Historian priest’s new book explores how post-war suburbanization drastically altered parish life

As the church in the United States looks for new ways to foster community, it is helpful to look to the past and understand the history that led to the current state of parish life. OSV News’ Charles Camosy recently dove into this history with Father Stephen M. Koeth, assistant professor of history at the University of Notre Dame and priest of the Congregation of Holy Cross, in discussing his new book, “Crabgrass Catholicism: How Suburbanization Transformed Faith and Politics in Postwar America.”

Charles Camosy: For many of us, especially when we think of Catholic immigration to a Protestant U.S., we think of Catholicism as an urban phenomenon. But your book reminds us — especially after World War II — just how much of it became a suburban phenomenon. Can you give us some numbers and maybe a story to help us understand this kind of shift?

Father Stephen M. Koeth: Yes, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, as waves of European Catholics arrived in the United States, they largely remained in urban areas of the Northeast and Midwest where industrial jobs were plentiful and where they could find national parishes in which the traditions of their homelands were perpetuated. But after World War II those urban ethnic communities broke down as Catholics moved up into the college-educated middle class and out into the burgeoning postwar suburbs.

My study focuses in a particular way on the Diocese of Rockville Centre in suburban Long Island, which was established by the Vatican in 1957 as Levittown and similar housing developments sprouted up.

In the 1950s, the population of Long Island jumped from 650,000 to 1,400,000 and almost a quarter of the Island’s residents were Catholic. In 1957, when the Diocese of Rockville Centre was established, 50 of the diocese’s parishes had more than 400 baptisms a year, with a few celebrating as many as 900 baptisms a year. And similar changes were occurring in metropolitan areas across the country.

Between the mid-1950s and the late 1960s, the proportion of non-rural Catholics who lived in suburbs as opposed to central cities rose dramatically from 42 percent to 68 percent. By 1980, only a quarter of the nation’s Catholics lived in central cities.

Camosy: Around this same time comes the Second Vatican Council. How did the changes after the council intersect and interact with the growing trend toward suburbanization?

Koeth: In examining the religious reforms of the 1960s, my work stresses the grassroots origins of religious reform rather than the top-down influence of theologians and conciliar documents. I argue that the reforms of Vatican II amplified changes that were already occurring in Catholic conceptions of the parish, in the roles of priests and laity, in parish associations and devotional life, and in religious education because of the material conditions of postwar suburbanization.

I show how in the postwar period an increasingly well-educated laity helped found new suburban parishes, spearheaded building drives, formed parish school boards and led religious education classes in the absence of religious women. Suburban laity were also the driving force behind the explosive growth of new family apostolates like the Christian Family Movement, the Cana Conference and Marriage Encounter.

Such experiences of parish leadership, along with new roles in the liturgy and the spread of parish and diocesan councils in the wake of Vatican II, fueled the laity’s expectation of greater influence in church affairs. Suburbanization thus shifted the balance of power between priest and people from the leadership of the clergy to greater involvement of the laity in the church’s organization and mission. The suburban church thereby anticipated the reforms of the Second Vatican Council and paved the way for their acceptance by the laity.

Camosy: Can you focus in a bit on what happened to Catholic spaces for prayer, education and charity during this time?

Koeth: I argue that practical considerations regarding suburbia’s spatial arrangement helped shift the center of Catholic practice from the parish plant to the family home and from public and communal expressions of piety to domestic and private forms of prayer.

Because newly established suburban parishes lacked buildings, and suburban transportation options were limited, gatherings that normally occurred within parish buildings — including Mass and religious education classes — had to be held in a variety of temporary spaces, from airplane hangars and factories to drive-in movie theaters and private homes.

Suburbia also stripped the parish of its deep association with ethnic identity and placed tremendous emphasis on domesticity and the nuclear family. As a result, more generically American forms of devotion and domestic rituals — such as home Masses, block rosaries and self-guided retreats — rose in popularity, replacing communal devotions rooted in immigrant traditions.

So, too, did Catholic charity and activism — including ecumenical outreach and efforts to improve race relations and civil rights — become centered in the family home. All of these changes undermined the traditional sense of the parish as a permanent, sacred space, at the same time that overcrowding in suburban parishes further diminished a sense of true community. Suburbanization therefore led to the wholesale questioning of the parish as the dominant means of structuring Catholic life.

Camosy: What lessons can we take from all of this going forward as a U.S. church?

Koeth: I highlight two ways in which crabgrass Catholicism shapes the challenges the U.S. church faces today and in the near future.

The first is religious disaffiliation. Suburbanization broke down the walls of the urban ethnic ghetto, which had helped reinforce participation in the faith. All of the changes of the postwar period signaled the rise of a more individual understanding of the faith in which religious practice was just another consumer choice made amid a panoply of social possibilities.

Additionally, in the suburbs the parochial school lost its centrality in the task of inculcating the faith in the next generation. Forays into novel theology and experiments in pedagogical methods left a whole generation of Catholic youth less knowledgeable about the tenets and practices of the faith and less likely to maintain it in the face of an increasingly pluralistic society.

I think the lesson for today is that the church’s evangelization must prioritize providing people with experiences of community and catechesis that answer their longing for connection and meaning in a world of social isolation and relativism.

The second challenge is addressing a new wave of Catholic immigration. In a previous era, national parishes helped European Catholic immigrants maintain their ethnic and religious identities while assimilating to America from a position of strength. In the era of the suburban church, parishes are premised on an Americanized version of Catholicism devoid of ethnic expressions of liturgy and pious devotions, and Hispanic immigrants must find their place in the U.S. church in mixed parishes.

The church is faced with the challenge of promoting parish unity among English and Spanish-speaking parishioners while preserving the ethnic traditions of Hispanic Catholics, which are such powerful tools for preserving the practice of the faith.

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