God’s Representative in Our Midst: Toward a History of the Catholic Diocesan Clergy in the United States
Author(s)
Clark, Elizabeth; Wacker, Grant; Hillerbrand, Hans
Abstract
From a historian’s point of view, the Catholic diocesan clergy in the United States look rather like forgotten men. As a group, they have never figured prominently in the scholarly literature. American Catholic history may have had an emphatically clerical bias as late as the 1950s, but the focus then was mainly on the chancery. This is unfortunate, and not just because the Catholic clergy are interesting in themselves. The world of the diocesan clergy is key to understanding both Catholic religious culture and the actual workings of the institutional church. Priests have historically been socialized not simply to teach and enforce the fundamentals of belief and conduct but to embody them-to represent the system in their own conspicuously consecrated persons. What follows is an effort to construct a kind of scaffolding for a history of the Catholic diocesan clergy in the United States. True the focus is resolutely local, but local variation is essential to this larger story: though priesthood itself may be defined in universal terms, the experience of priesthood can vary enormously from place to place. My most general conclusion with regard to Michigan would surely apply elsewhere: although the formal model of priesthood did not change in substance prior to the 1960s, the lived reality of priesthood changed significantly over time.
