Sister Mary John and the Regis volunteers played an important role in spearheading and shaping a larger movement of postgraduate Catholic lay volunteers. Under the vision of Sister Mary John Sullivan, the program ran from 1949 through 1972 and sent approximately 225 Regis graduates to serve at Catholic mission schools domestically and internationally. The program operated out of Regis College, an all-female school run by the Sisters of St. The Regis Lay Apostolate was a pioneering postgraduate lay volunteer program that grew out of the heyday of Catholic Action and the lay apostolate in the midcentury American church.

Finally, while adult organizers often made service opportunities a possibility, it was the desire of many young women and men to “do more” with their time and abilities outside of traditional educational or professional options was the engine that truly drove and grew this movement. Service programs were by their nature short–term projects meant to expose and educate volunteers to more entrenched social problems.

It also shows that impulse has always been a limited agent for large–scale social change. Further, it shows that this paradigm of volunteer has always been twofold in its aim it has focused both on the growth and education of the volunteer as they served others. The dissertation further demonstrates the religious roots of this phenomenon, as seen through Protestant and Catholic programs in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. This study weaves together multiple programs, and a rich array of ideas and events such as social gospel concerns, pacifism, William James’ arguments for a “moral alternative to war,” gender and class anxieties, Great Depression and Cold War–specific exigencies, the Catholic Lay Apostolate, 1960s student activism, and the War on Poverty. It explores how this larger impulse, which includes “service trips,” service–learning courses, and postgraduate programs like the Peace Corps, became a normative and ubiquitous opportunity for middle class, and consequently largely white, Americans. This dissertation examines the development of youth volunteer service in the United States through a constellation of religious, private, and government programs.

Mundelein Voices by Ann M. Harrington