American Crusade: Catholic Youth in the World Mission Movement from World War I through Vatican II (review)

Abstract

American Crusade: Catholic Youth in the World Mission Movement from World War I through Vatican II By David J. Endres. [American Society of Missiology Monograph Series, 7.] (Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, an imprint ofWipf and Stock Publishers. 2010. Pp. xiv, 197. $23.00 paperback. ISBN 978-1-608-99071-9.) Throughout the nineteenth century America was a mission field for the Roman Catholic Church, a status it retained until 1908. Ten years later, the American Catholic Church became a mission-sending church. This timing is ironic in that the great explosion of American Protestant interest in missions had occurred in the generation before World War I and probably peaked in terms of its visibility in the general culture just as American Catholics were entering the field in the years immediately following the war's end. One of the great engines of this Protestant movement, which saw the number of American Protestant missionaries soar from about 900 in 1890 to perhaps 14,000 in the 1920s, was the Student Volunteer Movement for Foreign Missions (SVM). The SVM was a recruiting and mobilizing organization for missions that worked on behalf of all the mainline Protestant denominations. American Catholics, marveling at this organizational juggernaut, attempted to create one of their own: the Catholic Students' Mission Crusade (CSMC). The SVM and the CSMC were similar in that they both reached out to youth, adopted the heroic rhetoric of the period, attempted to mobilize youth in an effort to evangelize the world, and were energized by the optimism and belief in a special American destiny that characterized nineteenth- and earlytwentieth-century America. Until the 1920s, the SVM reflected a broad Protestant consensus that embraced both evangelical Christianity and the Social Gospel. When this consensus became untenable in the 1920s as the battle between modernism and fundamentalism roared to life, the SVM soon tost its way and ceased to be an effective organization. The CSMC, unencumbered by this crisis of authority in American Protestantism, was rapidly rising in stature just as the SVM was becoming moribund. The CSMC would endure for another half a century, becoming a fixture in American Catholic life. David Endres does an excellent job bringing this history to life, charting the CSMCs story through four generations: the World War I generation that mirrored the Victorian optimism of the SVM; the interwar generation that saw itself as producing Crusaders to conquer the infidel; the post- World War H generation that produced Cold Warriors for Christ; and the generation of the 1960s that alternately gloried in and was mired in the social and ecclesial revolutions of the period. …