American Catholic Press: Religious NEP, Repression and Laicization (1925–1939)

Recent scholarship, reflecting the “religious turn” and research opportunities after the “archival revolution” of 1991, has substantially increased our knowledge of the Roman Catholic Church and other confessions in Soviet Russia. However, most of that research has focused on Soviet religious policy and relies overwhelmingly on documentation from the state, party, and police—a voluminous, but biased source base. Those documents (including the famous “investigative files” in police archives) reveal more about Bolsheviks than believers and tell us very little about everyday religious practice. To explore the religious life at the local level, it is essential that we find a new complex of documentation. This article suggests one such set of materials: the newsfeeds and internal files of the American Catholic press agency, founded in 1920 with the task of making diocesan papers less parochial and more global—by gathering information from around the world. It is argued here that: (a) despite interwar “deglobalization,” this press agency transmitted information about religious life in the USSR that increased in volume and proved highly reliable; (b) those reports helped to trigger and sustain a Vatican shift from accommodation to anticommunism—a perspective that dominated American Catholicism well into the Cold War; (c) the press agency also demonstrated the counter-productive impact of Soviet anti-religious policies: the closing of churches and repression of clergy inexorably led to the laicization of religious practice that enabled popular Catholicism to survive in the Soviet era and to undergo a striking resurgence in post-Soviet Russia.

Keywords

Roman Catholic Church, Soviet Union, antireligious policies, repression, religious NEP, laicization, League of Militant Atheists

Acknowledgment

This article is part of a project supported by the Russian Science Foundation (№ 19-18-00482 “Entangled Histories: Russia and the Holy See, 1917–1958”).

Received

16.10.2020

Publication date

07.12.2020

Number of characters

67351

Cite

GOST	Freeze G. American Catholic Press: Religious NEP, Repression and Laicization (1925–1939) // Novaia i noveishaia istoriia – 2020. – Issue 6 C. 121-139 [Electronic resource]. URL: https://nni.jes.su/S013038640012696-3-1 (circulation date: 19.04.2024). DOI: 10.31857/S013038640012696-3
MLA	Freeze, Gregory "American Catholic Press: Religious NEP, Repression and Laicization (1925–1939)." Novaia i noveishaia istoriia 6 (2020):121-139. DOI: 10.31857/S013038640012696-3
APA	Freeze G. (2020). American Catholic Press: Religious NEP, Repression and Laicization (1925–1939). Novaia i noveishaia istoriia (6), pp.121-139 DOI: 10.31857/S013038640012696-3

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