{"title":"Devotion Beyond Comprehension: The Catholic Church and the 1832 Cholera Epidemic in Baltimore","authors":"Dennis A. Castillo","doi":"10.1353/cht.2024.a919702","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cht.2024.a919702","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: When cholera first afflicted the United States in 1832, little was known about the disease, which caused widespread fear and panic. Thought to affect only the unhygienic, impoverished, and drunkards, the disease exposed many ugly aspects of U.S. society, particularly bigotry and racial inequities. In the 1832 epidemic in Baltimore, Catholic clergy and religious provided spiritual care and nursed the sick, including two communities of women religious: the Sisters of Charity, a Euro-American community, and the Oblate Sisters of Providence, an African-American community. These Sisters were critical in responding to the epidemic, with each losing at least one member to the disease. Despite similar sacrifices, the two communities did not receive the same acknowledgment, which is further evidence of the era's prejudices and inequalities.","PeriodicalId":388614,"journal":{"name":"U.S. Catholic Historian","volume":"46 4","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140527389","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Martyrs of Charity: How Philadelphia's Religious Sisters Responded to the 1918 Influenza Pandemic","authors":"Ryan P. Murphy","doi":"10.1353/cht.2024.a919703","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cht.2024.a919703","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: When the influenza pandemic struck Philadelphia in the autumn of 1918, Archbishop Dennis Dougherty wrote to the Mothers Superior of several religious communities instructing them to close parish schools and send their non-cloistered sisters to serve as volunteer nurses throughout the city. Despite having little to no medical training, more than 2,000 sisters from various congregations responded and cared for the city's sickest patients in temporary hospitals and private homes. These Catholic sisters focused especially on Philadelphia's poor, immigrants, and communities of color—who were all especially at risk and, due to overcrowding and social segregation, among the last to be prioritized in routine medical care. Many of these stories would be lost if not for Augustinian priest and archivist Francis E. Tourscher, who in 1919 compiled a summary of the sisters' nursing work for the American Catholic Historical Society of Philadelphia. When the pandemic finally subsided, Philadelphia's Mayor Thomas B. Smith attributed the outbreak's end to the religious sisters' selfless service and tireless care for the city's poor and marginalized amid overwhelming tragedy.","PeriodicalId":388614,"journal":{"name":"U.S. Catholic Historian","volume":"57 3","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140515726","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Master Plans, Medical Centers, and Medicare: The Struggle to Restructure Catholic Health Care in the Diocese of Brooklyn in the 1960s","authors":"Thomas F. Rzeznik","doi":"10.1353/cht.2024.a919704","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cht.2024.a919704","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: This article examines the effort to restructure Catholic health care in the Diocese of Brooklyn during the 1960s. It looks specifically at the formation of the Catholic Medical Center of Brooklyn and Queens (CMC), an ambitious plan to unite diocesan-owned hospitals and forge the nation's first multi-institutional Catholic hospital system. Formally announced just two days before the federal government's new Medicare program launched, the plan reflected the optimism of the moment and reveals the enormous faith that Catholic health care providers placed in the promise of federal funding. But within a few short years, the system stood on the brink of collapse as administrative and financial challenges mounted. The CMC's complicated history reveals not only the internal struggle that the diocese faced in restructuring its hospitals, modernizing facilities, and creating a unified health care system but also the tensions inherent in 1960s health care reform and the limits of the public-private partnership it envisioned between the government and the voluntary health care sector.","PeriodicalId":388614,"journal":{"name":"U.S. Catholic Historian","volume":"25 2","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140520960","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"To Lead Chaste Lives: Father John Francis Harvey and the Pastoral Care of Catholic Homosexuals","authors":"Chris Babits","doi":"10.1353/cht.2024.a919705","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cht.2024.a919705","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: This article examines the religious and therapeutic world of American priest Father John Francis Harvey (1918–2010), founding director of Courage, an apostolate of the Catholic Church centered on ministering to Catholic homosexuals. The following offers a close reading of Harvey's first full-length book, The Homosexual Person: New Thinking in Pastoral Care , published in 1987. I argue that though Harvey borrowed from the psychological thought that influenced the Protestant ex-gay movement, he offered a distinctly Catholic form of pastoral counseling for homosexuals that advanced Courage's religious and therapeutic goal of chastity, rather than the Protestant ex-gay ministry groups' focus on heterosexual conversion.","PeriodicalId":388614,"journal":{"name":"U.S. Catholic Historian","volume":"60 10","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140525172","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Thirty Years of Mercy: The Sisters of Mercy and Catholic Responses to the AIDS Crisis in Charlotte, North Carolina","authors":"Daniel Hutchinson","doi":"10.1353/cht.2024.a919706","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cht.2024.a919706","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: House of Mercy (HOM), founded by the Sisters of Mercy in 1991, offers care for those with HIV/AIDS in Belmont, North Carolina. Using oral histories and contemporary media coverage, this study explores HOM's unique role as a Catholic HIV/AIDS ministry in the rural South. This regional approach provides a novel view of the U.S. Catholic Church's engagement with HIV/AIDS, highlighting the complex relationship between faith-based healthcare, social justice, and the region's cultural and political norms. By examining how HOM navigated systemic challenges and social stigmas, the article explores how the nature of this ministry transformed over the course of the AIDS epidemic. This work contributes to scholarship on Catholic healthcare ministries, the U.S. Catholic Church during the HIV/AIDS era, and the history of Catholicism in the American South.","PeriodicalId":388614,"journal":{"name":"U.S. Catholic Historian","volume":"9 4","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140516507","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Narrative Continues: An Overview of Recent Historiography of Women Religious","authors":"Margaret M. Mcguinness","doi":"10.1353/cht.2023.0007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cht.2023.0007","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:In 2004, Carol K. Coburn published an essay in U.S. Catholic Historian on the historiography of women religious. Building upon Coburn’s work, this essay continues that conversation and discusses representative monographs and articles published since 2004. The scholarship is divided into several areas. “Beginning at the Beginning” considers books and essays that focus on women religious during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. “The Face of Catholicism” examines scholarship on sisters’ ministries in education, health care, and social service, as well as their more recent work in the civil rights movement and as missionaries and environmental activists. “Catholic Sisters and Race” considers recent scholarship on Black women religious, with a special focus on Shannen Dee Williams’s Subversive Habits. The essay concludes by suggesting areas where future work is needed.","PeriodicalId":388614,"journal":{"name":"U.S. Catholic Historian","volume":"25 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"117048599","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Marginalized Faith Commitments: Why Sisters’ History Must Critique the Liberal Feminist Subject","authors":"Jillian Plummer","doi":"10.1353/cht.2023.0010","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cht.2023.0010","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Despite the diverse research on the history of American women religious, Catholic sisters remain marginalized in the field of women’s history because their history does not fit neatly in the historiographies of either conservatism or feminism. Why is this? Women’s history, which emerged in the second-wave feminist movement, continues to privilege the liberal feminist subject. Saba Mahmood’s Politics of Piety critiqued this bias in feminist frameworks (which view freedom as the expression of autonomous action and struggle) to see agency expressed by women who commit to religious beliefs as preserved by patriarchal religious traditions. This historiographical essay explores why scholarship on Catholic sisters must contribute to the critique of the liberal feminist subjecthood—as elaborated by Mahmood—as the de facto interpretation of freedom. Catholic sisters expressed agency by committing to a religious institution rather than by freeing themselves from patriarchal structures or acting individually. Considering the recent historiography on Catholic sisters alongside the shifting body of literature on women’s history, the history of Catholic sisters will continue to be marginal to women’s history unless scholars begin to critique the field’s central bias.","PeriodicalId":388614,"journal":{"name":"U.S. Catholic Historian","volume":"86 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132930818","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"History and the Catholic Sixties: A Work in Progress","authors":"J. Burns","doi":"10.1353/cht.2023.0008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cht.2023.0008","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:The 1960s continue to fascinate historians and scholars, although their understandings of the decade’s meaning differ dramatically. The same is true for the Catholic Sixties. To date, no comprehensive history exists of the Catholic Sixties, although much has been written. Catholic scholars, such as Donald Thorman, Daniel Callahan, and John Noonan, among others, wrote seminal works during the 1960s, establishing the initial lens through which scholars came to view the decade. In 1972, three important works were published by David J. O’Brien, James Hitchcock, and Garry Wills; all three provided decidedly different approaches and critiques of the decade and all have influenced contemporary understandings of the decade. Several scholars provided interpretive schemas through which future historians may organize the decade, with Mark Massa’s work being the most important. Other historians focused on one aspect of the Sixties, which contributed to a deeper understanding. The many scholars and historians who have written to date provide much for future historians to consider.","PeriodicalId":388614,"journal":{"name":"U.S. Catholic Historian","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122927482","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"In Search of a Historiography of Clergy Sexual Abuse","authors":"Brian J. Clites","doi":"10.1353/cht.2023.0009","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cht.2023.0009","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Clergy sexual abuse has become a key area of interest in the study of U.S. Catholic history. For decades, survivors and whistleblowers have written passionately about the pain and scandal of clerical abuse. Journalists and social scientists have described their suffering as a “crisis” caused by individual and organizational pathologies, while lawyers and criminologists have advocated for financial and carceral solutions. Questions of religion and history took a backseat to these framings of clerical abuse as deviant, clinical, and judicial. After a recent influx of new resources, American Catholic historians now have the opportunity to reshape the discourse by contextualizing clergy sexual abuse within Catholic history and culture. Although this work has just begun, emerging projects suggest that intersectional and interdisciplinary approaches might unlock new ways of understanding not just clergy abuse but also the related topics of Catholic childhood, gender, and sexuality.","PeriodicalId":388614,"journal":{"name":"U.S. Catholic Historian","volume":"40 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126560780","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}