Ingrained Habits: Growing Up Catholic in Mid-Twentieth-Century America by Mary Ellen O’Donnell (review)

Ingrained Habits is a study of the writings—many writings, especially in the form of memoirs but fiction, too—of a generational cohort of “cultural Catholics” in the United States, mostly born between 1940 and 1965, and their collective memory of “an ostensibly ubiquitous religion that prescribed one a personal identity without any alternative” (xviii). “The evidence in these texts,” Mary Ellen O’Donnell explains, “indicates not two separate faces of Catholicism, but one culture of religion in which celebration and community seemed inextricably linked with the rules and enforcement, and all aspects blended into regular routines” (6).

“Simply put,” O’Donnell argues, “for most Catholics in the 1940s, ’50s, and ’60s, life revolved around the church and its stories. Devotions, religious images, and feast and fast days blended into the settings and rhythms of regular life” (18). O’Donnell illustrates this theme with samples from a wide array of authors, ranging from familiar, commercially established writers like Mary Gordon, Anna Quindlen, and Richard Rodriguez to less well-known memoirists including—to list but a few—Gina Gascone, Claudia DeMonte, and John Bernard Ruane.

In “Like an Owner’s Manual for a Very Complicated Vehicle”—perhaps the most representative chapter of Ingrained Habits—O’Donnell shows how Catholic writers formed in the pre-and-immediate post-conciliar church often feature “automatic responses” in the language and behavior of fictional characters—or memoir narrators—to evoke the repetitive, mechanical character of the disciplinary practices they endured, the prayers they memorized, and the deference to religious authority figures they internalized. The narrator of one novel, for example, responds to the arrival of her publishing-industry boss at a meeting by bolting “up from my chair as if the priest had entered the room during catechism assembly and the nuns had commanded: ‘Stand for Father!’” (59). Literary representations of such Catholic habits—ingrained body and soul—abound in the pages of O’Donnell’s work.

“Though it cannot claim a comprehensive history of Catholic life during this time,” O’Donnell concedes of her method throughout Ingrained Habits, “this assemblage of descriptions reveals a shared experience that might resonate for many” (147). It certainly resonated for the author, who weaves personal reflections into the narrative, describing her own early Catholic life as the grand-niece of three priests, and the product of a parochial school in which her fourth-grade math teacher, Sister Wilmette, required students who were short of stature (like Sister herself) “to bring with them a tissue box upon which to rest their feet: dangling legs had no place in her classroom. We learned quickly that order mattered” (48). O’Donnell’s reminiscences are especially striking because she grew up and attended Catholic schools not in the fabled 1950s or 1960s but in the mid-to-late 1980s, a period commonly thought as well-past the cultural peak of a Catholic educational order. Yet as the author explains, her engagement with the Catholic memories of older writers inspired her to “understand my childhood encounter with Catholicism as a vestige of this earlier period, an inherited version of a tradition” which the young Mary Ellen O’Donnell experienced in its final incarnation (4).

That “tradition” entails not only the habits of Catholic spiritual and personal formation, but a narrative mode of Catholic writing more devoted to honoring human experience—however insular, provincial, or sectarian it might appear in retrospect—than shoring up the boundaries of Catholic identity, or orthodoxy, past or present. In that spirit Mary Ellen O’Donnell offers a disclaimer that is far from perfunctory. “It remains crucial not to forget,” she writes, “that these narratives may obscure harsher realities among those who suffered within these circumstances, even as the same stories allow others to connect fondly with a familiar history” (10). Uncovering—or crafting—narratives that treat those harsher realities is now the new frontier of American Catholic...