In Fall 2007, CUA Magazine, a feature magazine produced for alumni and friends of the University, ran an article on the 1938 anti-Nazi broadcast recently uncovered here at the Archives.  You can find that issue here. 

The broadcast is of great historical interest to scholars of U.S. Responses to the Nazis and their persecution of Germany’s Jews in general, as well as to scholars of American Catholicism, and the article details some of these reasons. It reflects the concerns within the church at the time—Soviet Communism, the Spanish Civil War, persecution of Catholics in Mexico—even as it expresses sympathy for those persecuted during Reichskristallnacht, the Nazi pogrom against the Jews of November 9-10, 1938. We created a link to a clip and a press release of the broadcast available here.

I received many comments on the article from CUA Magazine readers, and requests from educators for full audio copies of the audio broadcast, so that they could use it in their teaching. Professor William Issel of San Francisco State University was one of these, and when he emailed me a request for a copy, I asked him to tell me how he used the recording in his class, and how his students responded to it. He used the radio program in his Religion and American Culture class. His students had done some background reading on the diversity of U.S. Catholicism in the 1930s and 40s and had lectured on the situation in Europe in the 1930s and 40s, including the Pius XI and Pius XII strategies of managing Vatican affairs through the Second World War. Hence, when he asked his students to “imagine you are in your living room listening to the radio,” and played the broadcast, they had some knowledge of historical context. He noted that after playing the broadcast, “we had a lively discussion of how important primary source evidence can be in the context of often emotion-driven public discussion of religion and public life. Not the least of the insights for them was their new appreciation for the “diversity” of American Catholicism.” We would very much like to hear more on how any educators might be using this primary source in the classroom.

Finally, congratulations to Maggie Master, the author of the CUA Magazine article, and to Tony Fiorini, the photographer, and Donna Hobson, Director of Publications. The Catholic Press Association awarded the article an Honorable Mention for best feature in a professional/special interest magazine and second place for best four-color large photo.

Recently, I was sent a link to the website of a group called Catholic Scholars for Worker Justice, which was founded by Joseph Fahey, a Professor of Religious Studies at Manhattan College in the Bronx.  Here’s a link to their site:

http://www.catholicscholarsforjustice.org

The group and the site are new, and their stated mission is “to promote Catholic Social Teaching on the rights of workers and the indispensible role that unions play in securing justice (1) for workers and their families, (2) in the workplace, and (3) for the universal common good.”  According to its stated purpose, CSWJ members are trying to bring the strong knowledge of Catholic social justice teachings to bear on public perceptions of those teachings and to actually apply it in real world situations involving union organizing and labor disputes.

This brings to mind individuals like George Higgins and John A. Ryan (whose papers we have here at the archives), two scholarly priests who spent their lives trying to apply Catholic teachings as expressed Rerum Novarum, Quadragesimo Anno, as well as the U.S. Bishops’ teachings on economic justice.   Both Ryan and Higgins, in fact, headed the Social Action Department of the National Catholic Welfare Conference, and their opinions were highly respected by Catholic and non-Catholic leaders alike.  We are still working on processing Monsignor Higgins’ papers, but our websites feature lots of materials that anyone who wants to educate themselves on matters of Catholic social justice.  In addition to the site on the Bishops’ Program, we have a site on Catholic responses to industrialization, which focuses on three different approaches to problems of social justice precipitated by industrial change.  You can find that one here:

http://libraries.cua.edu/achrcua/industrial/cri_wel.html

Another one that focuses wholly on the question of the living wage—How Much Is Enough?  Can be found here: 

http://libraries.cua.edu/achrcua/howmuch/hm_wel.html

This last site addresses many issues that continue to be relevant, such as the role of advertising in creating need, and a Catholic perspective on when consumption shades into excess.  This 1999 OSV article suggests the continuing relevance of the question: 

http://libraries.cua.edu/achrcua/howmuch/osv.pdf

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We have finally gotten our site on the 1919 Bishops’ Program of Social Reconstruction site up.  The site has dozens of documents and photos, background information on the topic, readings lists, document-based questions, and suggestions for exercises.  For history teachers, there is a section on fitting the site into the curriculum in ways that fit with national history standards.  A complementary site on the Bishops’ Program is this one out of the Office of Social Justice in St. Paul Minneapolis:

http://www.osjspm.org/majordoc_us_bishops_statements_program_of_social_reconstruction.aspx

This Social Justice site offers great teaching resources that can be used in tandem with the primary document .pdfs and images on our own.

Clearly, getting the site up this late in the school year isn’t ideal for attracting educators and their students to use it, but this particular site will also be useful for researchers, since so many of the documents are unavailable elsewhere on the Web.  I’ll direct you to a real gem: here is a scrapbook depicting the National Catholic Welfare Conference’s founding years, (when it was still called the National Catholic War Council).  The album is a chronicle of the earliest organized activities of the War Council and offers a window on organized American Catholic life ca. 1919.  Sorry there are no captions, we know little about the activities depicted in most of the images. 

http://libraries.cua.edu/achrcua/bishops/slideshow.html

Your comments on the images, the new site, how it might be used in the classroom or conducting research, as well as on any of our American Catholic History Classroom sites are welcome! 

This website supplies a range of teaching resources related to the Bishops’ Program of Social Reconstruction of 1919

Listen to a Clip of the November 1938 CUA Anti-Nazi Broadcast