The Poor Belong to Us : : Catholic Charities and American Welfare / / Judith Weisenfeld, Elizabeth McKeown, Dorothy M. Brown.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter HUP eBook Package Archive 1893-1999
• VerfasserIn: Brown, Dorothy M.,; McKeown, Elizabeth,; Weisenfeld, Judith,
• Place / Publishing House: Cambridge, MA : : Harvard University Press, , [2021]; ©1997
• Year of Publication: 2021
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (294 p.)

Between the Civil War and World War II, Catholic charities evolved from volunteer and local origins into a centralized and professionally trained workforce that played a prominent role in the development of American welfare. Dorothy Brown and Elizabeth McKeown document the extraordinary efforts of Catholic volunteers to care for Catholic families and resist Protestant and state intrusions at the local level, and they show how these initiatives provided the foundation for the development of the largest private system of social provision in the United States. It is a story tightly interwoven with local, national, and religious politics that began with the steady influx of poor Catholic immigrants into urban centers. Supported by lay organizations and by sympathetic supporters in city and state politics, religious women operated foundling homes, orphanages, protectories, reformatories, and foster care programs for the children of the Catholic poor in New York City and in urban centers around the country. When pressure from reform campaigns challenged Catholic child care practices in the first decades of the twentieth century, Catholic charities underwent a significant transformation, coming under central diocesan control and growing increasingly reliant on the services of professional social workers. And as the Depression brought nationwide poverty and an overwhelming need for public solutions, Catholic charities faced a staggering challenge to their traditional claim to stewardship of the poor. In their compelling account, Brown and McKeown add an important dimension to our understanding of the transition from private to state social welfare.Table of Contents: Acknowledgments Introduction 1. The New York System 2. The Larger Landscape 3. Inside the Institutions: Foundlings, Orphans, Delinquents 4. Outside the Institutions: Pensions, Precaution, Prevention 5. Catholic Charities, the Great Depression, and the New Deal Conclusion Sources Notes Index Reviews of this book: [The Poor Belong to Us] raise[s] important questions about American social welfare history. [It] is particularly significant in that it restores Catholic charity to its rightful place at the center of that history. As the authors point out, Catholics represented the majority of dependent and delinquent children in most American cities for much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Their book convincingly demonstrates that Catholic charities' massive efforts to aid their own needy had long-term ramifications for the entire modern American system of welfare provision.The book is an impressive achievement and should be required reading for all social welfare historians.--Susan L. Porter, Journal of American HistoryReviews of this book: Brown and McKeown provide a richly documented narrative that incorporates the insights and scholarship of American Catholic history and social history.The Poor Belong to Us represents an ambitious foray into territory within the history of Catholic social activism that has been neglected for too long. It provides an important counterpoise and supplement to the burgeoning scholarship on individual congregations of women religious and the Catholic Worker movement, two area adjacent to this study that have received considerable attention in the past three decades.In The Poor Belong to Us, readers gain a new understanding of the complexities and internal tensions within the world of Catholic social welfare during the century of growth and change chronicled by Brown and McKeown.They show us how, for most American Catholics of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, questions of class and social and economic responsibility can only be understood with reference to the faith, a pervasive yet elusive presence that Brown and McKeown illuminate for us in carefully pruned, contextualized exa