‘Fraught with wonderful possibilities’: Father Jimmy Tompkins and the struggle for a Catholic progressivism, 1912–1922

Abstract

This essay probes beneath the ‘folk hero’ image of Father J. J. Tompkins, the animating presence behind the world-famous Antigonish Movement. I argue that Father Tompkins’ project can be rendered as an illustration of early modern progressive adult education with theological affinity to the liberation theologies of the 1960s and 1970s. My narrative interpretive frame places Tompkins’ thought, struggles and agonies within a larger struggle between integrationists and progressives within global Catholicism.