“We are the Church”: The Cursillo Movement and the Reinvention of Catholic Identities in Postwar America and Beyond

Abstract

The Cursillo movement, the three-day “short course” in Christianity that Mallorquín Catholic layman Eduardo Bonnín Aguiló founded in 1944, flourished in the postwar American religious landscape. That the weekend, which emphasizes Bonnín’s theological triptych of piety, study, and action, swept through U.S. Catholic dioceses, parishes, as well as Protestant churches, is a testament to the desire of lay men and women for a personal and communal experience of God. This study of the rapid rise of the Cursillo weekend movement, post-weekend phenomena, and Cursillo spinoffs in the postwar years serves as a case study that illuminates how the global, national, and local were able to work together in new ways in postwar America. A postwar cultural and religious climate of experimentation and global awareness encouraged communalism and working for a common cause. This ethos helped make possible a broad lay-centric spiritual movement that traversed geographic and denominational boundaries.