Empowering the People of God: Catholic Action before and after Vatican II

I think a broad audience will enjoy this book about the practice of Catholic Action in America. It deals with Pope Pius Xl's call for the laity to engage in "Catholic Action" by assisting the clergy in carrying out the Vatican's definition of the Church's worldly mission, including its commitment to social justice. Millions of the faithful responded to this call, dutifully in he 1930s and 1940s and zealously after mid-century. The introduction to the book deftly contextualizes both periods of Catholic Action, and the essays explore the diversity of the activists reactions to this opportunity. Briefly put, the activists before mid-century conformed to the Pope's charge without challenging the Vatican's authority to define their options. But after 1950, in the new age of cultural individualism in American society and its institutions, the activists opted for the maximum feasible participation of the laity in the definition and implementation of the mission of the Church, a phenomenon that yielded todays' tripartite struggle, laic and clerical , among conservatives, liberals, and moderates for ascendancy in America's largest and perhaps its most quintessentially urban branch of Christianity.