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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 June 2011
In December 1916 David Goldstein, Catholic convert and former Jewish socialist cigarmaker, approached Boston's Cardinal William Henry O'Connell with a novel plan. Goldstein wanted to deliver lectures on Catholicism from a custom-built Model-T Ford on Boston Common. A little over a year later, across the Atlantic, Vernon Redwood, a transplanted tenor from New Zealand, asked Francis Cardinal Bourne of Westminster for permission to speak on behalf of the church in Hyde Park. Both Goldstein and Redwood received episcopal approval and Boston's Catholic Truth Guild and London's Catholic Evidence Guild were born. The emergence of these two movements marked a new epoch in the history of the Roman Catholic laity in the English-speaking world. The fact that the lay evangelist appeared on the scene during the First World War and in the aftermath of the Vatican condemnations of Americanism (1899) and Modernism (1907), actions generally assumed to have dampened the spirit of individual initiative in the church, renders them all the more illuminating to scholars of modern Catholicism. Goldstein and Redwood both exemplified and encouraged the new assertiveness which began to characterize a growing number of the American and English laity by the First World War. They call our attention to a significant shift in the self-identity of the lay population which came to fruition during the period between the World Wars, a shift which prompted even tenors and cigarmakers to mount the public pulpit.
1 There are virtually no recent secondary accounts of the history of these two movements. Aside from numerous contemporary articles in Catholic newspapers, magazines, and journals, the most important sources are: Goldstein, David, Autobiography of a Campaigner for Christ (Boston: Catholic Campaigners for Christ, 1936)Google Scholar; Browne, Henry, S.J., The Catholic Evidence Movement (London: Burns, Oates and Washbourne, 1921)Google Scholar; Ward, Maisie and Sheed, F. J., Catholic Evidence Training Outlines (4th revised ed.; New York: Sheed & Ward, 1939).Google Scholar Further information on the Catholic Evidence Movement appears in Sheed, Frank J., The Church and I (New York: Doubleday, 1974)Google Scholar and Ward, Maisie, Unfinished Business (London: Sheed & Ward, 1964).Google Scholar On the Catholic Truth Guild see Campbell, Debra, “A Catholic Salvation Army: David Goldstein, Pioneer Lay Evangelist,” CH 52 (1983) 322–32Google Scholar; Idem, “David Goldstein and the Lay Catholic Street Apostolate, 1917–41” (Ph.D. diss., Boston University, 1982).Google Scholar
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62 ibid.
63 Quoted in ibid., 294.
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65 ibid., 49–50.
66 The article, entitled “Is Park Preaching Practical?”, is cited in Browne, Catholic Evidence Movement, 48.
67 This system is spelled out in considerable detail in a series of editions of Catholic Evidence Training Outlines, by Sheed and Ward; see also Browne, Catholic Evidence Movement, chap. 5.
68 See Siderman, E. A., A Saint in Hyde Park (Westminster, MD: Newman, 1950).Google Scholar Siderman was a regular heckler at McNabb's outdoor sermons.
69 Goldstein, Autobiography, 273.
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76 David Goldstein to Martha Moore Avery, 21 April 1917 (David Goldstein Papers, Boston College Special Collections, Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts); hereafter cited as GP.
77 (Carbon) Goldstein to the Rev. John C. Reidinger, 23 March 1936 (GP); Goldstein, Autobiography, 277; for similar claims by English street evangelists, clerical and lay, see Pope, “Modern Apostolate,” 128; Ward, Unfinished Business, 91.
78 Edward Heffron to David Goldstein, 17 January 1935 (GP).
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83 A comparison of the figures in the handbooks produced for the annual Inter-Guild Conferences of the English C.E.G. indicates that the year 1932 represents the apex of the English Guild's membership. Although statistics are not available for the American C.E.G., W. G. Russell, a former street preacher, asserts (“Catholic Evidence Guild,” 305) that the peak years for lay involvement in the American Guild were 1931–35.
84 Frank Sheed to the author, 2 June 1981.