Voluntas: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations, Vol. 9, No. 2, 1998

Review Essay

Review of M. J. Oates, The Catholic PhilanthropicTradition in America

Helen Cameron1,2

The Catholic Philanthropic Tradition in America. M. J. Gates. Indianapolis:Indiana University Press, 1995.

INTRODUCTION

Hidden in the final chapters of this scholarly work of social historyare two impassioned pleas to the Catholic Church in the United Statestoday: first, to make a fresh commitment to running schools in the innercities, and second, to reorganize its philanthropic work to give greater op-portunities for lay participation. These pleas bring the book to life andsend the reader back to the earlier chapters to trace the story of a work-ing-class immigrant community that managed to establish an extensive net-work of welfare institutions.

This review starts with an assessment of the book's achievements. Itthen moves on to consider questions the book raises for international read-ers with an interest in the voluntary sector. Some difficulties with the bookare noted before, finally, the pleas for a "revolution" (p. 175) in modernCatholic philanthropy are evaluated.

FILLING IN THE PICTURE

Peter Dobkin Hall has commented that, "the scholarship of philan-thropy has given religion remarkably short shrift" (Hall, 1992, p. 155). He

1Doctoral student, Centre for Voluntary Organisation, London School of Economics, London,and external tutor, Westminster College, Oxford, U.K.

2Correspondence should be directed to Helen Cameron, Cottage 20, Wytham, Oxford OX28QA, U.K.

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argues that understanding the role of religion in American history is foun-dational to an understanding of the development of philanthropy. ProfessorOates makes an important contribution to revealing the religious foundationsof philanthropy. The book represents two years' work consulting Catholic ar-chives across the U.S. The result is a wealth of detail woven into a coherentaccount that covers the period from 1790, when the first American Catholicbishop was appointed in Baltimore, to the present.

Philanthropy is defined as "the giving of financial resources and vol-untary service under the aegis of the church to benefit others" (p. xi). Thegiving of Catholics to maintain their own worshipping communities is ex-cluded, as are their efforts for secular agencies. The story that emerges isof a transition from a poor immigrant community engaging in mutual aidto a largely middle-class denomination straining to support a large networkof institutions.

The early Catholic immigrants found themselves in a predominantlyProtestant society, hostile to their nondemocratic forms of organization andallegiance to a "foreign" Rome. Faced with the extremes of hardship,Catholics had no choice but to share their resources in mutual associations,which in turn funded the earliest welfare institutions, usually for orphans.Gradually a division of labor emerged, with lay women taking the lead infund-raising, and religious sisters providing the workforce for these insti-tutions. However, the institutions needed a public face, and their governingboards were reserved for lay men and clergy. As the range of institutionsincreased, so did the means of fund-raising. Bazaars and fairs became verypopular; special sermons were preached followed by a collection for charity;magazines to solicit donations were started.

By the middle of the 19th century, parishioners and particularly thegrowing numbers of middle-class Catholics received a multitude of appeals.By the end of the century, bishops had begun to intervene and rationalizecharitable fund-raising at the diocesan level, setting fund-raising targets thateach parish had to meet. Parishes reluctantly accepted these moves, rec-ognizing that, as a result, they were placing into diocesan hands the crucialdecisions about how donations were to be allocated. Some bishops werenot above redirecting funds to projects they valued, such as building semi-naries and cathedrals. Once diocesan intervention had started, its momen-tum was sustained by several factors: first, the widespread acceptance of"scientific philanthropy"; second, the need to even out the different levelsof giving between popular and unpopular causes; and third, the opportu-nities to receive state funding. Oates argues that the long-term effects ofthis diocesan control were to disempower the laity and religious sisters, tofocus efforts on financial giving rather than voluntary service, and to in-crease clerical control of decision making. Despite this centralization, the

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philanthropic efforts of the Catholic Church continued to grow until bythe 1960s they had the largest network of welfare and educational institu-tions in the U.S. The 1960s marked a watershed with the impact of thesecond Vatican Council and the liberalization of social mores combiningto decrease the activism of parishioners still further and trigger a dramaticdecline in the number of women becoming religious sisters. This starvedCatholic institutions of their revenue funding and low-cost workforce, ablow that has caused and is causing many agencies to close.

The book takes a thematic as well as a chronological approach. Ofparticular note is the way in which difficult issues are squarely tackled: forexample, Catholic attitudes toward women and toward black and NativeAmericans, and the class differences that started to affect philanthropy asparts of the Catholic community prospered. Professor Oates makes it clearthat most of the welfare and educational institutions set up by Catholicswere sustained financially by "the army of lifetime volunteers": that is, thereligious sisters. These women not only worked hard in the service of thepoor but also often had to raise the funds with which to continue theirwork. The rapid decline in religious vocations from the 1960s onward isdepicted as a substantial crisis for Catholic institutions, a perspective borneout by the research of Nygren and Ukeritis (1993). Catholic immigrationwas predominantly white European and rapidly developed ambivalent ifnot hostile attitudes toward black and Native Americans. Those initiativesthat were taken to provide institutions for black communities were metwith little enthusiasm. Full integration had to await the civil rights move-ment of the 1960s. As the early immigrant communities settled, many ofthem prospered, and class-based differences started to emerge in theCatholic community. Attitudes toward giving changed among the newlyrich, with a move from anonymous giving to donations being exchangedfor public recognition. This is nicely illustrated by the tendency to stopnaming institutions after saints and start naming them after major donors(p. 130).

QUESTIONS OF CONTEXT AND THEORY

For the non-American reader with a broader interest in the develop-ment of the voluntary sector, the book raises questions of context and the-ory that are not fully addressed by the author.

As social history, the book would be easier to interpret if more in-formation were given about the specifically Catholic and American con-texts. For example, what is distinctively Catholic about the story that istold? Were other faith communities experiencing similar developments?

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Was secular philanthropy also centralized and bureaucratized? Tropman(1995) has argued that there is a distinctive Catholic ethic, which advocatessharing with others on the basis of their need, in contrast to a Protestantethic, which is concerned with assessing the worth of the poor person beforeoffering help. Oates suggests that Catholics have a "preferential option forthe poor," but shows that this preference was frequently subverted by thereality of providing health and educational institutions for middle-classCatholics on a fee-for-service basis.

What is distinctively American about the history? Has Catholic philan-thropy in other parts of the world undergone similar changes, or are thereaspects of the story that are distinctive of an immigrant society? In their in-troduction to Contemporary Jewish Philanthropy in America, Kosmin and Rit-terband (1991) sketch a similar picture to that of Oates, showing a poorimmigrant community at odds with the Protestant majority, founding institu-tions that meet immediate welfare needs. They also describe a gradual for-malization of fund-raising and, in the last 30 years, a questioning of the objectsof philanthropy in what is now a largely middle-class community.

Historians can become irritated by requests for explicit theory in theirwork, yet a book that comments on the development of the nonprofit sectorand tells a story of organizational change inevitably raises theoretical ques-tions. To what extent was Catholic philanthropy captured by the ideas of"scientific philanthropy," which came to the U.S. from the U.K. in the late19th century? In accepting the idea that fund-raising should be systemati-cally organized, did the Catholic community also accept that the poorshould be helped only according to their merits? Another important issueis the impact of state funding on Catholic institutions. Has this fundingsubverted a distinctive Catholic ethic? Has it bureaucratized institutions,or had the formalization of Catholic giving already done that?

It would also have been helpful to have some explicit links to organ-izational theory. Among the limited literature on religious denominationsas organizations, Chaves (1993) suggests that agencies within denomina-tions are set up to deal with secular concerns and that their interest inlocal churches becomes focused on their potential as a source of donations.There seem to be some parallels between Chaves's Protestant study andthe development of the Diocesan Charity Bureaux. These were initiallyformed to rationalize the many requests for charitable giving received byparishioners. Very quickly they graduated to employing professional fund-raisers who "targeted" parishioners, appealing to secular rather than relig-ious motivations to give. Ammerman's (1990) work on the Baptists suggeststhat local churches have a considerable ability to resist changes in denomi-national policy. To what extent did Catholic parishes resist centralizing ten-dencies from their bishops?

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LISTENING FOR THE SILENCE

Any historical writing can only be as full as the available sources al-low. However, it is important to note gaps in the archival record and beaware of the stories that have not been told. There is inevitably more detailabout what happened at the diocesan level than about what happened inparishes and in individual institutions. The diocese may have placed moreemphasis on centralized and professionalized fund-raising, but did the in-formal provision of personal service by ordinary parishioners really dieaway, as is suggested, or did it merely become unnoticed and therefore gounrecorded? Has there really been a resurgence of lay activism since the1980s, or is it now more visible given the financial constraints experiencedby the Church? Similarly, in the chapter on social class differences in giving,more is heard from those with money about their preferred methods ofdonation than from the poor parishioners about why they favored fairs andlotteries as a channel for their benevolence.

While expressing admiration for the wealth of evidence assembled inthis book, at times the detail can be overwhelming. The distinction betweena general point and an illustrative detail is not always immediately clear.A summary at the end of each chapter would have helped the reader drawout the main themes and see the conclusions toward which the author wasworking in the two final chapters.

EVALUATING THE PLEAS FOR CHANGE

As was mentioned at the beginning of this review, the book ends withan appeal to the contemporary Catholic Church to learn from its history andthus reverse the current decline in financial donations from parishioners. Thisfinal section attempts to evaluate the two pleas that are made.

At the end of chapter 7, the author abandons her tone of academicneutrality and makes a powerful argument for the Catholic Church to givegreater priority to running schools in inner-city areas. The educational in-equalities experienced by children in these areas are explained and thestrong track record of fee-paying Catholic schools serving the poor is shown."The entire Catholic community must perceive the education of poor chil-dren as a benevolent priority and fund it accordingly" (p. 160). "The edu-cation of poor children is one of the greatest contributions privatephilanthropy can make to American society today" (p. 161). As a U.K.reader evaluating this argument at a time when there is great public concernabout schools in inner-city Britain, a very different perspective is available.Is it necessary for American Catholics to run their own institutions in order

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to raise standards in inner-city schools? Could it be that Catholic schoolsare in fact part of the problem in that they attract pupils from families whoare sufficiently well motivated to pay school fees despite their low incomes?What impact would those families and their children have if spread acrossthe state-funded schools? What effect would Catholic funding and voluntaryeffort have if directed at schools located in the parish but not run by theChurch? There seems to be an assumption that the state is, by definition,incapable of improving inner-city education. Maybe in a U.S. context thisassumption meets with support, but it suggests that the situation can onlybe improved for a minority of inner-city children.

The second plea, contained in the final chapter, is that Catholic phi-lanthropy should be reorganized to give greater opportunities for lay par-ticipation, both in sitting on boards of agencies and also in direct personalservice provision. This, it is argued, will revive genuine Catholic values thatlink financial giving with personal service and thus promote greater givingof time and money in an era when many parts of the Catholic Church arein financial difficulties. Professor Oates notes the increasing volume of laysocial action in the parishes in response to the cuts in government spendingin the 1980s and sees this as a positive sign that the laity can be remotivatedto take an active role in philanthropy. However, she wishes to retain "theobvious benefits of central organization" (p. 175). There is a possibility thattwo different sorts of voluntary action are being conflated in this analysis.The first is a formal model, where an established agency with professionalstaff seeks donations of time and money from parishioners. The agency, inthis case the Church, determines the need to be met and the way in whichthe donor's gift will be employed to meet the need. The second model isan informal one where parishioners set up welfare projects on a small localscale to respond to visible social need. In this model, the parishioners de-fine the need, raise the money, supply the labor, and control both what isdone and how it is done. It is this latter informal type of activism thatseems to have experienced a renaissance since the 1980s. This could beinterpreted as a clear signal from the laity as to how they wish to exercisetheir option for the poor.

There is almost a sense that history may repeat itself with informallay efforts at alleviating poverty being noticed by the church hierarchy andthen being "organized." The story of the 19th and 20th centuries is thatthe formal involvement of the Church robbed the laity of discretion andcontrol, causing their enthusiasm for philanthropy to wane. Perhaps nowthe left hand needs to ignore what the right hand is doing, leaving informalprojects to pursue their own destinies and giving the laity the autonomythey seek.

REFERENCES

Ammerman, N. T. (1990). Baptist Battles: Social Change and Religious Conflict in the SouthernBaptist Convention, Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, New Jersey.

Chaves, M. (1993). Intra-organizational power and internal secularization in protestantdenominations. American Journal of Sociology, 99(1), 1-48.

Hall, P. D. (1992). Inventing the Nonprofit Sector and Other Essays on Philanthropy, Voluntarismand Nonprofit Organizations, John Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, Maryland.

Kosmin, B. A., and Ritterband, P. (eds.) (1991). Contemporary Jewish Philanthropy in America,Rowman and Littlefield, Savage, Maryland.

Nygren, D. J., and Ukeritis, M. D. (1993). The Future of Religious Orders in the United States:Transformation and Commitment, Praeger, Westport, Connecticut.

Tropman, J. E. (1995). The Catholic Ethic in American Society, Jossey-Bass, San Francisco,California.

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