Suburbia Triumphant

Growing up, as I was so fortunate to have done, as a baby Boomer in the aftermath of World War II, I was lucky not only to live in the Bronx, still in its glory (although fading faster than any of us then realized) but also to grow up in the glorious sunset of the urban Catholic parish neighborhood. Physically embodied in the great Gothic parish church across the street from where we lived, the parish church was by far the biggest and most impressive structure in the neighborhood and perhaps the most influential in that it served as the spiritual center and source of stability for most of our neighbors. What a sight it was in those days, Sunday after Sunday, as thousands of people poured out of the 13 Sunday Masses celebrated in both upper and lower churches! (Sunday Masses upstairs at 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, and 12:50 and downstairs at 9, 10:15, 11:15, 12:10, and 12:55.) The “candy store” owner on the ground floor of our building once remarked that they probably made more selling newspapers to the people coming out of church on Sunday than on anything else the rest of the week! As a child, I would attend the parish grade school and go on to the parish high school, the two other great parish institutions, which - along with the omnipresent Augustinian Fathers and Dominican Sisters who staffed them - made the parish plant the physical and psychological (and, of course, spiritual) communal anchor of our very densely populated, urban neighborhood.

Already, however, the pull of suburbanization was at work. My mother, more than the rest of us I think, hoped someday to be a suburban homeowner - a desire eventually fulfilled years later, when I was already away in grad school. By them both the Bronx and the Church were being blown about by in the fierce winds of change. Those changes, however, were themselves, in part at least, consequences of a wider cultural shift from the old urban neighborhoods where European Catholic immigrants and their children and grandchildren had made once made their communities to to new and very different kinds of communities in the suburbs. That is the story, so ably told by Holy Cros priest and historian at Notre Dame University Stephen M Koeth in his book Crabgrass Catholicism: How Suburbanization Transformed Faith and Politics in Postwar America (University of Chicago Press, 2025).

Koeth contends that "it is only through accounting for the religious lives of suburbanites that we can fully understand the processes of suburbanization and the experience of suburbia." He also argues that Catholic critiques of suburbia "were reflective of concerns over modernity, economic prosperity, consumerism, assimilation, and the decline of ethnic religiosity as much as they were a specific response to suburban living."

The author begins by recalling the urban Catholic world that the 19th- and 20th-century American Church had created up until World War II. His case-study for postwar suburbanization and Catholic institutional expansionism is Long Island, which experienced enormous suburban growth in the postwar period. It was on Long Island in 1957 that the first fully suburban diocese was created - the Diocese of Rockville Center - a situation which also left its mother diocese, Brooklyn, the only entirely urban diocese in the U.S.He surveys the Church's demographic and institutional expansion and thr attempts to transplant older models to this new ministerial setting.

An important contention of this book is that "space shapes religious practice." Because parishes often lacked adequate buildings and the nature of suburban transportation, the center of Catholic practice shifted from the parish plant to the family home, and traditional communal expressions of piety shifted to more domestic expressions. All this led to greater involvement of the laity in the Church's organizational life and mission - not so much as a result of Vatican II but actually in anticipation of it. This was the heyday of the Christian Family Movement, the Cana Conference, and Marriage Encounter.

In the process, the old ethnic divisions began to breakdown, and an ethnically amalgamated Catholic identity came to predominate. (Think of sociologist Will Herberg's famous, Protestant, Catholic, Jew, published in 1955.) At the same time, as white, once "ethnic" Catholics amalgamated, racial division and polarization predominated.

Meanwhile, despite the commendable effort to continue the commitment to parish schools, the sheer size of the population to be educated and financial and other pressures (e.g., high taxes supporting high quality public schools) led to a greater emphasis on religious education programs, often conducted in parishioners' homes. All this had a further effect on participation in post-war politics."Catholic voters ultimately prioritized tax relief and local control over obtaining state aid for parochial schools. Suburban Catholics became increasingly dissatisfied with New Deal liberalism and increasingly opne to conservative political positions.

The early expansion into suburbia coincided with an era of high churchgoing among American Catholics. (Hence, the regular erection of new parishes and constant construction of new churches and parish facilities.) U.S. Catholic Mass attendance peaked at 74% in 1958. By the early 1970s, however, the drop in Mass attendance could no longer be ignored. The author quotes Paulist John B. Sheerin, writing in 1973, regarding the alarm about the drop in Mass attendance then being sounded by Andrew Greeley, that it was "worth of far more concern than most Catholics had given it."

Boomers and their heirs "have ceased practicing their faith in ever-increasing numbers," and "many of the most plausible explanations for the declines are deeply connected to change sin American Catholicism wrought by postwar suburbanization and its attendant social transformations." In addition to the loss of the old urban identification between religion and neighborhood and the various structural and financial issues already alluded to especially in regard to Catholic education, Koeth also acknowledges untoward changes in the U.S. political climate. Many, especially millennials, "have been turned off by what they perceive to be the political agendas of religious leaders.

Thus, "one of the key ironies of this book" is "that even as the postwar move to the suburbs was marked by the optimism and excitement of proliferating parishes and schools and of classrooms, seminaries, and convents bursting at the seams, suburbanization was undermining the structures that had sustained the vibrant Catholic world of the 'immigrant Church.' In opening an entirely new era for the Church, suburbanization sowed seeds that would ultimately erode the vitality fo the Church in the early postwar period." The Church today " is still grappling with, and largely defined by, the challenges first posed by the collapse of the Catholic ghetto and the spread of crabgrass Catholicism."