During World War I, U.S. Catholics launched an unprecedented initiative to supply portable Mass kits, including an altar stone, crucifix, chalice, and paten, to Catholic military chaplains serving in Europe. Led by the newly formed National Catholic War Council and the Chaplains’ Aid Association, American Catholics combined patriotic sentiment with religious devotion to send physical items across the Atlantic in a unique, faith-based material war effort. This endeavor proved massively successful.
This project analyzes the role of portable objects in Catholic devotion during the World Wars, emphasizing the overlap between faith, warfare, and material culture. In particular, it investigates how the collective endeavor to supply portable Mass kits to chaplains abroad impacted home-front Catholicism.
This research has been generously funded by the Trinity University Humanities Collective, the Mellon Initiative, the Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism, and the American Academy of Religion. See more at “Inscribing Devotion between the Medieval and the Modern” (2023), “Portable Mass Kits and American Catholics” (2022), and “Moving Altars from the Middle Ages to WWII” (2021).
Sarah C. Luginbill 