Suburban Life, the Preferential Option for One's Family, and Catholicism as Culture

I share Eduardo's concerns about the suburbs' implications for justice, community, and the environment, and I believe that CST should accordingly have something to say about suburban life.  I also believe that the attraction of the suburbs is understandable -- even natural -- and is supported by CST to the extent that parents are encouraged to turn their hearts toward home, replacing Plato's rejection of exclusive relationships and particularized care-giving with preferential commitments to our own offspring.  The primacy of the family may help pave the path to the suburbs.  When I see the world through the eyes of my children, I would much rather provide them with good schools, a lawn, and a quiet, safe neighborhood.

We must, of course, balance our family-centric focus with a concern for the broader community.  But what does that mean?  Is it enough for me to flee the city, but vote for candidates who will address urban problems with my tax money?  Or should I commit myself -- and my children -- to the city, warts and all.  I have a friend who moved with his wife and young children to the Desire housing projects in New Orleans, reasoning that it would be a joke for him to claim a commitment to the needs of that community while retreating to the suburbs every night.  I readily admit that I have not -- and probably will not -- make such a sacrifice.  I have lived in many urban settings, but my decisions on where to live were always shaped by quality of life considerations, not by any abstract commitment to the city and its inhabitants.  But my friend's example has always stayed with me.

As for Lisa's question, I do live in the city and I do send our kids to public school.  It's a good school, though, so I can't claim some sort of noble purpose.  On the question of special needs kids and urban Catholic parishes, I assume it's primarily a matter of resources.  (Please correct me if I'm wrong.)  If an urban parish had the financial support of the suburban parish that recruited a special needs student, is there any reason to believe that its school would be resistant to taking in those students?   While the resistance is certainly cause to head to the suburbs for parents of such students now, isn't the resistance at least partially a result of other parents heading to the suburbs over the previous decades?  If state-funded school vouchers were a reality, is there any evidence that Catholic schools would still keep out special needs students?

And let me throw one other observation into the mix, which may be more provocative than I intend.  Some of the more frustratingly dormant parishes that I have attended have been urban parishes.  I realize that I cannot judge an individual's spiritual life by their exterior, but still . . . parishes where no one sings, no one greets visitors, and the average pulse rate during services seems to hover around 27 are difficult for me to reconcile with the life-changing message of the Gospel.  At one parish in Queens, I was excited to learn that there was an adult education committee.  Then I learned that its sole responsibility was to replenish the informational pamphlets in the rack at the back of the church.  Are there lots of "dormant" suburban parishes? Of course.  Are there benefits to living in close proximity to others within an urban parish?  Undoubtedly.  But there is, in my view (here comes the provocative part), a cost to a religious life that is so much part of the cultural background that it never seems to make it to the foreground.  When we are Catholic simply because that's who we are and that's what we do, that seems (at least to my evangelical sensibility) a recipe for complacency.  Without a personal decision to embrace the Gospel as truth, Catholicism can simply serve as the wallpaper of our lives.  In the places I've lived where virtually everyone is Catholic, the parishes have been much less "vibrant" than in places where the majority is non-Catholic.  This does not correspond to a clean urban/suburban distinction, but it is a problem I've observed in several urban parishes.