The guest author, Quincy Ryan, is a graduate student in Library and Information Science at Simmons College who worked with the CU Special Collections this semester as a practicum student.
This Fall, I had the opportunity to complete a practicum with the Special Collections at Catholic University of America, under the mentorship of William J. Shepherd and Shane McDonald. My project for the fall was to process the collection and complete a finding aid for the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) Catholic Social Teaching and the U.S. Economy Ad hoc Committee for their library repository.
As a Library and Information Science student, I was excited to get hands-on experience with the field since I have not had LIS work experience prior to this opportunity. Before starting the practicum itself, the staff at the archive was generous enough to give me a tour and talk about the different collections they house, fun experiences and encounters they’ve had, and the day-to-day experience of working there.
The collection assigned to me for this project was The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) Catholic Social Teaching and the U.S. Economy Ad hoc Committee, a 12-box collection of documents about the Ad hoc committee and their creation of the pastoral letter titled Economic Justice for All: Catholic Social Teaching and the U.S. Economy. This collection consists of three series, with the bulk of the collection consisting of paper records of meetings, media coverage, and correspondence. The USCCB has played a central role in shaping Catholic advocacy on social and economic issues, with this letter being part of the tradition of Catholic social teaching. The letter’s purpose was to encourage and contribute to the development of a cultural common ground in efforts to inspire an economy that serves all people more fairly by detailing the questions of; What does the economy do for people? What does it do to people? And how do people participate in it? Abp. Rembert G. Weakland was asked to chair the U.S. bishops’ committee responsible for drafting the pastoral letter and has termed the experience in his memoir as “one of the most important and formative periods of my life.”
The first draft of the pastoral letter was written and delayed until after the election of President Ronald Reagan and his controversial economic policies he would enact. The delay of this draft was met with heavy criticism due to the opposing economic and social views between the catholic church and Reagan, but with a majority of the church backing Reagan due to his stance on pro-life policies.
Going through the hundreds of correspondences and documents of the collection, I was able to see various opinions on the pastoral letter, how the letter evolved over time, and the eventual reception of the finished product. This was such a cool learning experience and let me see firsthand how researchers would use a collection such as this due to the similar social and economic issues we are facing today. It was interesting to see how leaders within the church handled the moral dilemmas of capitalism and how the pastoral letter navigates the moral and economic beliefs of the church when against opposing views from the U.S. government. While not the most exciting of titles, the pastoral letter offered insight into a world I knew very little about.
Processing the collection itself and writing the finding aid was the bulk of the work completed for this practicum. The process of going through the collection was very intimidating at first as I did not know where to begin in learning the contents of each box. As I got more comfortable with the collection, I began to see the thought process behind the original order of the documents. My classwork alongside the practicum focused heavily on the concept of provenance and original order and allowed me to see what these concepts looked like when applied to a collection. With these concepts in mind, the final ordering of the collection was mostly in its original form with some folders being reorganized based on incorrect alphabetical order or fixing the ordering of a set of folders (e.g., some folders were assigned as a set such as Part 2, Part 3, and Part 1 and would be fixed to be Part 1, Part 2, Part 3). Overall, this was an invaluable experience and cemented my appreciation and excitement to further explore the field of archives.
If you’re interested in exploring the USCCB Catholic Social Teaching and the U.S. Economy Ad hoc Committee collection, please see the online finding aid, and/or you can visit the Catholic University of America Special Collections by appointment. For more information, you can reach out via lib-archives@cua.edu. Special thank you to Abigail Hibbs and Alexis Howlett for being so welcoming and answering my abundance of questions throughout this process. Thanks also to Katherine Nuss of the USCCB for providing photographs.