Content area
I examine the events, movements, and cultural values that shaped, and were shaped by the religious and labor identities, values, and social actions of the Jesuits in St. Louis from 1891 to 1965. In doing so, I advance three objectives. I provide an integrated narrative of Jesuit engagement in the faith-and-labor history of St. Louis from the promulgation of Rerum Novarum to the conclusion of Vatican II. I reveal the ways Catholic religious history and labor history shaped each other in this setting. And I pair “lived labor” as a category of analysis with religious historians’ more familiar category of “lived religion” to analyze and interpret the lived experiences of labor and religious life of Jesuits and Catholics.
My analysis of archival data produces a narrative at the intersection of Catholic religious and labor history that gives specific attention to how and when evidence illustrates the co-influence of Jesuit apostolic activity, Catholic social thought and action, and labor values, movements, and organizations.
I use “lived religion” and “lived labor” as categories that situate subjects and communities within the context of the social, material, political, and religious locality where labor was performed and experienced. In particular, I use “lived labor” to examine the overlapping experiences of workers, Jesuits, and Catholics as they went about their labors. The result is a subject- and community-oriented approach that puts lived experience at the center of the analysis and interpretation.
My narrative unfolds across multiple Jesuit ministries: five parishes; two social organizations; and Saint Louis University. From their stories I derive two key findings. First, Neo-Scholasticism and anti-communism dominated the lived labor and lived religion of the Jesuits and Catholics engaged in these ministries. Second, racism, clericalism, Eurocentrism, and Americanization caused tension, conflict, and changes of direction in Jesuit ministries.
These findings fill in a neglected chapter in the complex, organically connected history of the Jesuits and Catholicism in modern America, suggest the need for further study of clergy and religious as dynamic social actors, and invite future historians to holistically engage the religious and labor histories of subjects who both worked and believed.
