Suburbs, the Old Parish and Goneness

Eduardo's and Rick's posts bring me to one of my favorite subjects: the shifts in Catholic identity with the movements away from the cities. This is a multileveled phenomenon that needs a lot of analysis, but also one that I feel very personally because it is also about my life. As a 54 year white ethnic from the urban northeast, I've lived through the transition and have deep, though ambivalent feelings about it, so I'd like to offer some ruminations. This will return to some of the themes I first wrote about in my posts on Kelo. (I should preface my comments, however, by noting that the Catholic chattering classes are filled with people of my age and background, and we tend to regard our experience as the whole story of American Catholicism -- which obscures the different experience of the burgeoning number of Hispanic, and to some extent Asian, Catholics who have a  different story to tell.)

To some extent, there is a tendency to take a "world we have lost," nostalgic view of the urban communities centered around Catholic Churches until (more or less) the 1960s. When you asked someone from South Philly, or South Boston, or East Baltimore or 115th St in Manhattan where they were from, they were as likely to say St. Tommy's, or Mount Carmel or St Joe's as they were to name the city or neighborhood. They identified with the parish, which said something about both the importance of the Church in their lives and the importance of the neighborhood as the social unit with which they identified. Orsi's wonderful sociological study "The Madonna of 115th Street" about the importance of a matriarchal form of Italian Catholicism in an Italian neighborhood in midcentury Manhattan, evokes this wonderfully, as does O'Farrell's "Studs Lonigan," which does the same in fiction for an Irish Catholic neighborhood in the Chicago of the first part of the century. Both books show the importance of ethnic homogeneity, relatively recent immigrant status (particularly for Italians), relatively uniform working class and lower-middle class status, isolation from educated elites, and the Church as a major source of education, moral instruction, self-expression, entertainment and spectacle. Of course, the nature of the physical space contributed to all this. While these neighborhoods weren't all NYC-type tenements, Southie-type three deckers or Philly or Baltimore-type rowhouses, and had different strata of housing, they were all compact places, where most people could walk to work, take trolleys or subways, or (later) drive short distances. This was the world of cradle to grave Catholic institutions. Someone born circa 1930 would come squalling into the world at Mercy Hospital, be sent to elementary school at St. Casmir, high school at West Catholic, and dances at the CYO, while your father played cards at the Knights of Columbus and went to the Sunday breakfasts sponsored by the Holy Name Society and cooked by the mothers in the parish Sodality. If you were smart and lucky you went to Seton Hall, or DePaul or BC or Fordham; if you weren't, you joined labor unions influenced by the labor schools sponsored by the Jesuits. When you got sick you went back to Mercy Hospital; if you didn't make it, you went to Impelliteri's funeral home and ended up in Mopunt Calvary. Requiesicat in pace. Of course, most of this world is gone through a combination of factors: social/economic mobility; geographic mobility; assimilation of the grandchildren of the immigrants; and last but not least, the way Vatican II undermined, despite all the good it did, old patterns of Church authority and observance. Orsi shows poignantly the way the intense and dramatic celebrations of Our Lady of Mount Carmel on 115th Street gradually disappeared with the dissolution of the community that supported them through generational change and flight to the suburbs. All of this was exacerbated, of course, by tax, planning and government financing policies that accelerated the flight to the burbs.

It's difficult for me to have a coherent, internally consistent way of thinking about all this. My goal as a teenager in the 1960s was to get as far away from this world as possible. As soon as I could I fled to a secular college that was everything that world was not, and the Church and my faith played little role in my life for many years. Only much later in life did my feelings about all that begin to change, especially after I experienced what the sociologists call the moral minimilaism of suburban life. American suburbs are peaceful places because of the lack of moral claims those of us who live there make upon each other. The prevailing moral rules in use do not extend beyond politeness, respecting property boundaries and maintaining one's lawn to community standards. There is literally nothing to fight about. Nothing could be more different the old neighborhoods contrasted in Anne Tyler's depictions in "The Amateur Marriage" of Polish East Baltimore in 1941 and suburban Baltimore of the 1970's.

No one captures my ambivalence about all this better than Phillip Roth. In the '60s with "Good-bye Columbus" and "Portnoy's Complaint," he was an enfant terrible in his rebellion against the old Jewish neighborhood and culture that in important respects was similar to that of the Catholics a few streets over. More recently, his tune has changed. His brilliant books from the last few years, particularly "Sabbath's Theater" and "American Pastoral," all have moving elegies for the old Wequahic neighborhood outside Newark and the Jewish Jersey Shore of the '40's. The other day he was honored at the Wequahic public library, and he suggested that this honor was truly his Nobel Prize. He has come a long way from the 60's.

I'm not sure what all this has to do with Eduardo's and Rick's comments, with which I have great sympathy, both as a supporter of New Urbanism and an uncomfortable participant in suburban Catholicism. And I think they are mining a rich vein in exploring the religious dimensions of the way we organize and use space. But there is a "goneness" to the Catholic physical/spiritual/social world that requires us to produce new paradigms for how (and where) we should live now.

--Mark