The National Catholic Welfare Conference and Catholic Americanism, 1919-196

This dissertation examines the National Catholic Welfare Conference's attempts to prove the compatibility of Catholicism and Americanism over the course of its existence from 1919 through 1966. It begins with an overview of Catholic history in America and the NCWC's first two decades, and then concentrates on the 1940s and 1950s. It reveals the tension and ambiguities at play in the interaction of Americanism and traditional Catholicism by focusing on the NCWC's responses to three issues: communism, anti-Catholicism, and education. Catholic anti-communism expressed serious misgivings about secular trends in American society, but in the early Cold War years served as an assimilationist factor, since persons could act as both assimilated Americans and good Catholics through their anti-communism. The fight against communism was intertwined with efforts to educate Catholic youth, since the NCWC touted a Catholic education as not only essential for the preservation of the faith, but also crucial to protect American democracy from secular humanism and atheistic materialism. The separate Catholic school system appeared separatist, rigid, and un-American to many non-Catholics, however, and in the late 1940s there was a rise in anti-Catholic propaganda by old nativists and secular humanists at the same time that the anti-communist consensus provided an avenue for Catholic assimilation. The history of the NCWC shows the ways in which the Catholic Church at the national level used these issues simultaneously to promote and redefine Americanism, ultimately paying a price for its assimilation.