VALORES PREDETERMINADOS DE ARCHIVO DE CONFIGURACIÓN

Two factors heavily influenced twentieth century mission in North America. The first was a constant stream of immigration/migration from all parts of the world. The second was the contiguous land mass of the Americas. Their physical connection influenced the cross-continent, as well as trans-oceanic paths of mission. Mission issues affecting one part of the continent did not stop at national borders. The patterns of North American Catholic mission activity in the twentieth century further reveal an evolving mission theology.

Immigration/Migration in Relation to Mission

An experience that characterized much of twentieth century mission and evangelization in North America was the continuous immigration or migration of diverse ethnic/racial groups, as had been the case from the beginning of the Americas. This phenomenon shaped the mission and evangelization response of bishops, laity, clergy, and religious orders across the socio-economic and ethnic spectrum. With astute pastoral observation, the U.S. bishops, who gathered at the Third Plenary Council of Baltimore, laid out the wide-ranging mission and evangelical field in 1883. They identified the need to respond to Native Americans, African Americans, and immigrants – the latter largely from Ireland, Germany, Italy, Austria-Hungary, Belgium and the Netherlands at the time. Though not specifically mentioned by the bishops, internal migration from Mexico and people of Hispanic heritage in Texas, California and the southwest represented either new populations or existing Hispanic and Amerindian communities in those areas. When the bishops met, thirty-seven states comprised the United States with most of that land in the frontier West. A large amount of the energy of the American Catholic Church went toward immigrant populations, to make sure a vigorous pastoral presence and evangelical outreach assisted in maintaining and developing Catholic faith and ‘regular’ parish life in a land, thought by Europeans to be a ‘Protestant’ country. To renew and recommit the faith of Catholics, religious orders, especially the Jesuits and Redemptorists, traversed the country preaching one or two week ‘missions’ in parishes, a practice they continue to the present.

In 1908, the United States and Canada were removed from the jurisdiction of Propaganda Fide and placed within the regular jurisdiction of the Holy See. The bulk of personnel and financial resources were given

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to the burgeoning immigrant population, who often settled in cities. Many of the needs of new arrivals in North America were filled by a plethora of women’s religious communities who responded to the varied situations of immigrant communities. Religious sisters engaged in mission or evangelization through education, social work, medicine, and catechetical instruction, often as pioneers in the fields. Frances Xavier Cabrini (1850- 1917) was among the notable sisters in her mission to Italian immigrants in medical and education ministries through the community she founded, the Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart. Between 1872 and 1922, 167 new congregations or provinces of women religious were formed, significantly affecting the direction of the North American Catholic Church’s mission and evangelization, both for the ‘Americanized’ and for new immigrants from the Mediterranean and Eastern Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The growth of a Catholic school system through much of the United States played a key role in the evangelization of hundreds of thousands of grade and high school students. These schools, as well as seminaries, became the locus for the success of the Catholic Students Mission Crusade, with membership of almost a million young people at its height.

National ecclesiastical structures to minister to new immigrants or refugees to the United States began in 1920, when the National Catholic Welfare Conference established a Department of Immigration after the First World War. Following the Second World War, Catholic Relief Services and the Catholic Committee for Refugees assisted in the resettlement of Europeans. Since 1965, Migration and Refugee Services, established by the U.S. Catholic Conference, have provided a number of services to those arriving in the United States because of war or persecution in their home countries. After the Vietnam War, refugees arrived in numbers from Southeast Asia and more recently, immigrants and refugees have come from Central and South America and Africa. Within the last decade, the United States Catholic Mission Association (USCMA), which compiles annual statistics on U.S. Catholics in overseas mission, has included the category of ‘cross-cultural’ missionary in the United States.

Mission Among Native and African Americans

In Canada, between the mid-1860s and the 1960s, Oblates of Mary Immaculate, who had a strong presence among First Nations, operated many residential schools in Canada, an experience that had conflicting results, according to the Native Americans, the Oblates themselves, and the Canadian government (see Fay 2003). In the United States, the Bureau of Catholic Indian Missions (1848) continued its work, financed to a great extent by Katharine Drexel (1858-1955), who also founded the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament for Negroes and Indians, with the idea that education was a key to social and economic improvement for people whose

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lives had been impaired on both counts. While most of the North American Catholic communities were on government reservations, a few urban communities arose, with the one in Milwaukee, Wisconsin being the largest. Begun informally between 1939 and 1946, the Kateri Tekakwitha Conference has strengthened Native American Catholic identity and works toward the evangelization of Native Americans.

The mission to and evangelization of African Americans was the goal of two communities of black women religious founded in the nineteenth century – the Oblates of Providence and the Holy Family Sisters – and the Franciscan Handmaids of Mary founded in 1916 in Savannah, Georgia. Against great odds, these women taught and assisted the poor, and in the case of the Holy Family Sisters, sent their Sisters to minister in the Caribbean.

Discrimination against blacks by Catholics and others prevented black men from entering most North American seminaries. The problem had been addressed in the lay-organized African American Congresses and again by Howard University professor, Thomas Wyatt Turner (1877-1978), a leader among educated black Catholics in Baltimore. As an organizer of the Federated Colored Catholics in 1925, he spoke eloquently for entrance of African American men into seminaries. Two men’s communities who particularly identified with this group were the Josephite Fathers, who served African American parishes, and the Society of the Divine Word, who began a preparatory seminary in Bay St Louis, Mississippi for black young men (1923). The first ordained priests from that seminary served in Lafayette, Louisiana parishes, and after World War II some African American Divine Word Fathers and Brothers were sent to Ghana.

In the turmoil of the mid to late 1960s, The Black Catholic Clergy Caucus (1968) and the Black Sisters’ Conference (1969) expressed a greater national self-definition, addressed issues related to racism and pledged themselves to the liberation of blacks. The March to Selma, Alabama (1965), by hundreds of Sisters, clergy and laity under the leadership of Martin Luther King, Jr was a watershed for American Catholicism in terms of a strong public and ecumenical witness against racism.

Hispanic Americans

After the Spanish American War (1899), the United States had responsibilities toward Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines. Puerto Rico, with a Catholic culture, but not well organized in its Catholicism, went through a process of ‘Americanization’. Several U.S. men and women’s communities were sent there particularly to establish a Catholic school system. With a large number of Protestants applying to teach in the Philippines, Bishop John Ireland (1838-1918) urged Catholics to do likewise. The Mexican Revolution of 1910 with its subsequent

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persecution of the Catholic Church resulted in barrio churches north of the Mexican border, exiled clergy, and the opening of the Montezuma Seminary in Las Vegas, New Mexico (1936), for exiled Mexicans to study for the priesthood.

The largest Hispanic immigrant group in the United States before 1965 came from Mexico, Puerto Rico, Cuba, and the Caribbean. While men generally had less of a connection to the parish church, women took responsibility to educate their children in faith. A strong devotional life was a key to Hispanic identity, especially prayer to Our Lady of Guadalupe, a portable image that could be taken along during migratory work as they followed the harvest of vegetables and fruit. The people’s mobility made mission/evangelization of Hispanic families more difficult because they remained in an area for a few months and then moved on. The introduction of the Cursillo movement from Spain in 1965 energized Hispanic leadership, especially among the men. As was true for many other immigrant groups, the formation of mutual aid societies, mutualistas, played an important associational role in Mexican and Catholic identity and as economic and labor forces in the Midwest. In the mid-1960s, leadership among migrant groups, especially through United Farm Worker founders Cesar Chavez (1927-1993) and Delores Huerta (b. 1930), drew the attention of Catholics to the socio-economic and religious plight of migrants. A successful boycott was organized against large California companies that grew grapes and lettuce. While the companies benefitted from the labor and sweat of Hispanics, the migrants lived in substandard housing and suffered from the effects of chemical sprays on crops.

The first Mexican-American ordained bishop, Patricio Flores, and Father Virgilio Elizondo founded the Mexican American Cultural Center (1972), an important gathering place for teaching and research on Hispanic Catholicism and culture. Three pastoral Encuentros, or Encounters (1972, 1977, 1985), addressed the needs of Hispanics and subsequently, the U.S. bishops adopted a National Pastoral Plan for Hispanic Ministry (1987). Another level of mission and evangelization with the Hispanic community took place in 2006, when over 2,000 youth gathered at the University of Notre Dame for the first National Encuentro of Hispanic Youth Ministry.

Home Missions

Francis Clement Kelley (1870-1948), originally from Prince Edward Island, Canada, had been a pastor in a small, predominantly Protestant town in Michigan. He was impressed with the large churches they built, thinking that imposing buildings marked a stable parish community. Without a church wherein to worship, Kelley maintained, there would not be faith, and ‘Christian pride would surely die’ (Kelley 1922: 16). He founded the Catholic Church Extension Society in 1906 to raise money to fund missions in heavily Protestant or unchurched areas. He spearheaded two American

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Catholic Missionary Congresses (Chicago, 1909; Boston, 1913) that drew together bishops, missionaries, and laity to discuss and act on behalf of all types of mission. The society continues its goal to strengthen Catholic presence in isolated or underserved areas of the United States. A Catholic Church Extension Society formed in 1908 in Canada, though with somewhat different purposes: to assist Ukrainian Catholic and other Eastern European immigrants in building churches, meet their various needs and to anglicize them (Fay 2003:166-169).

The Glenmary Home Missioners were founded by Father Howard Bishop (1886-1953) in 1939 to establish the Catholic Church in rural areas. In addition to the services provided by the Glenmary Fathers and Sisters, the Glenmary Research Center has conducted sociological analysis for the southern and rural United States, where Catholic presence was minimal. Many Catholics remember seeing Glenmary’s ‘No Priest-land’ maps of the United States. Glenmary experience and research was important background in the pastoral letter, This Land is Home to Me (1975), written by bishops who served in the Appalachian mountain region. The document addressed justice issues related to coal mining, workers, the misuse of land and subsequent impoverishment of local communities.

National ecclesiastical groups formed to draw together representatives of mission sending and mission funding organizations, individual missionaries, bishops and others interested in mission. After a successful national collaboration during World War I, the U.S. Catholic bishops formed the U.S. Catholic Welfare Council, under whose auspices the American Board of Catholic Missions was begun (1925). Further national configurations worked for mission collaboration and to keep mission before the minds of American Catholics: a Mission Secretariat (1949/50-1969), the U.S. Catholic Mission Council (1969-1981), and the United States Catholic Missionary Association (1981-present). The membership of the latter includes the leadership of mission communities, mission fundraisers, and missionaries, with a goal to foster cross-cultural and global mission.

In 1986 the U.S. bishops’ pastoral, To the Ends of the Earth, provided an overview of the history of missions in the U.S., a brief theology of mission using the insights of the Second Vatican Council, and encouragement for dioceses to develop mission committees. Local involvement in mission awareness would provide a wider base of education and financial support for missions and would assist the bishops in effecting a greater realization of the essential missionary nature of the Church. Currently, the office of the United States Catholic Conference of Bishops Committee on World Mission is charged with oversight to promote mission ad gentes through education and mission animation and to be a liaison with pontifical mission societies.

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Mission Education and Formation

Many mission congregations published their own magazines to inform Catholics about their missionaries and to raise money for their support, reflective of the earlier Jesuit Relations. By 1930, U.S. Catholics could choose from over forty-five mission magazines available to them. In the first half of the twentieth century, local and national offices of the Society for the Propagation of the Faith (SPF) provided solid mission reading for American Catholics. Joseph McGlinchey in the Boston SPF office translated Paulo Manna, The Workers are Few (1911) and The Conversion

of the Pagan World (1921). Between 1945 and 1950, the National SPF,

along with the Missionary Union of the Clergy, published seven volumes of

Missionary Academia to infuse seminary curricula with mission

knowledge. The articles covered a range of mission topics, including a theology of accommodation, laity and overseas missions, interracial justice, world religions, and a geographic perspective on comparative mission approaches around the world. The periodical intended to involve seminarians in the work of the SPF, to provide specific familiarity with missions and to develop a ‘mission mindedness’. The furtherance of this academic study was the publication of Worldmission (1970-1982), sponsored by the National SPF.

Between 1920 and the late 1960s, the Catholic Students Mission Crusade provided mission education materials in a range of media – study books, pamphlets, radio programs, and plays for high schools, colleges and seminaries. Current creative and dynamic mission education programs in English and Spanish include those produced by the Society of Saint Columban and the Maryknoll Society. Other groups focused on education of adults toward current understandings of mission and ecumenism. The Paulist Fathers’ innovative Living Room Dialogues (1965) was a popular forum for Catholic adults to discuss practical and theological elements of post-Vatican II mission and ecumenism in the comfort of their homes.

As seminaries sought ways to reform their education and formation programs for future priests in the 1960s, the Servite Fathers, the Order of Friars Minor (Sacred Heart Province), and the Passionists collaborated to form the Catholic Theological Union (CTU) in Chicago, Illinois, in 1968. Shortly thereafter, other men’s groups joined them, including several mission congregations. This mission emphasis led to CTU having perhaps the strongest missiology and cross-cultural curriculum among comparable Catholic schools of theology in the United States. Currently twenty-four communities of men provide their seminarians graduate education for priesthood and/or mission in an international and multi-ethnic student body that includes laity. The Dominicans, Jesuits, and Franciscan Friars collaborated in an ecumenical endeavor to coordinate theological programs at the Graduate Theological Union, formed in 1968 in Berkeley, California.

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Lay Mission

Many lay missioners both within North America and those going overseas were influenced by Pope Pius XII’s encyclical, Mystici Corporis (MC 1943), that infused many types of lay mission, including Catholic Action. A particular model of mission – observe, judge, act – undergird the approach of several groups from the 1930s through the 1960s, including the Young Christian Workers, Young Christian Students, and Christian Family Movement. The model reflected the influence of Belgian Canon Joseph Cardijn (1882-1967). His concept emphasized that laity could and should have an influence in their milieu to effect changes for a more just and ‘Christian’ public sphere. Several lay mission groups, such as the Grail, the Papal Volunteers for Latin America, the Lay Mission Helpers of Los Angeles, and the Women Volunteers for Africa represented the mid- twentieth century numerical growth of lay missioners going overseas. In the last twenty-five years, short-term overseas missions for laity (anywhere from six months to one year) have increased noticeably among U.S. Catholics, as they realize the call to mission through baptism. The USCMA suggests the number to be in the hundreds of thousands, who serve anywhere from a few weeks to a year. Diocesan and parish ‘twinning’ missions, connecting one diocese or parish in North America with one usually in South America, have also grown more numerous. A recent study indicated that over 330 U.S. parishes have a ‘relationship of support’ with parishes in Central and South America (McGlone 1997).

Missions Abroad

Prior to the twentieth century, few religious congregations in the United States sent missionaries overseas. World War I, however, created disorder in the European-sponsored missions, and North American Catholics saw the time to be ripe for their involvement in overseas mission. In 1909, the Society of the Divine Word opened a preparatory seminary outside of Chicago to prepare men for missions overseas. In 1911, the Catholic Foreign Mission Society of America (Maryknoll) was founded outside of Ossining, New York, to send missionaries to Asia. In 1918, John Mary Fraser (1877-1962), a priest from the Archdiocese of Toronto, founded the Scarboro Fathers, initially for work in China. A comprehensive pastoral letter of the U.S. Catholic bishops (1919) called for continued work in home and ‘foreign’ missions. An innovative dimension in mission came in 1925, when medical Doctor Anna Dengel (1892-1980), against great odds in gaining ecclesiastical approval, founded the Medical Mission Sisters, the first women’s community dedicated to professional health care to meets the needs of women and children in cultures that did not provide adequate care for them, first in India and then elsewhere.

The geographic focus from the 1920s until the 1950s highlighted Asia, particularly China. Mission emphasized the importance of saving souls, lest

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they be ‘lost forever,’ and the establishment of the Catholic Church, because without baptism one would not be saved. Conversion or ‘planting’ the Church, involved cultural, economic and religious ‘elevation’. The assumption was that the missionary was a priest, while religious brothers and sisters were ‘auxiliary’ to mission work.

Pope Pius XII urged North American Catholics in 1959 to send missioners to South America, against a background of increased Protestant evangelization and the threat of communism gaining structural influence in traditionally Catholic countries. The U.S. bishops created a Latin America Bureau (1960) with John J. Considine, MM (1897-1982) as director. The Bureau played a critical, authoritative role in advising American laity and religious congregations, some of which took on overseas missions for the first time. The Bureau sponsored five Catholic Inter-American Cooperation Program (CICOP) meetings between 1964 and 1972, wherein North Americans learned from progressive Latin American bishops and others of