The American Jesuits: A History

11 The Cold War

11 The Cold War A Church Strong, but Weak If the late 19th century was an era in which the American Catholic Church took root, the first half of the 20th century, culminating in 1960, is the age in which it began to bloom. The election of the first Catholic president seems an apt climax for this long process during which, beginning with the American Revolution and summed up symbolically on the deck of the USS Franklin and in the fields of white crosses over Catholic graves in Normandy and Iwo Jima, Catholics had had to prove that they were immigrants and patriots too. This ef- florescence of Catholic institutions and culture has been described in various ways, as a maturing process, a coming of age, and even as a period of triumph. In the years following World War II, several of the social justice initiatives begun in the 1930s—retreats, labor schools, racial integration, and the confrontation with communism—came to the fore again, sometimes in new forms, and showed signs of both unresolved conflicts and progress. These gains were made possible by a postwar leap in the Catholic population, which doubled between 1940 and 1960. In the Northeast, Catholics amounted to almost 40 percent of the population, and, in the nation as a whole, 23 percent. On this base, with vigorous clerical leadership in the population centers like New York, Philadelphia, Chicago , and Detroit, parishes, more than ever, became prosperous social and cultural centers with convents, grade schools and high schools, athletic teams with their own leagues, social clubs, Holy Name Societies , and sodalities—all geared to nurture, protected to some degree from secular corruption, a parish child through youth and adolescence , and into a Catholic college. At the same time, though this was not foreseen, as Catholics participated in the postwar economic boom, they jumped from the center cities to the suburbs where, as New Orleans Jesuit social activist Louis Twomey pointed out in his newsletter, 146 Christ’s Blueprint for the South, in 1958, they often forgot their Catholic working-class origins and became affluent political conservatives. John Tracy Ellis, in American Catholicism (1967), lists the main evidences of this new maturity, beginning with Pope Pius X’s 1908 declaration that America was no longer to be considered mission territory . Although there were probably 40,000,000 Catholics in America in 1956, they were concentrated, at 82 percent, in the cities, while John LaFarge’s concerns that rural Catholics needed more attention had been justified by a “leakage” in country areas. And, for many reasons, large numbers drifted away from the city churches as well. On the other hand, there were signs of strength: increase in foreign mission work; an international eucharistic congress, which gathered participants from all over the world to Chicago in 1926; more Americans in the College of Cardinals (8); an increase in contemplative religious orders like the Poor Clares and Trappists; increased liturgical participation , as in the dialogue Mass; finally the higher profile of the National Catholic Welfare Council (NCWC), the association by which the American bishops have coordinated their teaching, especially on social policy. Nevertheless, there remained ways in which the Catholic Church and the Society of Jesus might always be both at home in America. The tension between church and state on the theoretical level was being worked out in Rome during Vatican II’s deliberations on the Constitution on Religious Liberty. But in other ways, any American religion or religious order might remain at odds with American society . Christianity has always had a countercultural streak. If the dominant culture is perceptibly corrupt, violent, racist, or otherwise abusive of human dignity, the Jesuit’s conscience should lead him to stand against it. The mid-20th century offered several opportunities. The Labor Schools Open One of the elements in the Catholic “triumph” during these years was the positive image of the church and the Catholic priest, especially as they appeared in a long string of Hollywood movies: Gonzaga University alumnus Bing Crosby as Father O’Malley in Going My Way and The Bells of St. Mary’s; Pat O’Brien as a football coach—as Notre Dame’s Knute Rockne and as Frank Cavanaugh, Fordham’s The Iron The Cold War 147 Major—and as chaplain to The Fighting 69th; and Spencer Tracy as Father Flanagan in Boys’ Town and the dynamic priest in San...