Mother Teresa and American Catholics’ Mission to the World: Humanitarianism and Foreign Missions in the Mid-Twentieth Century
Open AccessThis dissertation examines U.S. Catholics’ encounters with one of the most famous global icons of the twentieth century: Mother Teresa. In particular, it charts her rise as an icon of both missionary work and humanitarianism within U.S. Catholic circles between the 1950s and early 1970s — decades in which she was not yet well-known among the broader American public. Drawing on a variety of Catholic archives, I place Mother Teresa’s emergence in American life in the context of U.S. foreign relations, U.S. Catholicism, and U.S. religious history more generally. I argue that American Catholics and their institutions, particularly Catholic Relief Services and the Catholic press, enabled Mother Teresa’s expanding reach and renown. And I reveal the ways that she, in return, shaped how U.S. Catholics understood their evolving global mission. These forces helped set the stage for Mother Teresa to burst onto the larger U.S. scene in the 1970s. Overall, my research provides insight into a highly influential figure who is virtually absent in studies of U.S. history and, more broadly, into the ways that religion intersected with Americans’ expanding presence on the global stage in the twentieth century.To set the scene, I first argue that American Catholics’ growing prowess in foreign missions and humanitarianism between the 1920s and the 1950s represented a “global turn” that made U.S. Catholics into important international players. I demonstrate how this development was spurred by U.S. Catholics’ strengthening identity as Americans who — like their Protestant counterparts — believed they had a unique role to play in the “American Century.” But I also show how they were encouraged by the Vatican and Catholics worldwide, who increasingly recognized the global power and “abundance” of the United States and who looked to it (instead of Europe) as the key to the success of the Catholic Church’s growing global ambitions. I focus specifically on the ways that U.S. Catholics’ more frequent interventions into “Third World” countries, including India, brought them into contact with Mother Teresa in the 1950s — initiating a powerful spiritual and financial relationship that would last for decades.Second, I argue that Mother Teresa became a primary vessel for U.S. Catholics’ growing mission in the world and a lens through they understood it. This global mission, and the meaning it held, was not always straightforward: U.S. Catholics, like the Catholic Church more broadly, faced tensions between their two objectives of “saving souls” (missionary work) and “saving bodies” (humanitarianism). In this uncertain climate, I argue that Mother Teresa, more than anyone else, became a symbol and a figure through which American Catholics “solved” these tensions — at least for a short time. This was precisely because she performed “humanitarian” work but in a way that differed from secular humanitarian organizations. Her religious beliefs were out front, and her actions were suffused by the rhetoric of suffering and sanctification. She was both missionary and humanitarian, in a way that Catholics recognized as particularly their own.Third, I argue that Mother Teresa’s image in this period was of a “liberalizing” reformer — which is surprising from a contemporary perspective. Although in later decades she would come to be known as largely apolitical or even conservative, I show that her image among American Catholics in the 1950s and 1960s was identified primarily with the “liberalizing” reforms that prefigured and surrounded the Second Vatican Council. With U.S. Catholics seeking to become more open and relevant to the wider world, Mother Teresa represented the vanguard of a new, more outward-looking and adaptable — yet still mainstreamed — American Catholic community.
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Chamberlain_gwu_0075A_16315.pdf | 2023-11-14 | Open Access |
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