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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5 Questions on Catholics and Suburanization with Stephen Koeth

Shane Ulbrich

Stephen Koeth, C.S.C.

[This month's Cushwa post features an interview by Shane Ulbrich with Research Travel Grant recipient Stephen Koeth, C.S.C., about his work on the postwar suburbanization of American Catholics. Stephen, a Holy Cross priest, is a doctoral candidate in history at Columbia University. His writing has appeared in The Journal of Church and State and U.S. Catholic Historian.]

SU: Tell us about how your project developed. 

 SK: My dissertation explores the postwar suburbanization of American Catholicism by examining the creation and expansion of the Diocese of Rockville Centre in suburban Long Island, which throughout the 1960s was one of the fastest growing Catholic communities in the country. It describes how Catholic pastoral leaders grappled with the rapid exodus of the faithful from urban ethnic neighborhoods to newly built suburbs, and how Catholic sociologists and intellectuals assessed the effects of suburbanization in reshaping definitions of family, parish, and community. I also hope to trace how changing experiences of family and community, the economics of suburban life, and efforts to build and maintain suburban Catholic schools altered lay Catholics’ view of the state and their voting habits, thus transforming Catholicism’s role in American politics from the New Deal to the Reagan Revolution. This topic first began to take shape when I read Tom Sugrue’s contribution to Catholics in the American Century, one of the most recent volumes in the Cushwa Center Studies of Catholicism in Twentieth-Century America series. Sugrue pointed out that “the history of Catholic suburbanization … and its implications for Catholic politics remain mostly unexamined.” And yet, Sugrue argued, suburban Catholics contributed to a “growing grassroots rebellion against taxation,” to “the erosion of support for the state,” and to “the challenge to liberalism” that reconfigured American politics through the 1960s and 70s. [1] I read Sugrue’s observation as a challenge and opportunity to bring together my long-standing interest in how Catholics have shaped their American identity with coursework in urban history I undertook as a doctoral student at Columbia University with the great historian of suburbanization, Kenneth Jackson.




 SU:  What did you come to the Notre Dame Archives to find? Did you end up making any valuable discoveries you didn’t anticipate? 

Map from Philip Murnion, et al., The Archdiocese of New York: Prospects and Recommendations for the Future (New York, March 1968)

SK: I specifically came to Notre Dame to search the archives of the Christian Family Movement. From the 1940s through the 1970s, the CFM aimed to assist married couples in properly understanding family, community, and parish life, and deepen member couples’ commitment to involvement in their parish and community. In the archives I was able to find numerous CFM handbooks used for group discussion, lectures from CFM annual conventions, and articles from the CFM newsletter, Act. Additionally, thanks to wonderful assistance from the archivists at Notre Dame, I will be able to listen to digitized recordings of oral interviews that were conducted with CFM members in the 1980s. These materials make clear the evolving ways in which Catholics understood the parish, especially in light of the liturgical movement and demographic change. I was also pleased to uncover more valuable material than I had originally expected in the papers of Fr. Philip Murnion, a priest-sociologist who founded the National Pastoral Life Center. His studies of parish life and priesthood, including for the Archdiocese of New York, contain interesting reflections on how suburbanization was re-shaping pastoral planning on the diocesan level.

SU: You said that a lot about Catholic suburbanization remains unexamined by historians. Is your research uncovering surprising trends or challenging standard narratives about the period? 

SK: One of the most popular tropes about postwar suburban Catholics is that they so valued Catholic education, and were having so many children, that newly established parishes usually built a parochial school first, and celebrated Sunday Mass in the gymnasium or cafeteria until the parish could afford to build a church. Of course, this pattern did in fact play itself out in many suburban parishes, but it was far from universally true, and the narrative may actually obscure as much about suburban Catholicism as it illuminates. St. Bernard’s Parish in Long Island’s famed Levittown development, for example, helps provide a necessary corrective. After the parish was founded in 1948 a church was built and sisters were recruited to teach religious education classes in parishioners’ homes. Not until 1961, however, was a parish school opened, and only after the parish had a contentious debate about the necessity and value of Catholic education. Parishioners questioned the advisability of spending so much money on building a school when it could only accommodate a small percentage of the parish’s children, when parishioners’ heavy tax burden was simultaneously funding new public schools, and when the ecumenical spirit of Cold War religiosity – and, in time, the Second Vatican Council – engendered suspicion of Catholic separatism.

Getting beyond the standard narrative of the postwar building boom and recovering these debates provides crucial insight into broader uncertainties in American Catholicism occasioned by the collapse of the Catholic ghetto. These include issues of assimilation to mainstream American culture, inculcating the faith in the next generation, the quality of Catholic schools, and the relationship between church and state. These are all issues I hope to explore more deeply in the dissertation.

SU:  You mentioned Tom Sugrue’s argument that suburban Catholics contributed to a “growing grassroots rebellion against taxation.” Could you say more about the role you’re finding taxation played in Catholic suburbanization and its politics?

SK: As I mentioned, suburban Catholics found themselves under the weight of home mortgages, the increasing taxes levied by suburban municipalities that were massively expanding public services, and, in some cases, the tuition bills for sending their children to the parish school. In response, Catholic lobbying groups in New York and around the nation intensified their efforts to obtain state aid for parochial schools, hoping that such financial relief would lower tuitions, increase enrollments, and thus ensure the survival of Catholic schools. Political candidates from both parties also appealed to Catholic voters by supporting state aid for parochial schools. In 1967, delegates to the New York State constitutional convention proposed repealing the state’s 1894 “Blaine Amendment” which had prohibited state aid to church-related schools. This was a considerable victory for Catholic lobbying efforts in Albany. However, when the proposed constitution was put before the state’s electorate, it was voted down even in heavily Catholic areas of suburban Nassau County. At the time, political commentators concluded that Catholic voters must have feared that the new constitution would lead to increased financial obligations for the state and thus to higher taxes.

I am still sorting out precisely what this result, when combined with other data such as enrollment figures in suburban parish schools, has to tell us about Catholic assimilation, the laity’s support for parochial schools, and Catholic voters’ understanding of church-state relations. But the 1967 referendum strongly suggests that suburban Catholic voters placed a higher priority on minimizing their tax burden than on preserving a Catholic subculture through the support of Catholic schools. I think that this episode, and the larger story of Catholic suburbanization, can help us fill out the historiography of postwar conservatism and adjudicate historiographical debates about white backlash and the disintegration of New Deal liberalism. Catholics are often oddly omitted from the story of postwar conservatism. Historians who do try to explain the political realignment of American Catholicism, and the Catholic contribution to the Reagan Revolution, usually focus on the politics of race relations, law-and-order, and especially abortion. I hope to show that postwar political realignment can’t be fully understood without reference to the cultural, economic, and political changes wrought by the suburbanization of Catholic voters throughout the 1950s and 60s.

SU: What other archives will you be visiting? 

SK: In addition to my research in the archives at Notre Dame, I have already spent several months researching in the archives of the Diocese of Rockville Centre. I had the opportunity to examine numerous diocesan and parish collections as well as twenty years of the diocesan newspaper, The Long Island Catholic. In the coming months, I will be working in the archives of the Diocese of Brooklyn and the Archdiocese of New York, in the U.S. Bishops’ Conference papers at The Catholic University of America, and in select collections of women’s religious orders which were active in the suburbs I am studying. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, I hope to visit several suburban parishes to explore their collections of bulletins, newspapers, and other documents.

 [1] R. Scott Appleby and Kathleen Sprows Cummings, ed. Catholics in the American Century: Recasting Narrative of U.S. History (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012): 70–72, 79.

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