How a Notre Dame Professor Became Irish

by Kathleen Sprows Cummings

My Irish citizenship papers arrived this week. By virtue of having a grandparent born in Ireland, my siblings and I were eligible to apply for this status, and I responded enthusiastically to my sister's proposal that we pursue this opportunity (especially when she volunteered to do all the research and paperwork, which involved, among other tasks, tracking down a birth certificate for a man who was born in rural Ireland in 1899). I'll admit I was enticed by the prospect of easy travel that an EU passport would permit. But mostly I agreed for very sentimental reasons, grateful for the chance to remember and honor my family's immigrant past. So I prepared the application with a light heart and little reflection.

You would think I would have known better. I am, after all, writing a book about citizenship, religion, and national identity, so I should have known that actually becoming an Irish "citizen of foreign birth" would evoke conflicting and complicated emotions. While I am glad to have this new connection to my past, I also deplore the way that many Americans--Irish and otherwise--romanticize Ireland and its culture. When I see the elaborate celebrations that mark St. Patrick's Day, I cannot help but call to mind Margaret Atwood's critique of "ye olde country shoppes.": "History, as I recall, was never this winsome, and especially not this clean, but the real thing would never sell: most people prefer a past in which nothing smells. "

Ireland's past has plenty of smells, and many of them are unpleasant. The experience of migration intensified some of the worst of it, and the history of Irish Catholicism in the United States has a dark side that all the spritely leprechauns and shamrocks in the world may mask but never erase. For specifics, read CLOSING TIME, Joe Queenan's haunting and beautiful memoir about growing up in a working-class Irish-American community in Philadelphia. Though my own family's experience has nothing of the horrors chronicled by Queenan, I have read and experienced enough of Irish-American culture to appreciate the pervasiveness of the violence, alcoholism, repression and tragedy which he describes.

I know my grandfather, were he still alive, would be puzzled, if not angry, at our choice to become Irish citizens. My grandmother, also an immigrant, retained a strong attachment to Ireland and visited as often as she could. But my grandfather returned only rarely and reluctantly. Though poverty and hardship were part and parcel of his early life in the United States, he never regretted the choice to leave Ireland. Here he found work, met my grandmother, owned a house, and had five children, and he was perpetually grateful for all that his adopted land had given him. He lived until age ninety-five--something he insisted would never have been possible had he stayed.

Yesterday one of my colleagues, who can trace his lineage back to the Mayflower, expressed his envy of my status as one of Ireland's newest "citizens of foreign birth." But surely he wouldn't exchange his family's three-century head start on education and the accumulation of wealth for the proprietary glow I will feel later today when I lift my pint of Guinness in celebration of Ireland's patron? I was reflecting on this last night as I was baking my grandmother's scone, wondering whether my decision to become an Irish citizen was less of an act of remembering than it was of forgetting.

On the Irish Waterfront

By Kathleen Sprows Cummings

I am holding in my hands my long-awaited copy of James T. Fisher’s On the Irish Waterfront: The Crusader, the Movie, and the Soul of the Port of New York, just published by Cornell University Press as part of the Cushwa Center’s Studies of Catholicism in Twentieth-Century America series. Fisher claims On the Waterfront is the best movie ever made in the U.S. A. His book not only makes a convincing case for that argument, but also provides a deft and compelling history of religion, politics, labor, and ethnicity in mid-twentieth century America,and I plan to assign it in my classes for years to come.

The timing of the book’s publication was made all the more poignant by the death of Budd Schulberg, the screenwriter for On the Waterfront, the very same week. Fisher’s eulogy of Schulberg, whom he describes as “the best Catholic never baptized,” will be of interest to readers of this blog, and I post them here below.

Budd Schulberg, March 27, 1914-August 5, 2009

James Terence Fisher

For years I opened public presentations on Budd Schulberg’s life and times by noting that he was a close personal friend of F. Scott Fitzgerald. I’d pause, then remind audiences that F. Scott Fitz died in…1940. That fact often drew gasps or knowing smiles. But then, just a few moments ago, mourning Budd’s death in conversation with my L.A. cousin (more like brother) the screenwriter Bob Fisher, I was given a much more powerful image with which to convey the magnitude of Budd’s gift and prowess. “Budd,” as Bobby reminded me, “was close personal friends with F. Scott Fitzgerald and Spike Lee.” Budd and Spike worked intermittently for years on a Joe Louis film bio. Budd knew Joe Louis.

Ben Stiller was another friend of Budd; they also collaborated, on a project to bring to the screen Budd’s 1941 Hollywood novel What Makes Sammy Run. Budd was already an old industry hand by that year, having written several screenplays (including 1939’s with Scott Fitzgerald) and doctoring many more (Budd told me he penned the famous final line of 1937’s A Star is Born: “Hello, this is Mrs. Norman Maine”).

Budd Wilson Schulberg, that is, knew seemingly everybody enshrined across that vast tableau we know as twentieth century culture. He was standing next to his friend Bobby Kennedy in a passageway at LA’s Ambassador Hotel when RFK was murdered in June 1968. He was seated ringside when his friend Muhammad Ali reclaimed his heavyweight title from George Foreman in Zaire in October 1974. That was nearly three decades after Budd not only arrested Leni Riefenstahl (”Hitler’s favorite filmmaker) while working for his friend the legendary director John Ford in the wartime OSS; he wrested from her an implicit admission she knew about the Nazi death camps, a truth she subsequently denied for decades.

Budd was an amazingly gifted listener; perhaps the result of a lifelong if highly manageable speech impediment, but more likely because listening was simply his supreme gift. When he met the ”waterfront priest” John M. “Pete” Corridan in late autumn 1950, the gruff, guarded Jesuit told Schulberg there was “no percentage” to be gained via collaboration between the men on a film project. During that very first meeting, however, Schulberg–who had been commissioned to write a screenplay based on a New York Sun waterfront expose for which Corridan served as prime source–began to win the priest’s enduing trust. They talked boxing; they talked mob talk; they talked briefly about the Catholic church’s radical social teachings, which came as great a revelation to Schulberg as they did to many Catholics. Within days Budd experienced his first waterfront pub crawl along Manhattan’s forbidding “Irish waterfront,” in the company of Arthur “Brownie” Brown, Corridan’s most devoted “rebel disciple” in the struggle to overthrow the mob-ridden, Tammany-backed and Church-blessed union that had misrepresented dockworkers in the Port of New York and New Jersey since the turn of the century.

Budd Schulberg would devote the next three years of his life to bringing journalist Malcolm Johnson’s “Crime on the Waterfront” to fruition as a film. A film? May we suggest On the Waterfront is quite possibly the greatest movie ever made in the U.S.A. (Hoboken, New Jersey, to be exact). Budd virtually moved in with Brownie and his wife Ann in their tiny apartment (Brownie is immortalized as “Kayo Dugan” in the movie; the rebel dockworker crushed by the mob under a slingload bearing cases of his beloved Irish whiskey). By day he wrote on a desk in a corner of a room at the Xavier Labor School on W. 16th Street in Manhattan, the place where Corridan and his “insoigents,” as Budd liked to call Corridan’s disciples, were provided cover and refuge by Phil Carey, S.J. the heroic and steadfast director of the labor school, who turned Pete Corridan loose in the face of overwhelming resistance from powerful figures in the New York Archdiocese; they had a major economic and spiritual investment to protect in the waterfront status quo.

Budd was the best Catholic never baptized; or perhaps that’s precisely why he was such a brilliant and courageous “mouthpiece” for Pete Corridan and the waterfront rebels. Corridan was a powerful speaker, but Karl Malden’s cinematic rendition of “Christ in the Shapeup”–a fiery address originally delivered by Corridan on the Jersey City waterfront in 1948–represents simply the finest moment in the representation of Catholic social justice teachings witnessed anywhere, at any time, in any medium. Budd had the gift and he shared it: the magnificent film is Budd’s, and that of his comrade Pete Corridan; this alone enshrines him as a towering figure of the century he nearly covered in his life and art. Budd wrote it best himself on the occasion of Pete Corridan’s death in early July 1984, a quarter century to the day preceding the recent death of their mutual friend Karl Malden: Ave Atque Vale Budd. Forget Charley Malloy for the moment; it was you Budd: you created this magnificent work, inspired by Pete. To borrow from what your friend Eddie Futch said to Joe Frazier on that night in Manilla when he stopped the fight with Ali before the bell sounded the fifteenth round: you will never be forgotten for what you created–with your amigo Elia Kazan–amid the wintry streets and wind-swept piers of Hoboken in that most memorable late autumn 1953.

The Vatican and American Catholic Sisters

We're pleased to present today Kathleen Cummings' analysis of recent moves by the Vatican to investigate Catholic women's orders in the United States. Kathleen's post had been featured at the home page of Notre Dame University, where it drew the attention of the Cardinal Newman Society, which described it as a "radical feminist commentary" which showed "disdain for Catholic male leaders." Oh my! My fellow former Lilly fellow and current director of the Cushwa Center for the Study of Amercan Catholicism (a well-known haven for terribly dangerous radicals who sponsor conferences such as "The Word of God and Latino Catholics") is tearing it up there in northern Indiana! Better keep her out of Texas!

The Vatican and American Catholic Sisters
by Kathleen Sprows Cummings

As Laurie Goodstein recently reported in the New York Times, the Vatican has ordered an “apostolic visitation” of American congregations of active religious women. Mother Mary Clare Millea, Superior-General of the Apostles of the Sacred Heart of Jesus who was appointed to head the investigation, will prepare a confidential report to the Vatican on the state of each of about 340 qualified congregations of nuns in the United States.

As Goodstein and others have pointed out, the visitation has provoked anxiety among many nuns who fear they are the” target of a doctrinal inquisition.” Indeed, there is enough evidence to suggest that there is much more behind the Vatican’s apostolic visitation than a spirit of friendly and open-minded inquiry. Cardinal Franc Rodé, the prefect in Rome who ordered the investigation, observed last year that “all is not well with religious life in America” and more recently criticized nuns who “have opted for ways that take them outside communion with Christ in the Catholic Church.” Rodé’s statements, coupled with the Vatican’s warning to the Leadership Conference of Women Religious that sisters are not doing enough to promote church teaching on controversial issues, signal that punitive measures may indeed be on the way for women religious who are not living a “traditional” religious life—i.e., those who do not wear habits, do not live in convents, and do not engage in established ministries such as teaching or nursing. Though it is too soon to tell exactly what the outcome of the visitation will be, it is highly probable that part of it will include an affirmation of congregations who have retained the traditional hallmarks of religious life and a rebuke to those who have left them behind.

Should this happen, it will hardly surprise anyone with even a rudimentary understanding of women in Catholic history. The institutional church has never quite known what to do with women who step out of traditionally female roles, and there is no question that by becoming collectively more professional, more educated, and more likely to challenge those in positions of power in both church and state, the majority of sisters in this country have grown progressively less “feminine” over the past four decades. Though they are often accused of moving away from the Church, sisters who have chosen this version of religious life actually believe that it represents a more authentic one: In choosing to stand with those on the margins of society, and in witnessing to Christianity at its most radical, they understand themselves to be returning to the founding charisms of their congregations as mandated by the Second Vatican Council.

We can expect that the eventual report will make much of statistics that show that congregations whose members wear habits, live in convents, and engage in conventional ministries are presently attracting more members than their non-traditional counterparts. Many commentators have already recommended that American congregations revert to traditional practices as a remedy for their rapidly declining membership. Time, however, may well prove this presumption wrong. It is far too soon to tell if this trend will be sustained, or whether those who have entered over the past decade will stay permanently.

Historical perspective also demonstrates the flaws in this line of reasoning. Even the fastest-growing congregations today receive far fewer new members annually than most women’s religious communities did a century ago. There are two often-overlooked reasons why religious life proved so attractive to American Catholic women for most of this country’s history, and, conversely, why it represents a far less appealing option today. The first involves the perspective of sisters themselves. From the early 19^th century until the late 1960s, religious life offered thousands of Catholic women—most of whom hailed from immigrant, working-class communities-- opportunities for education, leadership, and meaningful lives far beyond what they were offered in American society at large. But if U.S. Catholic women once saw more possibilities within church structures than outside of them, since the late 1960s quite the opposite has been true. Because transformations for women in American society have far outpaced those for women in the church, religious life no longer represents the only option for gifted and faithful Catholic women called to live their vocations in the modern world.

The second reason concerns the nature of the services American sisters provided. Throughout the golden age of vocations, church leaders very consciously advertised religious life to young Catholic women through sermons, pamphlets, and personal invitations. Let’s assume that in doing so they were primarily inspired by genuine concern for the spiritual well-being of their flock; until Vatican II, Catholics understood religious life as a higher and holier calling than life “in the world,” and entering a convent would therefore give a young girl a head start on the path to sanctification. But intermingled with more altruistic motives were other considerations. In encouraging more girls to become nuns, church leaders were also intentionally creating a vast underpaid work force to sustain and expand Catholic institutions, most especially parochial schools. American clergy and hierarchy are less successful in selling religious life today because most Catholic women today are less willing to dedicate their entire lives to subsidizing the church’s infrastructure. It is true that the precipitous decline of women religious—not to mention their median age--suggests that the numbers will never rebound to what they once were. But a smaller population of American sisters is hardly too high a price to pay for two very positive developments: the acknowledgement that religious women are far more valuable to the Church as witnesses than they are as workhorses, and the recognition that all Catholics are called to place their talents and energy in the service of a vibrant Catholic life in this country.

History of Women Religious, CFP

Kathleen Sprows Cummings

Call-For-Papers
History of Women Religious, Scranton, Pennsylvania, June 2010

I have been a part of this group for many years now and the triennial conferences are always fun and interesting. Proposals on a wide range of topics are very welcome. Feel free to contact me or Maggie McGuinness for more information.

Eighth Triennial Meeting, Conference on the History of Women Religious

University of Scranton
Scranton, Pennsylvania

June 27-30, 2010

Confronting Challenges: Women Religious Respond to Change

The Conference on the History of Women Religious invites paper and session proposals that explore how communities of women religious or their individual members have defined or redefined their mission in response to regional, national, or international developments. Studies may explore, among other themes and issues, the impact of change on congregational leadership, structures of governance, mission and ministry, membership, inter-congregational cooperation, relations with other organizations, and creating new modes of affiliation. Disciplinary approaches may include, but are not limited to, history, sociology, literature, anthropology, theology, and communication.

Proposals for papers and/or sessions in the form of a one-page abstract (including title and 250-word abstract) accompanied by a one-page C.V. are requested by July 15, 2009. Incomplete proposals will not be considered. We also invite volunteers to chair and comment on sessions.

Send proposals to:

Margaret McGuinness
Department of Religion
La Salle University
1900 W. Olney Ave.
Philadelphia, PA 19141
mcguinness@lasalle.edu

More information on the Conference of History of Women Religious can be found at

http://chwr.org/

The Democratic Virtues of Notre Dame

Notre Dame Commencement 2009
by Kathleen Sprows Cummings

What a pleasure to walk across the quad this morning without having to keep my eyes downcast. The “abortion plane,” the one towing a banner with a graphic picture of a 10-week aborted fetus, is gone now, after having circled Notre Dame’s campus for weeks on end.

Participating in yesterday’s commencement—I was seated with the faculty about 100 feet from the stage—was both exhilarating and exhausting. The nervous tension before and during the event was unbelievable. There was a Secret Service agent disguised in academic garb (the earpiece was a dead giveaway) seated in the row in front of me, and U.S. Marshalls posted throughout the arena never stopped scanning the crowd for threats. Worst of all were the hecklers at the beginning of the President’s speech, whose comments and subsequent removal were far more disturbing in person than they appeared to be on television.

We had all heard that Randall Terry’s group had obtained tickets, but we didn’t know how many of them there would be, or whether there would be disruptions throughout the speech, or how exactly the crowd would respond. It was a relief after the first five minutes passed, when we could all really start to listen to the President’s marvelous speech (the New York Times reports on it here). And when that was over, we could go about the business that brought us all there in the first place, honoring and celebrating Notre Dame’s class of 2009.

There is no question that the last six weeks have been the most painful in my life as a faithful Catholic. Two weeks ago my daughter’s second grade class held their First Communion retreat on campus, and the joy of participating in that event was overshadowed by worries that the abortion plane would disrupt our nature walk, or that I wouldn’t be able to avoid the demonstrators and their placards as I drove my group back to school. How, after all, does one explain dismembered fetuses, or baby dolls covered in blood, to a group of eight year olds?

But if the Obama controversy has saddened me as a person of faith, it has heartened me as a teacher and scholar of American Catholicism. The folks in administration and development will almost certainly grimace if they read this, but on balance this episode made my professional life, at least, a whole lot LESS complicated. I always search for opportunities to engage past and present in the classroom, and so I was delighted when, early in the semester, Kathleen Sebelius’ nomination for Secretary of Health and Human Services was announced the day before we were scheduled to discuss the election of 1928.

But if I was pleased with the thoughtful discussion about Catholics in American public life that Sebelius’ nomination generated, I was astounded by the level of intellectual engagement that characterized our discussions of the Obama controversy. As a prelude to those discussions, we read and analyzed a host of primary documents, ranging from Monsignor John Tracy Ellis’ 1955 critique of Catholic intellectual life to the 1968 Land-O-Lakes Statement of Catholic Higher Education, from Mario Cuomo’s 1984 speech at Notre Dame to the USCCB’s statement on Faithful Citizenship. We debated what the controversy revealed about faith and public life, dissent, episcopal authority, Catholic education, and electoral politics in the post-Vatican II American church. My students came to these discussions from a variety of ideological viewpoints, yet our conversations were invariably characterized by respect and by a sincere desire to understand what developments over the last half-century have brought us to this moment in American Catholicism.

On my way home from work each day, I couldn’t help but marvel at the contrast between our provocative discussions and the daily circus staged by protestors at Notre Dame’s Main Gate. I have never felt more privileged to be a faculty member at the University of Notre Dame than I have been this semester, and I was even prouder during yesterday’s ceremony. Between the legacy of Father Ted Hesburgh, evoked so elegantly by President Obama, and the leadership and courage of Father John Jenkins, displayed so prominently in his own remarkable speech, I was repeatedly moved to tears. I plan to use both speeches as a springboard to discussion in my classes next year, and there is much more that can and will be said about them. Today, though, I am just grateful it is a quiet and happy day at Notre Dame, with nothing but blue skies overhead.

Notre Dame's Laetare Medalist, and Catholic Women's Identity

Notre Dame’s Laetare Medalist
by Kathleen Sprows Cummings

In the midst of the controversy surrounding the invitation to President Barack Obama, few people have remarked on the other person slated to address Notre Dame’s class of 2009: Mary Ann Glendon, winner of this year’s Laetare Medal. The Laetare Medal, regarded by some as “the most prestigious award conferred annually on American Catholics,” was instituted in 1883 to honor a person whose witness to the Catholic faith has shaped his or her public endeavors. Let me state upfront that Glendon is an accomplished and faithful woman who well deserves this honor. It’s also high time a woman was named. Aside from Peggy Steinfels, who received the award jointly with her husband in 2003, the last female recipient was Sister Helen Prejean in 1996. The preponderance of male Laetare medalists of late marks a departure from the medal’s early years, when women were honored much more routinely.

One of these early winners was Katherine E. Conway, the Laetare Medalist of 1907. Conway was a prolific writer and successful journalist who became the first woman editor of the Boston Pilot. Conway was also an anti-suffragist, a label that at first seems counterintuitive. As an educated, ambitious, and professional woman, what could she possibly have had against women’s enfranchisement? It turns out that Conway’s aversion to suffrage was rooted in her belief that she was far more marginalized as a Catholic in American society than she was as a woman in the Church. In 1893, she “marveled” that other Catholics had even raised “the woman question,” pointing out that the sanctuary and the pulpit were the only doors the Church had kept closed to her. As a Catholic in the United States, by contrast, she felt herself to be the victim to “utterly unfounded prejudices, misunderstanding, misrepresentation, and downright slander.”

Conway and her contemporaries grasped what many historians have since missed: the suffrage movement, whose core members were white, middle-class, Protestants, replicated the religious biases of the larger culture in many respects. Conway, like many of her contemporaries, was highly attuned to the anti-Catholicism embedded in suffrage arguments. This is not to say that she was entirely unaware of the way her life was circumscribed by gender. But at the end of the day, it would be religion, not sex, that would override all other alliances.

Acknowledging this has significant implications for the historiography of American women. While it is old news that “sisterhood” could be splintered by race and class, scholars have not sufficiently acknowledged the power of religious identity to undermine alliances based on sex. I am hardly the first person to make this observation. Ann Braude, a scholar I admire deeply, recently urged historians of U.S. women to transcend “the Protestant frameworks embedded in the field,” noting that “Protestantism often functions as an unmarked category in women’s history because religion is not analyzed as a source of difference, just as whiteness disappears when the impact of race is only considered for non-whites.”

Braude’s challenge raises interesting questions: If women’s historians taught us that men have a gender, and scholars of African-Americans prompted explorations of how whites are shaped by race, is it possible to make an analogy in terms of the study of religion? By studying a minority religion, might we understand how religious difference has impacted the members of the majority religion? Are many of the movements or people historians have assumed to be secular in fact Protestant? And if so, how deeply did biases against Catholics shape their rhetoric and actions? The answers to these questions go a long way in explaining why most Catholic women in the early 20th century believed that women’s rights were best secured “in the Court of Rome,” not through the ballot box.

If Conway and other Catholic anti-suffragists can help explain the American religious past, they might also offer clues to help us understand the presently embattled relationship between religion and feminism. Mary Ann Glendon, for example, has been very critical of feminism, often implying that it is at odds with religious faith. In 1995, commenting on John Paul II’s Letter to Women, Glendon suggested that “a Catholic woman impatient with the pace of change might consider asking herself: “Where in contemporary society do I feel the most respected as a woman, whatever my chosen path in life?” Asserting that she could not “think of any institution that surpasses the Catholic Church in these respects,” Glendon replicated the argument Conway made a century earlier: it is the Catholic church, not secular feminism, that is the best protector of women’s rights and interests. One could argue, and I have elsewhere, that this position was more defensible in 1893 than it is now. But the point remains: Catholic women who refused to join woman suffragists in the early 20th century offer a provocative pre-history of the choice Glendon and many other religious women make to ally themselves with the men who share their faith, rather than with the women who do not.