Ingrained Habits: Growing Up Catholic in Mid-Twentieth-Century America by Mary Ellen O'Donnell (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Ingrained Habits: Growing Up Catholic in Mid-Twentieth-Century America by Mary Ellen O'Donnell William L. Portier Ingrained Habits: Growing Up Catholic in Mid-Twentieth-Century America. By Mary Ellen O'Donnell. (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press. 2018. Pp. xviii, 164. $75.00. ISBN 9780813230375). As Mary Ellen O'Donnell explains in the preface, this book began at a memorial Mass for her mother. In the kneeling figures of her mother's generation, O'Donnell caught a glimpse of the passing world in which she learned to be a Catholic. Her three-year-old daughter might grow up to be a Catholic, but she would never know that world. Her daughter's Catholicism would not be embedded in a culture. O'Donnell sensed an emerging "chasm," based on fundamental generational differences "in the way Catholicism has been lived, shared, and internalized" (p. xiv). This book explores the "cultural Catholicism" (not a pejorative term for the author) of northeastern and midwestern descendants of European Catholic immigrants, mostly Irish and Italian, born between 1940 and 1965. Since O'Donnell is part of the cohort she is writing about and often finds her own experience mirrored in the narratives on which she draws, Ingrained Habits sometimes reads as a memoir. Rather than an intrusion, however, this autobiographical dimension adds to the book's overall impact. Ingrained Habits is a work of cultural studies, a literary ethnography—a salvage ethnography perhaps—that draws upon almost fifty authors, e.g., Mary McCarthy, Garry Wills, Alice McDermott, Robert Orsi, Claudia DeMonte, Donna Brazile, Anne Rice, Thomas Ferraro, and Anna Quindlen. Their literary productions, some fictional, some explicitly autobiographical, depict their Catholic culture as an "all encompassing, world determining experience" to which there appears to be no alternative (p. xviii). The author locates this work in a thick social network that includes parish and school, home, and neighborhood and community. After an opening chapter that introduces them historically and sociologically, these three sites structure the book's remaining three chapters. This world's tension arises from its rarely seamless blending of "celebration and community" with "rules and enforcement" (p. 5). O'Donnell's carefully circumscribed study of the "bridge generation" to which she and I belong, by definition, leaves out many voices. The divide this generation crossed, however, led not only from one experience of Catholicism to another, but also from ethnic enclaves to what sociologists of this generation might have called the dominant culture. Here there are alternatives, choices to make, and inevitable ambivalence. I would like to have heard more of the author's reflection on this ambivalence. [End Page 427] Nevertheless, O'Donnell's insightful, elegantly written account of a particular "cultural Catholicism" makes a valuable contribution, capturing the "feel" of European American Catholicism in this period. One of this book's main audiences would be cultural studies scholars in the field of Catholic Studies. A strong secondary audience would be educated Catholics who are members of the generational cohort the author is writing about. Ingrained Habits would also work in undergraduate courses on U.S. Catholicism, Catholic Studies, or American religion, giving a real-life, narrative feel to the kinds of formal sociological and historical works the author cites in Chapter 1. It is especially effective in opening a window on women's experience of what O'Donnell calls "Catholic culture." It is highly recommended. William L. Portier University of Dayton Mount St. Mary's University, Emmitsburg, Maryland William L. Portier University of Dayton Mount St. Mary's University, Emmitsburg, Maryland Copyright © 2023 The Catholic University of America Press