ABSTRACT
In the early 1920s, less than one out of five Roman Catholics in America lived in rural areas. The organization's specific purposes were: to provide care for underprivileged Catholics living on the land, to retain on the land those Catholics who were already there, to settle still more Catholics in rural areas, and to convert non-Catholics in the countryside. The early National Catholic Rural Life Conference (NCRLC) also held that agrarianism was the real alternative to communism and its strange ally, sterility. Yet by the mid-1930s, the NCRLC still remained on the margins of the American Church, with little to show for its effort and without full-time leadership. It was Father Luigi Ligutti who would move the New Agrarianism to near the center of Catholic attention. David Bovee, the most thorough historian of the NCRLC, has concluded that "no other person in the Conference's history has come close to being the personal embodiment of the movement that Ligutti was".
