Parish Boundaries and Postwar Suburbia

Abstract

Parish Boundaries and Postwar Suburbia Stephen M. Koeth31 CSC When I arrived at Columbia University in the summer of 2012, my professors and fellow doctoral students were eager to express interest in my research by discussing what they knew of American Catholic history. Invariably, one of the texts with which they were most familiar was John McGreevy's Parish Boundaries. Although religious historians may lament that theology and religion are still not sufficiently engaged by scholars of twentieth century America, Parish Boundaries' greatest contribution is that it so powerfully showed how "theological traditions help believers interpret their surroundings" and are therefore crucially important for understanding the past.32 Specifically, Parish Boundaries argued convincingly that because Catholics in the postwar period represented an increasing percentage of urban whites, Catholic priests, politicians, union workers, and homeowners played an outsized role in debates over public housing, urban renewal, highway programs, and in the history of race relations in the urban north, which was so deeply intertwined with all these issues.33 Most importantly, whereas other scholars had treated labor competition as central to race relations in the urban north, McGreevy showed that housing was, in fact, the crucial issue. White Catholics fought to defend their urban ethnic neighborhoods—and were slower to depart for the suburbs—because their sacramental sense of place imbued their parish and neighborhood with deep theological meaning.34 Nevertheless, a focus on housing also highlights that, in the very period McGreevy explores, suburbanites were becoming the majority in American Catholicism. Even though Parish Boundaries did not aim to study those Catholics who left the urban core for the suburbs, McGreevy still gets a great deal right about suburbanization's effects on Catholic life. Still, as Thomas Sugrue has stated, there is much about "the [End Page 19] history of Catholic suburbanization, its impact on Catholic understandings of family, and community, and its implications for Catholic politics" that remains unexplored.35 Indeed, historians have largely overlooked suburban religion in general.36 Since the suburbs were at the heart of the postwar United States, more scholarship on Catholic suburbia would not only bolster and refine Parish Boundaries' arguments, it would also help better integrate Catholics into the history of twentieth-century America–a goal for which McGreevy has rightly advocated.37 Although McGreevy makes little mention of redlining, and only briefly references Federal Housing Authority (FHA) mortgages and realtors who created racial panic, his focus on housing has been validated by subsequent scholarship on housing inequality and racism in federal policy, banking, and real estate practices.38 In particular, recent research into Home Owners' Loan Corporation (HOLC) appraisals of urban real estate has shown that while Black Americans were undoubtedly the greatest victims of racist housing policies and redlining, European ethnic Catholics were victims too. As residents of HOLC Grade-C neighborhoods, which were coded yellow on HOLC maps, they would have been less likely to receive FHA mortgage insurance and lower interest rates and therefore also suffered the ill effects of disinvestment.39 Greater attention to federal policies and real estate practices would only serve to make clearer that the ultimate collapse of the urban [End Page 20] Catholic neighborhood—and the flight of white ethnic Catholics to the postwar suburbs—was not only an effect of individual racism but very much a result of federal, state, and local policy.40 HOLC appraisals resulted in depressed home values, which gave white ethnic Catholics concrete financial motivations to take advantage of the GI Bill's lowcost home loans and move to the suburbs, an option not available to Black veterans and their families. Parish Boundaries makes clear how Catholic parishes defined urban geography, marking the boundaries and shaping the life of the city neighborhoods Catholic suburbanites left behind.41 But suburban space, too, was shaped by Catholic homebuyers and clergy and their desire to transplant much of the Catholic infrastructure they had known in the city into suburban environs. Precisely how the presence of Catholic parishes, schools, hospitals, and summer camps did and did not determine the contours of suburban life is ripe for further exploration in the model of Parish Boundaries. That racial exclusion was a crucial aspect of...