by Rachel Bohlmann, American History Librarian and Curator
In 1955 the National Catholic Rural Life Conference, an organization established to support the spiritual needs of people and parishes in rural communities in the United States, published Blessings and Prayers of Thanksgiving for the Family & Parish Observance of Thanksgiving Day. It offered parishioners prayers and a program of spiritual observance for the day.
The Conference first organized in November 1923, when a group of priests, bishops, and laity met in St. Louis, Missouri to address a need for more official church attention to rural Catholics in the United States, as well as the lack of priests and parochial schools in rural parishes. By the 1930s, during the Great Depression, the Conference added concern for social and economic justice, as it promoted solutions to problems of farm tenancy. In 1940 the Conference moved its headquarters to Des Moines, Iowa. Currently, it operates from St. Paul, Minnesota.
This mid-century pamphlet provides prayers and biblical readings that farm families could use throughout Thanksgiving day. One prayer, composed by Archbishop John Carroll in 1791, was “For Church and State,” another was “A Farmer’s Prayer of Thanksgiving.” The publication ended with a novena in honor of St. Isidore, “the patron of all farmers and rural people.”
Blessings and Prayers of Thanksgiving is part of Hesburgh Library’s Catholic Pamphlet Collection, an assemblage of more than 5,500 publications, mostly produced in the United States.
Happy Thanksgiving from everyone in Rare Books and Special Collections!