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“It is the Mass that Matters Most”: Monsignor George G. Higgins and the Place of the Liturgy in Social Action

Abstract: Monsignor George G. Higgins is widely regarded as the single most influential clergyman in the American labor movement in the second half of the twentieth century. Through his leadership of the Social Action Department of the National Catholic Welfare Conference, his teaching at The Catholic University of America, and especially his syndicated newspaper column, “Yardstick,” Higgins explicated Catholic social teaching and proposed its lessons as a blueprint for the reform of economic and labor policy. Very little attention, however, has been paid to Higgins’s undying interest in the liturgical movement and in the liturgy’s crucial importance for any true social reform. Throughout his priestly life, Higgins exhorted Catholic laity, and union members in particular, through his homilies, speeches, and newspaper columns, to appreciate how liturgy and social action were two sides of the same coin. Using the extensive archival resources of The Catholic University of America, this article traces the influences that inspired Higgins to wed liturgical and social reform, recovers how he wrote and spoke about the importance of the liturgy in obtaining the ends of social action, and briefly suggests reasons why the brief marriage of these two movements failed to endure.