The Church Confronts Modernity church confronts modernity: Catholicism since 1950 in the United States, Ireland, and Quebec

6. Decline or Relocation? The Catholic Presence in Church and Society, 1950–2000

R. S c o tt A ppl e b y 6. Decline or Relocation? The Catholic Presence in Church and Society, 1950–2000 Introduction Comparison across national boundaries is a difficult challenge. Historians , idolaters of the particular, are not natural comparativists. In 1992 the Journal of American History announced the internationalization of its board and issued a call to comparative history. Forty-six issues later, there is scant evidence of anything like a movement in the direction of sustained comparisons of social phenomena, political cultures, or material culture, much less the formation of religious identity, across national boundaries. The Harvard intellectual historian James Kloppenberg attributes this failure to, among other things, the increasing impossibility of mastering one’s own subfield within American history, given the access to sources now available with the click of a mouse, and the rapid proliferation of excellent monographs, articles and other secondary studies. What follows here, unfortunately , only confirms the veracity of this observation. When we first wrote these papers for a conference, each of us coordinated his or her work with a colleague. I had the good fortune of being paired with Jim Davidson, who first phoned me to discuss the project and then sent me a draft of his paper, followed by a revised version. This left me with the far easier task of following Jim’s lead and crafting my paper as a kind of belated response to his. Professor Davidson’s periodization thus provides my starting point. As 208 I move through his three postwar generations, I sketch ways in which Catholic practices and piety were influenced, and in some instances transformed , by increasing levels of Catholic assimilation into mainstream U.S. society. In an attempt to lend greater nuance to a segmented generational analysis, I argue that developments in U.S. society and culture, much more so than developments in world Catholicism, constituted the framework within which most American priests and religious, and the vast majority of Catholic laity, interpreted and assimilated the changes in Roman Catholicism that are commonly associated with the Second Vatican Council. For working-, middle-, and, eventually, upper-middle-class Euro-Americans, that is, “the U.S. experience” was definitive and even normative; “society” provided the filter though which ecclesial reform and changes in practice were perceived, advanced, embraced, implemented, or ignored.1 Moreover, the relevant “developments in U.S. society” since 1950 were part of one sustained process of secularization—the redefinition and relocation of “holy things”—that began after the world wars and continues to this day, affecting Catholicism no less than other institution-based religions in the United States, but having distinctive consequences for the Church. Accordingly, the transformations of American Catholicism that account for the most significant generational differences mentioned by Professor Davidson should be understood as phases or stages in the deepening of this secularization process. As will become clear, I do not see secularization as necessarily inimical to religious practices, spirituality, or belief; but the process has in fact produced complex and largely negative consequences for U.S. Catholic institutions. According to the argument I present here, then, the event of Vatican II (“event” = “what happened at the Council” plus “how what happened Decline or Relocation? 209 1. I restrict my claims to the Euro-American majority, not because I am unaware of the African-American Catholic and growing Latino-American Catholic and Asian-American Catholic presences in the United States during the decades under consideration, but because I believe that their experiences cannot be conflated with the Euro-American experience and that they deserve parallel but separate treatment. Beyond lacking the competence to pull this off, which would not necessarily deter me, I acknowledge that this paper is too long as is. But it would be necessary, in a truly comprehensive study of “U.S. Catholicism,” to make a structured comparison of U.S. Catholics across Euro-, African-, Latino- and Asian-American communities. When I use the terms “American Catholicism” or “U.S. Catholicism” in what follows, I am referring only to the largest part of that multiethnic body. was understood by various parties” plus “how it was implemented”) was less a watershed in U.S. Catholic history than a particularly vivid and important moment within, response to, and expression of the secularization process that unfolded during the latter half of the twentieth century. Partial though this emphasis on the priority of national society and culture may...