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7 - Social Welfare and Social Reform

from Part II - Catholic Life and Culture

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 May 2021

By
Mary Elizabeth Brown
Edited by
Margaret M. McGuinness  and
Thomas F. Rzeznik
Margaret M. McGuinness
Affiliation:
La Salle University, Philadelphia
Thomas F. Rzeznik
Affiliation:
Seton Hall University, New Jersey
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Summary

The Catholic Church in the United States includes among its institutions a vast social welfare network that has been important for countless individuals, including the Catholics who support it, the Catholics who benefit from it, and the non-Catholics who have been recipients of its services. This essay provides a narrative of that development, identifying the key characters and turning points from the eighteenth century to the present day. It explores the intersection of “American” and “Catholic”: what the church learned from the American culture around it, and what the church contributed to it through its teachings about charity and its example of putting those teachings into action.

Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Companion to American Catholicism , pp. 123 - 140
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2021

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References

Further Reading

Abell, Aaron, ed. American Catholic Thought on Social Questions. New York: Macmillan, 1968.Google Scholar
Battisti, Danielle. Whom We Shall Welcome: Italian Americans and Immigration Reform. New York: Fordham University Press, 2018.Google Scholar
Brown, Dorothy M., and McKeown, Elizabeth. The Poor Belong to Us: Catholic Charities and American Welfare. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000.Google Scholar
Gleason, Philip. The Conservative Reformers: German-American Catholics and the Social Order. South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1968.Google Scholar
Kauffman, Christopher J. Ministry and Meaning: A Religious History of Catholic Health Care in the United States. New York: Crossroad Publishing, 1995.Google Scholar
McShane, Joseph Michael. “Sufficiently Radical”: Catholicism, Progressivism, and the Bishops’ Program of 1919. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America, 1986.Google Scholar
O’Brien, David J., and Shannon, Thomas A., eds. Catholic Social Thought: The Documentary Heritage. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1992.Google Scholar
Wall, Barbra Mann. American Catholic Hospitals: A Century of Changing Markets and Missions. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2016.Google Scholar

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