Communicants, Community, and Capital: Parish Boundaries, Race, and Catholicism

Abstract

Communicants, Community, and Capital:Parish Boundaries, Race, and Catholicism Thomas J. Sugrue6 On a beautiful spring Sunday in 2009, I visited my childhood parish, St. Mary's of Redford, in northwest Detroit. The most impressive building in a low-rise neighborhood, St. Mary's had an elegant granite façade, designed by celebrated Boston architect Ralph Adams Cram, in a Romanesque revival style with some Art Deco details. 7 As I opened the ornate oak doors, I felt a rush of cool air, infused with the scent of lit candles. The altar came into view, garlanded with white flowers. The polished tile floors reflected the red and blue and yellow light streaming through the impressive stained-glass windows. As I sat in the pews waiting for Mass to begin, I realized that this was not an ordinary Sunday. About ten children sat in the first row, girls wearing lacy white dresses and boys dressed in suits and ties, fidgeting under the watchful eyes of their parents and grandparents, all adorned in their Sunday best. It dawned on me that exactly forty years earlier, I had been one of those children about to receive the Holy Eucharist for the first time. Arguably no moment in the ecclesiastical year is more important in a Catholic parish. Saint Mary's of Redford changed a lot in the four decades after I and about 160 other second graders received our First Communion. Our cohort was so large that we could not all attend the same Mass. That year, the parish's primary and secondary schools educated 2,419 students.8 All of us were white. In 2009, what had once been the largest parish in the Archdiocese of Detroit served only 27 children in its after-school religious education program.9 Every first communicant that year was Black. [End Page 8] My childhood parish could have been a case study in John McGreevy's Parish Boundaries. Its history was a microcosm of mid-twentieth-century American urban Catholicism. Parishioners shared a cognitive map of the city which began and ended with the question, "What parish are you from?" My mom grew up in Gesu, my dad in Epiphany and then St. Cecilia's. They were proud to live in St. Mary's, especially my dad, whose move signaled a step up from the world of his working-class, Irish immigrant parents. Even Detroit's real estate brokers—Catholic or not—were keenly attentive to the importance of parish boundaries. On one randomly chosen day, January 21, 1968, the city's morning paper listed homes for sale in St. Mary's of Redford, Gate of Heaven, St. Scholastica's, Christ the King, and Our Lady of Grace. Click for larger view View full resolution Advertisement, Detroit Free Press, January 21, 1968. Parish Boundaries offers a compelling history of Catholic urban communities like mine. McGreevy documented a world that was largely invisible to social, cultural, and political historians (including this Catholic school alumnus) who were trained at major, secular universities in the second half of the twentieth century. As a fledging scholar, I learned about class struggles, labor movements, ethnopolitics, migrations, and urban politics, but little about religious history other than Puritanism, the first and second Great Awakenings, and the role of black ministers in the Southern struggle for civil rights. Influential social historians like Paul Johnson taught us that religion was a means of disciplining unruly laborers and regulating disorderly urbanites. In our grad classes, Catholics made a few cameo appearances, mostly in discussions of nativism and immigration restriction. The only cleric to get much attention was right-wing radio priest, Father Charles Coughlin. Those of us venturing into twentieth-century America at best superficially considered the role of Catholics in the rise of trade unions, the role of Catholic politicians and citizens in shaping the New Deal, or the role of Roman Catholicism in the Cold War and in human rights politics. We learned how immigrants transplanted their local cultures from southern and eastern Europe to American cities, but very little [End Page 9] about how their religion gave meaning to the places they left or settled. Our reading lists were silent about...