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In 1970, the United States’ Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals ordered South Carolina school districts to end their dual public education systems. Rock Hill, South Carolina, a community thirty miles south of Charlotte, North Carolina, responded by closing down the all-black schools in the district and hurriedly rezoning all students into previously all-white schools. Yet, once in their new schools, black students faced continued discrimination and received inferior educational opportunities. In conjunction with the Rock Hill Catholic Church Oratory, black students responded by challenging the lasting remnants of Jim Crow, demanding adequate school facilities, fair discipline policies, qualified teachers, and advanced curriculums. This chapter analyzes the ways in which the Oratory, a local Catholic mission, became a bedrock for civil rights activism in this predominantly Protestant community. The story demonstrates a sustained effort by African American youth, aided by the Catholic Church, to overcome the legacy of racial discrimination in the American South in the years following the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the 1965 Voting Rights Act, and federally enforced school desegregation.

This chapter examines María Antonietta Berriozábal, native of San Antonio, Texas; Rosa Martha Zárate, of San Bernardino, California; and Tess Browne, of Boston, Massachusetts—all three see themselves as catalysts of change in their communities. Their involvement with Las Hermanas, a thirty-four-year-old national religious-political feminist organization of Chicana/Latina Catholics, influenced their profound commitment to community, justice, and faith. This chapter provides a brief overview of the sociohistorical context from which Las Hermanas emerged; then presents snapshot profiles of Zárate, Browne, and Berriozábal. These brief descriptions of their extensive work provide windows into the effect that Las Hermanas has had on Latina Catholic political activism. It is argued that the autonomous space created by Las Hermanas and its integration of spirituality and social activism influenced and strengthened these women in their involvement in civic affairs. No other Latina Catholic organization exists that serves this purpose.

The establishment of Catholic Action in Mexico in the 1930s is the subject of Chapter 6. The Vatican founded an official model of Catholic Action globally during the decade, so Mexico and Chile, despite their different contexts, had to conform to a non-party political conception of Catholic Action. Mexican Catholic activists challenged its establishment but, by the end of the decade, Catholic Action’s separation between party politics and the Catholic movement influenced Catholic university students throughout Latin America. A generational divide occurred as older Catholic activists fiercely rejected the separation of party politics from religious action.

For Paulus Wiryono, grassroots, lay Catholic activism characterizes the contemporary, democratic character of post-colonial Indonesia. Through analyzing the lay movements Ikatan Petani Pancasila and Bina Swadaya, Wiryono offers an articulation of the democratizing legacy left by figures like John Batista Dijkstra, S.J. The system of musyawara that Dijkstra championed—‘a traditional system of mutual dialogue, consultation, deliberation, and decision-making based on consensus’—grounds the contemporary Indonesian state philosophy of pancasila. In his analysis, Wiryono evaluates the effectiveness, and continued relevance, of this deliberative process for developing contemporary lay Catholic activists and, in the end, finds that the process of musyawara retains its effectiveness in the process of developing such activists, especially when their religious, social, and political commitments are coupled with social entrepreneurship and responsibility.

Who in civil society seeks to influence the representation of women's interests and how, in both democratic and authoritarian regimes? Relatively little is known about the full range of actors outside the state who care about the representation of women's interests. To more fully explore the who and how questions of women's representation, this chapter examines the feminist activists and Catholic activists who mobilized around the African Union's treaty on women's rights, the Maputo Protocol on the Rights of Women in Africa. The chapter finds that feminists and Catholics employed multilevel strategies in their attempts to influence whether governments would ratify the African Union's treaty. Activists in democracies and autocracies engaged in international networking as well as domestic lobbying, protesting, and consciousness-raising.