Faith and the Historian: CATHOLIC PERSPECTIVES

7. Lost at the Drive-In

148 maureen fitzgerald 7 Lost at the Drive-In Several years ago I gave a talk at the College of William and Mary on my own struggles with subjectivity and research, especially as they pertained to my work on Irish Catholic women historically and my quite complex relation to Catholicism. At the end of the talk, a perceptive colleague asked me what should not have been a startling question; namely, “Is there a Catholic methodology?”1 I was stymied, not least because I had spoken vehemently on my decision to refuse anymore to call myself an “ex-Catholic” in recognition of the impact of my Catholic childhood, family, and values on my work. I knew what I did not want to claim as well, which was that some measure of “truth,” as decided by an institutional Church with which I was frequently at odds, determined the “truth” I found in history. I told her I needed to think about it, and have been thinking about it since. I have come up with an answer that will not be satisfying to some, but is the only honest answer I can give. I ascribe to no overarching method, certainly not one that needs to be replicated by anyone else. But in my work, my Catholic, or more precisely Irish Catholic, background, is frequently in tension with my training as an historian. It is often a creative tension, one that helps me to question the presumptions in the fields with which I engage, or the presumptions of the historical actors about whom I write. This sometimes welcome, and often unwelcome, tension has given me a tolerance for ideological impurity that when I am at my best serves me and my work well, and when I am at my worst makes the work itself impossible to do. I have never, even in my childhood when I was traditionally reli- gious, felt entirely comfortable as a Catholic. Part of this had to do with my parents’ discomfort at the options for worship on Long Island, where I grew up—first in Levittown from 1959 to 1965, and then in another similar suburb, Commack, until my graduation in 1977. My parents had grown up in the city, and their respective churches were central to how they defined neighborhood and community.2 I heard a lot about what they missed. Dad had gone through Catholic schools until he dropped out of Manhattan College to enlist. Mom had lived her entire premarried life in the same apartment, next door to the parish and parish convent. Dad craved the more sophisticated Catholicism he learned from the brothers at Cardinal Hayes High School. Mom craved being able to enter sacred space at any given moment and the sense of peace she felt, not from Mass per se, but from space and time for contemplation. Neither was satisfied with the huge suburban church we attended, one that was architecturally indistinct from a gymnasium, and whose pastor seemed incapable of a sermon that focused on anything but the need to put more money in the collection plate.3 This was the 1960s and 1970s, and as I got older I was increasingly dissatisfied with a religious experience impervious to the complexity of life outside the building. The most important lesson we learned was that we return from Communion not to the pews but to the back of the church, so that we might leave first and avoid a fortyfive -minute wait to get out of the parking lot. There were many aspects of our family life that made enjoyment or engagement with Catholic parish life very difficult. I was the oldest of five children born in six years. Mom did not drive, and so could not go to church except for Mass or confession, when Dad or some other adult could drive her. And our motley crew was often sick and/or too squirmy to sit long enough for Mom to get much out of church. She spent most of our childhood listening to Mass through a speaker in the otherwise soundproof nursery. The nursery experience probably prepped Mom to try the most alienating of our suburban Catholic experiments, the drive-in Mass. I think I was about nine at the time, because I had made my First Communion but my siblings had not. We went a few times, pulling into the slot, hanging the intercom on the window, and trying to stay quiet in the back of the station wagon. We...