"Cult of True Womanhood" and American Catholic Sisters: An Example of Creative Subversion

Barbara Welter concludes her pathbreaking article, “The Cult of True Womanhood, 1820-1860,” by declaring that “[Various forces in their lives] … called forth responses from woman, which differed from those she was trained to believe were hers by nature and divine decree. The very perfection of True Womanhood, moreover, carried within itself the seeds of its own destruction. For if woman was so very little less than the angels, she should surely take a more active part in running the world, especially since men were making such a hash of things” [174]. Traditionally, in both Welter’s original work and the many efforts that have subsequently followed, the living out of “True Womanhood” and the creative subversion it unintentionally inspired have been understood almost exclusively in either secular or Protestant contexts. This article explores the role of Catholic education by sisters in both reinforcing and undermining Victorian gender roles, and specifically analyzes the contributions of Catholic women religious to the complex and subversive process that Welter suggested. It analyzes the cultural and religious tensions that characterized nineteenth-century Catholic women’s education, as well as the women’s agency that, however inadvertently, it came to empower.

Taking the Check or Checking the Take

This essay studies the endowments of modern American colleges and universities. It examines the norms that govern the activities that affect the size of the endowment, specifically spending, acceptance of donations, and investment of endowment funds. The norms regulating the latter two are found to be insufficient, as is evidenced by their inconsistent application. However, American catholic colleges and universities apply the norms regulating investments more consistently than other schools. Catholic colleges' and universities' Socially Responsible Investment (SRI) practices are found to be rooted in the catholic church's official teaching on catholic universities as found in ex corde ecclesiae and the catechism of the catholic church. These documents suggest the need to develop, codify and apply even more rigorous norms governing the acceptance of donations and investment of endowment funds at every American catholic college and university.

“All kids matter”? Catholic institutional advocacy for federal COVID relief funding for non-public schools

This article explores the policy interests expressed by the largest private educational system in the United States, American Catholic schools, during the first four months of the COVID-19 crisis. Critical discourse analysis is applied to public texts produced by the Catholic Church between March 1 and July 1, 2020, in order to understand the discursive strategies through which this institution constructs meaning in the policy arena. This analysis illustrates how Catholic leaders use language to make racialized and low-income students “discursively invisible.” The author documents a significant change in policy discourse, from neoconservative logics to neoliberal ones, which corresponds directly to political signaling from the Trump Administration. Drawing on critical race theory, the author suggests implications for policymakers and stakeholders.

Policy Dialogue: The Rise and Decline of Catholic Education, 1500-Present

Catholic schools have faced a number of hurdles in recent decades, including the sharp decline of vocations among religious sisters who have worked in schools (as much as 90 percent in the last four decades), rising tuition prices for families, the sexual abuse crisis, and questions about institutional commitment to maintaining schools in light of these challenges. These changes affect all students and families, but have special significance for those of lower socioeconomic status, who historically used Catholic schools as an engine of upward mobility.For this policy dialogue, the editors of HEQ asked Paul Grendler and Carol Ann MacGregor to reflect on the benefits, challenges, and turning points of Catholic-sponsored education from the sixteenth century to the present. Grendler is Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Toronto, the former president of the Renaissance Society of America and the American Catholic Historical Association, and a recipient of the Galileo Galilei Prize. The author of eleven books, he has published widely on education in the Renaissance. His recent work concentrates on Jesuit universities and Jesuit schools, especially in Italy. MacGregor is Associate Professor of Sociology and current Vice Provost at Loyola University New Orleans. She has also been named an Associate Fellow of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia. Her publications, which have appeared in American Catholic Studies and American Sociological Review (among others), focus on Catholic education policy and practice, and religion and public life.HEQ Policy Dialogues are, by design, intended to promote an informal, free exchange of ideas between scholars. At the end of the exchange, we offer a list of references to readers who wish to follow up on sources relevant to the discussion.

Archival Formations and the Universal Sentiment

This chapter examines the life and writings of Eusebio Guiteras (1823–93), who lived for twenty-five years in Philadelphia. Guiteras captured American life and culture in his travel diaries of the 1840s–1880s, and he translated Rudo Ensayo, a work by the eighteenth-century priest Juan Nentvig (1713–68) that details the evangelization mission of the Jesuits in what is now the American Southwest, but was then northern New Spain. Contextualizing the production and circulation of the multiple editions of Nentvig’s text in the nineteenth century, specifically one by the well-known antiquarian Thomas Buckingham Smith (1810–71), this Latina/o translation advocates for a constructive place for the Catholic Church in the US and Cuba. This advocacy must be understood in light of the translation’s underlying racial politics. Following his source text and the political designs of the editors of the Records of the American Catholic Historical Society (1894), in which the translation appeared, Guiteras simplistically and erroneously depicts the pacification of Native Americans in New Spain as a compassionate enterprise. In his travel diary, Un invierno en Nueva York (n.d.), Guiteras transposes this spiritual enterprise to the Cuban context, in which the place of Afro Cubans was being debated in the 1880s and 1890s on the island and in the US. In doing so, he envisions Catholic priests and Catholicism as agents for the pacification and assimilation of Afro Cubans in Cuba’s future republic while also arguing for a parallel and positive role for the Catholic Church in fashioning a culturally integrated United States.

The Making of American Catholicism

The Making of American Catholicism: Regional Culture and the Catholic Experience argues that regional and transnational relationships have been central to the making of American Catholicism. The book traces the development of Catholic cultures in the South, the Midwest, the West, and the Northeast and their contribution to larger patterns of Catholicism in the United States. Exploring the history of Catholic cultures in New Orleans, Iowa, Wisconsin, Los Angeles, and New York City, the book carefully explores the history of American Catholic cultures across regions and their relation to factors such as national origin, ethnicity, race, and gender. The chapters include close analysis of the historical experiences of Latinx and African American Catholics as well as European immigrant Catholics. Eschewing a national or nationalistic focus that might elide or neglect global connections or local complexity, the book offers an interpretation of the American Catholic experience that encompasses local, national, and transnational histories by emphasizing the diverse origins of Catholics in the United States, their long-standing ties to transnational communities of Catholic believers, and the role of region in shaping the contours of American Catholic religiosity. Drawing on extensive archival research, the book argues that regional American Catholic cultures and a larger American Catholicism developed as transnational Catholic laity and clergy ecclesiastically linked to and by Rome in a hierarchical, authoritarian, and communalistic “universal Church” creatively adapted their devotional and ideological practices in particular American regional contexts that emphasized notions of republicanism, religious liberty, individualistic capitalism, race, ethnicity, and gender.