Catholic writers throughout the twentieth century have tried to improve their church's public reputation. It is not, they have declared, the leader of reaction, the champion of archconservatism, and the enemy of freedom. On the contrary, it pioneered humane, non-Socialist alternatives to capitalism, it cared for the poor and needy, and it resisted the degradation of mass society. In fact, no beacon of human rights has cast more light into the murky modern world.

These Catholic apologists have not always been able to convince their Protestant and secular brethren, and they have sometimes been forced into special pleading and the making of artful omissions, but their case, strong in patches, does deserve a respectful hearing. Brown and McKeown's The Poor Belong to Us and Thomas Bokenkotter's Church and Revolution are latter-day contributions to this tradition, each emphasizing the enlightened, progressive, and humanitarian character of Catholicism while minimizing its autocratic and intolerant side. Bokenkotter's is much more fun to read and comes about as close as any book on Catholic intellectuals can to being a real page-turner. Brown and McKeown's sober study is more limited, but its modest scope and meticulous approach make it ultimately more convincing.

Bokenkotter, a Cincinnati priest, professor, and social activist, likes to make bold, eye-catching statements. In a brief introduction, he declares that the Catholic church now leads the world's "progressive" forces, and that the Catholic social conscience has been gaining force in the two centuries since the French Revolution. He then tries to substantiate the claim with nearly 600 pages of biographical sketches.

The book provides a handy introduction to the lives and works of about 30 Catholic writers and politicians. It is particularly strong on the first generation of nineteenth-century "liberal Catholics," Felicite de Lammenais, Jean-Baptiste Lacordaire, and Charles Count de Montalembert; on the founder of the Saint Vincent de Paul Society, Frederick Ozanam; and on the pioneers of twentieth century neo-Thomism, Jacques Maritain and Emmanuel Mounier. There is an informative chapter on the hero of Italy's anti-Fascist Christian Democrats, Don Luigi Sturzo, and a quick tour of the English, American, Salvadoran, and Polish highlights, represented by Cardinal Manning, Dorothy Day, Oscar Romero, and Lech Walesa, respectively.

The subjects are an oddly miscellaneous lot: politicians, writers, priests, bishops, charity workers, and utopians, many of whom never thought of themselves as progressive Catholics and who would flinch at the idea of being brought together between the same covers. The book itself wanders all over the place, partly because Bokenkotter's indulgent editor permits him 30-page digressions that have little or nothing to do with his main theme. A chapter on the Irish revolutionaries Michael Collins and Eamon de Valera, for example, scarcely mentions their religious lives or their connection to Catholic philosophy. And no wonder: there is no connection. Collins was a ruthless revolutionary, whose contributions to twentieth-century terrorism are much easier to discern than any enhancement of the Catholic humane tradition. A chapter on Konrad Adenauer, the post-World War II German chancellor, is incongruous, too. He came from a Catholic family, but neither his career nor his political thinking had much to do with the church.

The chapter on Karl Marx is stranger still. It outlines the revolutionary scheme laid down by Marx and other antireligious, "scientific" socialists in the midnineteenth century as a way of setting the stage for his Catholic counterparts Wilhelm von Ketteler and Henry Manning, but it also ranges far beyond the book's ostensible subject, to discuss Marx's relations with Hegel, Proudhon, Engels, and Bakunin. Rather better is a chapter on Albert de Mun (1841-1914), the paternalistic right-wing army officer, papal loyalist, and scourge of the Dreyfusards, who nevertheless advocated an enlightened Catholic social policy to bring estranged French working men back to the church.

Bokenkotter has written several books on Catholic themes, including a general history of Catholicism over the last two millennia. He has the good storyteller's knack for drama, knows how to make the best of every tale, and sometimes descends into a folksy style. He is emphatically not an ardent historical researcher, nor even a systematic reader of available secondary sources, and most of his chapters are simply digests of other writers' longer and weightier books. In his chapter on Henry Manning, for example, he confines himself almost entirely to summarizing Robert Gray's 1985 biography of the cardinal, scanting dozens of others written since Manning's death. Page after page is footnoted with columns of "Ibids," as Bokenkotter passes along both the substance and interpretations he has found in a single source.

Church and Revolution is then rather less than the sum of its parts. I enjoyed each chapter, and took them for a bundle of reports on the author's wide range of reading in modern history. But I never found its thesis—that Catholics have played a pioneering progressive role in European and American affairs over the last two centuries—convincing. At times it clearly shows the triumph of wishful thinking over historical reality. Catholics who played a big role in what Bokenkotter thinks of as "unprogressive" politics are usually passed over in silence.

The exception that proves the rule is a chapter about Monsignor Umberto Benigni (1862-1934), an Italian reactionary. Right from the beginning, unsubtle clues ("roly-poly priest … dangerous and cunning … unprepossessing cleric … doing as much damage as [he] could to the liberal, democratic, and modernist elements within the Church") direct the reader to look upon Benigni as the antithesis of a good Catholic. Eventually you realize that the book is just a leisurely and heartfelt sermon on the author's historical heroes, highlighted with a glance at a couple of his favorite villains.

Brown and McKeown's The Poor Belong to Us could hardly be more different. Written in a spartan academic style by two Georgetown professors, thoroughly researched and meticulous in its reasoning, always unemotional, it shows how Catholic charities helped poor people in America between the 1870s and 1930s. Through most of those years the poor were, disproportionately, Catholic immigrants and their descendants. Catholic charities aimed to keep them alive and prevent them from falling into the hands of secular or Protestant charities. They saw poverty as a problem for souls as well as bodies and were not content to treat only its practical symptoms. "Catholic agencies believe that the material cannot be separated from the spiritual in family life," said the Reverend John O'Grady, editor of the Catholic Charities Review, in 1933. "They believe that any type of care that fails to reckon with the spiritual problems of human life is doomed to failure."

Poor children, including thousands of foundlings and orphans, were their main clients. Bearing in mind the principle of Catholic social teaching that sees the family rather than the individual as the basic unit of society, they tried to move homeless or orphaned children into other families and to keep threatened families intact whenever possible. In 1875 they persuaded the New York legislature to guarantee that the religious tradition of all poor children would be respected by adoption bureaus and aid-granting agencies, and that religious-based charities would not be excluded from putting public social programs into action. The New York model became the basis for Catholic initiatives in the other states.

Laymen and -women conceived, founded, and ran most of these charities at first. But despite the language of "subsidiarity"—the Catholic version of decentralization—the laity usually lost control to clergy and orders of sisters as the institutions expanded. Bishops and archbishops in turn brought them under central control, carrying out their own version of Progressive Era reform and taking more initiative out of the laity's hands. "In the drive to centralize, coordinate, and respond to professional standards, bishops and clergy established more than eighty diocesan bureaus by the 1930s," write Brown and McKeown, until they had built "the largest private system of social provision in the United States." This centralization "turned the principle of subsidiarity on its head," but it did foster efficiency and permit economies of scale. The well-to-do laity, Catholics beginning their long march into the middle class, were still expected to fund these charities, and they gave generously.

At the same time, social work as a career was developing rapidly. Professional charity workers began to vie with the Catholics for access to the poor, and the two groups feuded over the proper treatment of orphans and juvenile criminals. Religious sisters running the institutions often learned ad hoc on the job, and were sometimes more interested in creating what they thought of as a spiritually uplifting setting than in ensuring adequate nutrition, sanitation, and medical care for poor children. They tended to speak more warmly of edifying deathbed scenes than of inmates surviving, growing up healthy, getting jobs, and moving out into the world. As the twentieth century progressed, the pendulum swung steadily toward the professionals. Catholics were obliged to keep pace either by sending their nuns for professional training or (for the laity) by joining and running the ostensibly secular agencies.

The authors' thorough survey of cities where Catholics were a major presence, including New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Boston, Saint Louis, Cincinnati, Chicago, and Denver, shows an uneven performance among Catholic institutions in the early twentieth century. Some were models of what would now be called holistic care, in which souls and bodies really were well cared for. Others were horror stories, such as Saint Paul's Roman Catholic Orphan Asylum in Pittsburgh. A 1919 survey there showed severe overcrowding. Built at first for 30 inmates and extended haphazardly over the next 70 years, in 1919 it housed 900 inmates, many of them abandoned illegitimate babies, an inflexible principal, and a staff of only 34 sisters, overworked to a state of permanent exhaustion. There were no routine procedures for admissions or release of children to relatives, no reliable funding source, no milk for the children to drink, and no principles of hygiene to combat epidemics.

Even worse was the Saint Joseph's Maternity and Infant Hospital in Cincinnati, where a 1926 survey showed a death rate of 458 per thousand among its illegitimates. Standards were low enough that charity workers at another foundling home in Pittsburgh could describe a death rate of 25 percent as "certainly very low." Sensitive to the bad publicity created by these examples, and genuinely dismayed by the managers' incompetence, archbishops worked hard in the 1920s to improve the situation in their many inadequate facilities.

The Great Depression forced the system to change, because the scale of unemployment and the number of suddenly impoverished people needing work, food, clothing, and shelter became unmanageably great. The federal government became directly involved, and from 1933, standardized New Deal programs began to shoulder aside the old makeshift methods and to create a nationwide system of poverty relief.

This was not accomplished without a vigorous rearguard from the politically well-connected Catholic charities, which often made deals to become its local administrators. When Congress debated social security in 1934, the archbishop of Fargo, North Dakota, Aloysius Muench, fearing that the work of Catholic charities, laboriously built up over the last 60 or 70 years, would be eclipsed by a uniform secular scheme, declared: "The poor belong to us! We will not let them be taken from us."

If Catholic charities did in fact lose "the poor" of their early days, they have found plenty of alternative work right up to the present, filling in the spacious gaps in the American welfare system, caring for battered women and children, homeless men and the mentally ill, refugees, and many others. The virtue of Brown and McKeown's research is to remind us how "Catholic" poverty seemed for half a century, and how effectively a generation of more prosperous Catholics reacted to it. It also shows how the idea of caring for the poor, for centuries a religious duty, was rapidly secularized in America. With none of Bokenkotter's flair or fun, and none of his outsize personalities, The Poor Belong to Us takes its place as a study and reference work of permanent value.

Patrick Allitt is professor of history at Emory University. He is the author most recently of Catholic Converts: British and American Intellectuals Turn to Rome (Cornell Univ. Press).

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