Closing Chapters: Urban Change, Religious Reform, and the Decline of Youngstown’s Catholic Elementary Schools, 1960–2006 (review)

That Catholic parochial education in the United States is in decline is self-evident from a statistical profile. In the middle of the 1960s, when these institutions were at their zenith, there were 4.5 million students enrolled in more than 10,000 Catholic schools. By 2012, the number of students in such institutions had dropped to a little more than 2 million in fewer than 7000 schools. Much of the decline has taken place in the heart of urban American Catholicism—the big cities of the Northeast and the Midwest. In this important new book, Thomas G. Welsh provides something of a “morbidity and mortality” report on the decline as it played out in the Diocese of Youngstown.

It will come as no surprise to scholars of American Catholicism that Closing Chapters began as a doctoral dissertation. As a resident of Youngstown, Welsh chose to study what he knew—the schools that had educated him during his formative years. Closing Chapters is not a memoir, however, but rather a serious scholarly effort to understand why such an important Catholic social institution has collapsed in little more than a generation.

Welsh has traced the decline of parish schools in Youngstown and by inference across the nation to the dissolution of a distinct American Catholic identity in the years after the Second Vatican Council. Once a robust and distinct minority living in homogeneous neighborhoods, American Catholics began something of a transformation in the years after World War II, a transformation that accelerated in the 1960s. They left their traditional neighborhoods and parishes for the suburbs and did not look back. A major casualty of this exodus was the parish school.

Welsh traces this transformation through seven chapters that articulate the social and demographic changes in Youngstown over the last half of the century. Each chapter provides a distinct element to the tragedy. Of particular interest to scholars of urban Catholic education will be the fourth and fifth chapters, which trace the flight of Youngstown’s working-class Catholic population from the city center to other parts of the diocese or to other cities altogether. Neighborhoods once teeming with Catholics became African American who were not generally Catholic and lacked the resources to support private schools.

There were other contributors to the decline of these schools, of course. Welsh touches on the sharp drop in religious vocations, the slide in charitable giving to support parish activities, and the internecine conflict between liberals and conservatives over the future direction of the American Church. “This book shows,” Welsh notes at the end of the introduction, “that a fuller understanding of the phenomenon of declining urban parish schools can be obtained by examining the ways in which urban change intersected with rising levels of disharmony within the American Catholic community” (p. 16).

Closing Chapters is a powerful scholarly analysis of the negative consequences of social and demographic change. As Catholics became less apprehensive about their place in American society, the case for a separate school system seemed less compelling. Welsh’s book is something of a challenge to other scholars to study the unique and specific contours of the decline of Catholic education in other dioceses over the past half century.