Saving the Heartland: Catholic Missionaries in Rural America

The Catholic Rural Life Movement of the mid-twentieth century worked to safeguard the future of both farming and faith as its "motor missions" traveled to the heartland, adapting liturgical traditions to rural conditions. The Catholic missionaries joined with other groups, both religious and secular, to improve American farming practices after the "dust bowl" crisis. Simultaneously responding to a perceived crisis of belief, they worked to save the faith from modernist doctrines and to gain rural converts to a religious practice that was associated mainly with urban immigrants. Saving the Heartland explores the process by which rural Catholicism finally won recognition as a religious subculture in need of its own devotions, celebrations, and publications.