The decades following the close of the Second Vatican Council (1965) witnessed a mushrooming of movements and trends in American Catholic life; liturgical renewal, greater attention to the Bible, a more finely-tuned sensitivity to social issues, and a redefining of goals and approaches in religious education are just a few of the activities that came to the fore in this period. Although he had died six years before the opening of that historic council, Edwin V. O'Hara (1881-1956) was a man far ahead of his time, whose half-century of ceaseless activity as both priest and bishop sowed seeds that blossomed not only in his lifetime, but especially during those years after the council. Timothy M.Dolan here examines the life of a remarkable churchman whose importance to the progress of the Catholic church in America is grossly underestimated. Driving O'Hara was the deep-rooted conviction that ignorance was the main enemy of the church's mission, followed closely by an institutional complacency hesitant to meet the challenges of the times.
As an heir to the episcopal tradition of John Carroll, John England, John Hughes, James Gibbons, and John Ireland, O'Hara insisted that the Catholic church form and educate its people to take a normative role in society and also provide a model of coherent organization to bring the timeless message of the gospel to a world attracted to secular values. His activist approach to church leadership resulted in the passage of the first state minimum wage law (defended all the way to the Supreme Court), pioneer work in campus ministry, the formation of the National Catholic Rural Life Conference, and the advent of American Catholic agrarianism. Other organizations and movements O'Hara was instrumental in founding and promoting (which are now taken for granted) include the Confraternity of Christian Doctrine (CCD) in the United States, the Catholic Biblical Association, the revision of the Scriptures that led to the New American Bible, a nascent liturgical renewal cooperation between North and South America, and early advances in inter-racial justice.
In this scholarly and critical biography of O'Hara, Dolan constructs a portrait based on such primary sources as the archives of the diocesses of Kansas City-St. Joseph, Missouri, Great Falls, Montana, and Portland, Oregon, as well as those of The Catholic University of America. Anyone seeking a better understanding of the Catholic church in the United States may find here an important biography of a man of ideas, vision, and courage whose "crop" is still harvested today.