Lay Catholic Societies in Twentieth Century Britain

This volume brings to light the Catholic laity's rich history of collective action to address major social issues in twentieth-century Britain, from women's suffrage to the AIDS crisis.


Catholic teaching in the twentieth century placed renewed emphasis on the role of lay people in enacting Christian values and beliefs in the circumstances of their ordinary lives. In Britain, this call for Catholic action in the social sphere was answered by many organisations and associations that in very different ways channeled and transformed the engagement of Catholic believers with the Church and with wider society. This volume casts fresh light on the neglected contributions of Britain's Catholic minority to widely familiar movements and issues across the twentieth century, from women's suffrage at its beginning to the peace movement and AIDS response at its end.

While much research has been done on lay Catholic associations in North America and Continental Europe, very little has previously been known about such societies in the British context. Chapters in this ground-breaking collection discuss such organisations as the Catholic Women's League, St Joan's Social and Political Alliance, the Guild of Catholic Teachers, the Catholic Evidence Guild, the Young Christian Workers, the Newman Association, the Catenians, the Catholic Worker movement, the charismatic prayer groups that proliferated in the 1970s, and Catholic AIDS Link.
These groups operating under lay leadership variously worked to support working and professional women, secure equal voting rights, advance the professionalisation of teachers, combat prejudice against the reasonableness of Catholic doctrines and those holding them, give young working people the skills and confidence to engage actively with their conditions, provide aid to exiles from totalitarian regimes, create forums for respectable conviviality and collective charitable endeavour for middle-class men, promote radical social justice and peace activism, experiment with new forms of worship and spirituality, and respond to the crisis of the AIDS pandemic of the 1980s.

The sheer variety of concerns addressed by these associations - a small selection from the many more that have existed and that continue to operate - indicate something of the breadth of the Catholic laity's engagement with the condition of twentieth-century Britain and the depth of its response to the call for Catholic social action.