Catholics and American culture: Fulton Sheen, Dorothy Day, and the Notre Dame football team

Abstract

Catholics and American Culture: Fulton Sheen, Dorothy Day, and Notre Dane Football Team. By Mark S. Massa. New York: Crossroad, 1999. x + 278 pp. $24.95 (cloth). Growing up as a low-church Yankee Episcopalian in Boston during 1950s, was nurtured in a culture imbued in anti-Catholicism. Most of my family members assumed that Catholics were both socially and spiritually beneath us, and remarks such as She's a Catholic ... but nice were commonplace at dinner table. still vividly remember my grandmother telling me, I don't think you ought to go to John's house-after all, they're Catholics. Indeed, there were two words invariably spoken in whispered tones at our home, as if sounds themselves had a power to undo us: cancer and Catholic! Inasmuch as this prejudice had an intellectual basis, it was articulated in Paul Blanshard's American Freedom and Catholic Power (1949), classic expression of modern Protestant concerns about inherent foreignness of Roman Catholicism. The fact that Blanshard's book was published in Boston by respected Beacon Press and was regarded as a responsible statement of liberal social thought indicates endurance of antiCatholic bigotry (at least among Protestants in Northeast) after World War II. While Mark Massa, a Jesuit who teaches at Fordham University did not know my family, he could well have written Catholics and A-merican Culture to explain why our prejudices and anxieties were not only wrong but also ridiculously misplaced. As he demonstrates in this extraordinarily rich, readable, and insightful book, Yankee Protestants had no reason at all to fear Roman Catholics in their midst. A remarkable transformation occurred in American Catholicism during period when Massa and were growing up, and most white Catholics entered the verdant ... pastures of middle-class acceptance and affluence (p. 2) where all traces of their religious distinctiveness disappeared. During this process, Catholics generally abandoned the fortress of immigrant Catholic subculture (p. 36), and instead embraced what Episcopalian Gibson Winter has called suburban captivity of churches. Moreover, thanks to popularity and influence of such identifiably Catholic figures as Joseph McCarthy Fulton J. Sheen, and John F. Kennedy Catholics moved into center of nation's cultural mainstream. This shift was completed in fall of 1960 with Kennedy's election as president. Running on a platform that stressed disjunction between his religious beliefs and his political views, Kennedy successfully dissociated himself both from Blanshard's stereotype of alien-controlled Catholic politician and from vapid Piety on Potomac fostered during Eisenhower administration. While his enthusiastic embrace of secularity raises disturbing questions about effectiveness of social mission of his church-an irony Massa highlights-Kennedy's victory demonstrated how far American Catholicism had come in little more than a decade since publication of Blanshard's book. As foregoing discussion suggests, Catholics and American Culture is neither a conventional narrative history nor an exhaustive sociological study of multicultural Catholic community today. Instead, Massa examines in detail a few key individuals and events in order to illustrate what he believes is central theme in American Catholic history between 1945 and 1970: evolution of Roman Catholicism from its older, ghetto style of religion to a newer, `culture religion' one (p. …