The 1960s ushered in an era of profound cultural change. There were anti-war protests, assassinations of major political figures, and the Second Vatican Council, to name a few. There were also cultural changes driven not by protest, but by geography. That’s the premise of a new book Crabgrass Catholicism: How Suburbanization Changed the Catholic Church by Fr. Stephen M. Koeth, C.S.C., a Holy Cross Father and professor at the University of Notre Dame.
American urbanization and large-scale mass immigration occurred simultaneously in American life. In large cities, like Chicago, Boston, and New York, immigrants congregated in ethic neighborhoods, who identified their dwelling by the parish boundary they lived within. There were Italian parishes, Polish parishes, Irish parishes, etc. This applied even to non-Catholics. In a conversation with Drew Mariani, Fr. Koeth recounted a story of a man who approached John Cardinal O’Connor and said, “Your eminence, I’m a good Jewish boy from Our Lady of Mary Parish in Brooklyn.”
The phenomenon of ethic urban neighborhoods lasted from the late 1850s through the 1940s, Koeth told Drew. Then, World War II upended the norm, and Catholic immigrants were assimilated into society, “they’re no longer the immigrant foreigner. They’re someone who has bled and died for the nation. They’re good Americans,” Koeth said.
After the war, mass suburbanization began. The G.I. Bill enabled veterans to go to college and make more money in the workforce. That extra money, plus mortgage assistance from the G.I. Bill, prompted many working-class Catholics and Jews to move to the suburbs.
This movement coincided with the building of mass-produced suburban homes – the brainchild of William J. Levitt. According to Edward Berenson, professor of history at New York University, Levitt was the head of Levitt & Sons – a homebuilding company that build low-cost affordable houses zoned for single families. “The result was a sociocultural revolution that, by the 1960s, had turned nearly two-thirds of Americans into suburbanites,” writes Berenson.
Changing Landscape
The urban ethic communities were often centered around Catholicism. “The faith spilled out of the Church through Corpus Cristi processions…through the fact that you went to through the fact that you went to the Catholic grade school that was right next door,” Koeth said.
The advent of suburbanization meant ethnicity became detached from parish life. Even the names of parishes changed. “You have in the city St. Stanislaus…and St. Patrick’s,” Koeth said. The suburban parishes had names like “Our Lady of Grace or Our Lady of the Apostles.”
Life in the suburbs also changed Catholic devotional life from a communal experience to a more atomized one. According to Koeth, “newly formed suburban parishes lacked the infrastructure of church, rectory, school, and convent, gatherings that normally occurred within parish buildings.” So, masses were held in homes, at drive-in movie theaters, and even airplane hangars. Subsequently, devotional life shifted towards the domestic, where “block rosaries, and self-guided retreats rose in popularity, replacing the public and communal devotions that had marked the urban ethnic parish.”
Finally, suburban life meant an increased role for the laity at parishes. In the early days of the suburbs, communities sprung up quickly, Koeth says, so the pastor had to rely on the parishioners to help “build the parish.” The clergy-laity dynamics arising out of suburbanization even pre-date some of the reforms of the Second Vatican Council. “These changes between the clergy and the laity, this rise of the lay vocation, so to speak, it’s all happening already because of suburbanization, even before the Council says anything about it,” Koeth argues.