You Are in the World: Catholic Campus Life at Loyola

Loyola University Chicago Loyola eCommons Dissertations Theses and Dissertations 2009 You Are in the World: Catholic Campus Life at Loyola University Chicago, Mundelein College, and De Paul University, 1924-1950 Rae Bielakowski Loyola University Chicago Recommended Citation Bielakowski, Rae, "You Are in the World: Catholic Campus Life at Loyola University Chicago, Mundelein College, and De Paul University, 1924-1950" (2009). Dissertations. Paper 161. http://ecommons.luc.edu/luc_diss/161 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Theses and Dissertations at Loyola eCommons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Loyola eCommons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License. Copyright © 2009 Rae Bielakowski LOYOLA UNIVERSITY CHICAGO “YOU ARE IN THE WORLD”: CATHOLIC CAMPUS LIFE AT LOYOLA UNIVERSITY CHICAGO, MUNDELEIN COLLEGE, AND DE PAUL UNIVERSITY, 1924-1950 A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL IN CANDIDACY FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY PROGRAM IN HISTORY BY RAE M. BIELAKOWSKI CHICAGO, IL DECEMBER 2009 Copyright by Rae M. Bielakowski, 2009 All rights reserved. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I owe so much to the assistance of others! First of all, I would like to thank my dissertation director William J. Galush and readers Susan E. Hirsch and Lewis A. Erenberg for their guidance and constructive criticism. Philip Gleason’s comments on an early version of Chapter 6 were of great help in the revision process. Patricia Mooney- Melvin of Loyola’s Graduate School generously assisted me time and time again, while Lillian Hardison, graduate secretary of Loyola’s Department of History, guided me through paperwork and kept me in communication with the department. Thank you all for your help, support, and patience. This project could never have left the drawing board without the help of dedicated archivists, librarians, and public historians, including Kathryn Young; Elizabeth Myers; Kathryn DeGraff; Morgan MacIntosh Hodgetts; Joan Saverino; Max Moeller; Malachy McCarthy; and the late Br. Michael Grace, S.J.. Ursula Scholz and Jennifer Jacobs of Cudahy Library’s Interlibrary Loan Department also went above and beyond to see that I obtained the necessary materials. In addition, Jeffry V. Mallow and Loyola Hillel director Patti Ray provided me with crucial information and context regarding Chicago’s Jewish students. On a more personal level, I would like to thank Patrick Quinn, Janet Olson, Allen Streicker, and Kevin Leonard of Northwestern University Archives, who, when I needed iii it most, gave me a job that exposed me to the challenges and opportunities of the archival field. Likewise, I am grateful to the Cudahy Library Circulation Department for employing me from 1999-2001, thereby allowing me to resume graduate coursework. After I left Chicago in 2001, Janet Olson and Carolyn DeSwarte Gifford opened their homes to me during various research trips. Here in Leavenworth, KS I have benefited immensely from the advice and encouragement of scholars at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College’s Department of Military History. I am also very thankful for the prayers of members of Old St. Patrick’s Oratory and the Confraternity of Christian Mothers in Kansas City, MO. Throughout this entire process my parents Wayne and Lucy Sikula, my grandparents Helena and Stefan Lukaszewicz, and my uncle Richard Lukaszewicz helped me very much, not least of all through their unwavering confidence in my abilities. In addition, I owe a special debt of gratitude to my in-laws, Louis and Charlene Bielakowski, who gave me a place to stay while researching in Chicago and afterward managed many of my university errands. Most importantly, however, I would like to thank my husband and colleague Alexander Bielakowski, whose encouragement, support, and extraordinary patience allowed me to re-enter graduate school and see this dissertation through to completion. In addition to sharing his life with me, he has turned my life around. iv For Alex, who made me finish TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS iii INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER ONE: STATUS AND “SCHOOL SPIRITUALITY” AT DE PAUL UNIVERSITY AND LOYOLA UNIVERSITY CHICAGO, 1923-1938 26 CHAPTER TWO: “IT OUGHT TO RAMIFY”: THE ORGANIZATION OF CISCORA, 1926-1934 95 CHAPTER THREE: FROM “RELIGIOUS ACTIVITIES” TO ‘CATHOLIC ACTION’: CISCA, 1934-1941. 161 CHAPTER FOUR: INCLUSION AND ELITISM 235 CHAPTER FIVE: ETHNICITY AND STUDENT ORGANIZATION 302 CHAPTER SIX: A “CHURCH MILITANT”: GENDER AND RELIGION IN DEPRESSION AND WAR 378 CONCLUSION 443 BIBLIOGRAPHY 455 VITA 466 vi INTRODUCTION In March 1927 Vatican Secretary of State Rafael Cardinal Merry Del Val privately advised Jesuit Father General Wladimir Ledochowski that the Holy See viewed Jesuit universities in the United States as insufficiently Catholic in character. Ledochowski informed American Jesuit Provincials that, among the charges leveled, was that Jesuit educators exerted “practically no influence over the religious and spiritual welfare of the students.”1 In Chicago, Loyola University administrators responded to this warning by enlarging the Loyola student Sodality’s newly-established Catholic Action program into a hegemonic presence, not only on the Loyola Arts campus in Rogers Park, but throughout Chicago’s network of Catholic schools. By 1928 Loyola students headed a federation of 52 Chicago-area Catholic universities, colleges, and high schools, initially known as the Chicago Intercollegiate Conference on Religious Activities (CISCORA). Under Vatican pressure to reassert a bishop’s catechetical role, six years later Chicago Auxiliary Bishop Bernard Sheil adopted the federation—renamed Chicago Inter-Student Catholic Action (CISCA)—as the official student Catholic Action unit of the Archdiocesan Catholic Youth Organization (CYO). Over the period 1928-1950 the Catholic Action federation operated as a conduit through which other Catholic movements, such as the Benedictine Liturgical Movement and Peter Maurin and Dorothy Day’s Catholic Worker, reached and influenced Catholic students in Chicago 1 William P. Leahy, S.J., Adapting to America: Catholics, Jesuits, and Higher Education in the Twentieth Century (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 1991) 43. 1 2 This dissertation examines the interaction of organized student Catholic Action with the cultures that Catholic students themselves constructed on the urban Catholic campuses of Loyola University Chicago, Mundelein College, and DePaul University, with the goal of illuminating how collegiate Catholic Action impacted students’ interpretations of Catholic student life over the period 1924-1950. Far from passive receivers of religious ideology, during the 1920s and early ‘30s Loyola, De Paul, and Mundelein students—like those on college and university campuses nationwide— participated in an American collegiate youth culture that connected individual initiative, upward mobility, and self-sacrificial service to the prestige of the broader student community and its sponsoring institution. Often defined as the active participation of the laity in the mission of the Church hierarchy, the Catholic Action ideology of the “lay apostolate” co-opted student culture’s leadership drive and community “spirit,” but over the course of the 1930s it also introduced ideas concerning class, race, and gender ideology that challenged and sometimes even reshaped students’ vision of campus society and their own social roles. One outcome was increasing tension and factionalization within Catholic youth culture. The Church hierarchy encouraged, but also limited, lay student initiative; religious pressures toward Americanization and interracialism discouraged ethnic expression; a strengthening “Mystical Body” ideology simultaneously collapsed and re- inforced social elitism, introducing new factions on campus; and wartime constructions of male spiritual superiority overshadowed Depression-era female leadership expectations, changing Catholic women’s interpretation of their collegiate experience. 3 These tensions presaged the watershed of change and experimentation that would follow upon the Second Vatican Council. Periodization The dissertation’s periodization—from 1924 to 1950—begins with the initial development of visible and coherent student cultures at Loyola and De Paul universities and an increased devotional intensity inspired by the International Eucharistic Congress that Chicago hosted in 1926. DePaul and Loyola students inaugurated their campus newspapers in 1923 and 1924 respectively, thereby establishing their student community as a visible presence and—from a practical perspective--providing sources through which to examine it. On a broader scale, Chicago’s International Eucharistic Congress mobilized Chicago’s Catholics as a confident and coherent social force, thereby opening an era of increased Church publicity, self-consciousness, and Eucharistic devotion in Chicago. The end date of roughly 1950 coincides with the final transfer of authority over Chicago’s student Catholic Action federation away from the Society of Jesus, a development which, along with the ascendancy of the National Federation of Catholic College Students in Washington, D.C., ended the involvement of Chicago’s Catholic college students in the CISCA organization. 4 Methodology and sources Placing high emphasis on student discourse, this study draws

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