Search Results

Three things have to be achieved for Catholic high schools to flourish: clarity about their distinctive mission, care in the recruitment and formation of lay leadership and faculty, and a critique of modern culture. This chapter restates and re-emphasizes the importance of these conditions for vibrant Catholic high schools. The most important factor for the future of Catholic high schools is a clear vision of their mission—a mission fully embraced by the faculty. Catholic schools had an important advantage over public high schools: they can draw explicitly on a theological foundation for the moral formation of their students. When a transcendent foundation is missing, one of two things tends to happen: either disagreements, especially over the morality of certain sexual issues, polarize the school community, or the faculty simply avoids addressing moral issues. The leaders of Catholics schools are obliged to form their students intellectually, morally, religiously, and intellectually, and do so by drawing on the Catholic theological tradition and practice, especially the Eucharist, and, it should be added, by being excellent teachers in all subjects.

This chapter explores the history of New Community Corporation, from its roots in a predominantly black Catholic Church with strong lay leadership to its founders' participation in the larger black freedom movement. Emerging as a self-consciously interracial organization with an emphasis on city-suburban ties, it did not define itself as a black power organization, but emphasized black self-determination nonetheless. The chapter explores NCC’s strategies and the obstacles it faced as members developed affordable housing and established an infant childcare center chain, Babyland, at a time when few existed. NCC’s grew into one of the largest and most successful community development corporations in the country and this chapter considers the reasons for that, including the skills of leaders such as Mary Smith and William Linder, the group’s fraught, but ultimately beneficial, Catholic connections, and the breadth of endeavors. NCC emergence as a major housing provide in the city offers a clear example of how community development corporations acted as “parallel state” in a time of federal retreat from the cities.

This chapter describes Jack Reed’s speech during an interdenominational, interfaith “Lay Leadership Assembly” in Jackson, Mississippi, on May 7, 1971. It also details his appointment to the Commission on Religion and Race; his growing popularity as a public speaker in Mississippi; and his prominence in the pro-merger movement.

This brief history of indigenous spiritual authority in Mexico begins in 1513 with the arrival of the Spaniards and includes the argument that the conquest of Mexico resulted in the loss of indigenous spiritual authority through the defrocking of the Aztec priests and four centuries of indigenous exclusion from the Catholic clergy. The chapter contextualizes the search for indigenous identity and spiritual voice by recounting native responses to religious subjugation, including Indian rebellions, native prophets, bloody conflicts, and combinative religious practices through the nineteenth century. The arrival of Protestant and Mormon missionaries after the Civil War offered indigenous Mexican converts new avenues to ordination, education, and the development of leadership skills.