issues of racial justice and workers’ rights—his position within the American Catholic Church never regained the prominence it had held during the Depression. By the early 1950s, declining health, a growing CYO debt, and run-ins with his ecclesiastical superior plagued Sheil. In 1954, a few months after a public feud with U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy, Sheil resigned from the CYO. The Archdiocese of Chicago largely dismantled the program and stepped back from Sheil’s progressive social agenda. The “Apostle of Youth” remained in Chicago for another twelve years as pastor of a North Side parish, but he became a sort of persona no grata among the leadership of the archdiocese. In 1966, after Cardinal John Cody forced him to step down from his position as pastor, he left the only city he had ever lived in for retirement in Tucson, Arizona, dying in 1969 at the age 83.

I mention all that to explain why relatively little has been written on Sheil. No full-length biography exists, for example. It is rumored that he burned his personal papers out of bitterness. This was a challenge for me doing research. I relied on limited CYO records in the archives of the Archdiocese of Chicago, journalistic accounts, and oral histories. Historian Steven Avella has a chapter on Sheil in his book on mid-twentieth century Chicago Catholicism, This Confident Church (Notre Dame, 1993), and Cardinal George Mundelein biographer Edward Kantowicz describes the relationship between Sheil and Mundelein in Corporation Sole (Notre Dame, 1983). Otherwise, Sheil is largely forgotten. Besides his name attached to the Catholic student center at Northwestern University and a small Chicago park, there is little memory of the bishop and his substantial influence on Chicago and the nation during the mid-twentieth century.

Likewise, sources of African American Catholics can be difficult to come by. Catholic sisters, who encountered thousands of black students in schools across the country, were typically modest to the point of anonymity, unlikely to write memoirs or commemorate their selfless works. Oral histories can be excellent sources of information—and were for me—but require significant investments of time and energy. Moreover, we’re losing more and more of those voices each day as black Catholics born in the first half of the twentieth century pass on. Nonetheless, parish records, diocesan archives, school yearbooks, government documents, newspaper accounts, and many other sources are out there for those willing to search for them.

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