CT - The 1950s and early'60s brings changes in the world, church

The 1950s and early '60s brings changes in the world, church

By David J. Merkowitz

Many people believe that America and American Catholicism passed through a golden age from the end of World War II through the assassination of John F. Kennedy in late 1963. This era is often labeled as a time of innocence.

The economy was buzzing, families were growing and America was at peace.

When the moment passed - usually dated either JFK's death or a little later in 1965 after the first urban riots and the escalation of military action in Vietnam - Americans felt a crack in time. Without a doubt, the nation had moved through its innocence.

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The first Catholic president of the United States, John F. Kennedy

The darker aspects of the late 1960s and the 1970s blurred the vision of the recent past; the 1950s certainly had a different vibe than anytime since. One of the mistakes people often make is to presume that the 1950s represented the norm of American life. In quite a number of ways, the 1950s were an exception.

The most significant exception was the baby boom: All the children born in a short period because a generation of women had put off childbirth during the war and were now having children, and other women started having children at a much younger age than had been the historical trend for most of the century. The combination of these generations of women contributed to the creation of the largest generation in American history, and one that has continued to dominate the nation, for better or worse.

The 1950s required hard work; many Americans made a conscious effort to leave behind the darker vision of the world that came with the Great Depression and the Second World War. The postwar era started with the loss of Eastern Europe, and then China, to communism; the Korean War and McCarthyism. It ended with Sputnik and the missile gap. The loss of Eastern Europe and China to communism garnered more attention than the various aspects of the "Red Scare" whipped up by Joseph McCarthy and others.

Amazingly, the Korean War (1950-1953) passed nearly unmentioned in the pages of The Catholic Telegraph. Whereas all the previous wars had eventually dominated the Telegraph's attention, Korea never did. There were mentions of the geopolitical situation and the local economic significance but little else. The Telegraph did take time to castigate a soldier who, upon his return, seemed to have enjoyed killing Koreans and communist Chinese too much. There was little coverage of the soldiers or the events of the war itself. It is clear that many Americans were not in an especially warlike mood so soon after World War II.

The Telegraph gave far more attention to the effects of China falling to the communists than it did to Korea. The discussion centered around the travesty this was for the Chinese people and the horrible and insidious nature of communism. The paper used the Chinese example to warn its readers to be especially vigilant against spread communist influence in the United States.

On the domestic front, the Telegraph was concerned with a number of issues. The Depression and the war had slowed the number of vocations to the religious life. With the massive growth in the Catholic population during this period, leaders in the church became concerned that the church would not have adequate resources to deal with the growth. But the 1950s was actually a high point in terms of vocations to the priesthood and religious life. Most religious orders and dioceses experienced their peak numbers during the transformational Second Vatican Council (1962-1965).

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Before the liturgical changes of the Second Vatican Council, Catholics received the Eucharist by approaching and kneeling at the Communion rail.

But by the early 1970s, those numbers had entered a precipitous decline which the church still lives with today.

While the Telegraph devoted a lot of attention to vocations, there was a significant shift in who appeared in the pages of the paper. Women, especially mothers and women religious, claimed a far more prominent place in the paper than at any other time in the paper's history. It is clear that one of the primary audiences during the 1950s was the housewife and mother. The paper became more attuned to her work with the church and her interests in general.

The late 1940s and 1950s saw another period of sustained anti-Catholicism in the United States. But there was a significant shift in the leaders of anti-Catholicism. If the 1920s weres dominated by small-town Protestants who joined the Ku Klux Klan and other organizations, the animus toward Catholicism in the 1950s was led by educated and increasingly secularized liberals.

Paul Blanshard and the Nation magazine continually attacked the Catholic Church and Catholics as undemocratic and reactionary. Jesuit Father John Courtney Murray took the lead in defending the Catholic Church against Blanshard's attacks. He would later become a key figure at the Second Vatican Council in encouraging the church to accept religious pluralism as the default state in the modern world. Interestingly at the end of this decade of anti-Catholicism, John Kennedy would be the first Catholic elected president.

Throughout the postwar period, the Catholic Church battled with Americans United for the Separation of Church and State (originally called Protestants and Other Americans United) and other groups over public support for parochial schools. Catholics were no longer able to argue that the public schools inculcated Protestantism, but now many believed that the public schools had been hijacked by secularists and others who intended to denigrate religion and push it out of public life. In addition to mainline Protestants, the Jewish community took up a sharply divergent perspective from the Catholic Church.

While the Telegraph continued to oppose attacks on Jews, it was clear they were losing patience at Jewish opposition to public funding of parochial schools and other issues of interest to the Catholic community. One recently unearthed example concerned questions about religion on the 1960 census. The Jewish community was able to more effectively use political pressure to prevent the question from being asked than the Catholic community could to get the question included in the census.

The Telegraph was also not supportive of American aid to Israel and argued that allying too closely with Israel would risk alienating the Muslims throughout the Middle East. While prescient, these battles point toward why many Jews consider Catholics to be amongst the more anti-Semitic Americans even today.

Finally, the 1950s were the great decade of suburbanization, and the transformation of the American landscape concerned the Telegraph. On the one hand, the paper's editors understood the desire for less-cramped living conditions; however, they worried - with good reason - that the suburbanization of the archdiocese would drain resources that could be put to better use elsewhere. The new suburbs would need new churches, while the city parishes would inevitably decline and be left with physical plants out of proportion to their congregations. Starting in the late 1950s and continuing through the present, the archdiocese has had to respond to this continually changing demography through the opening and closing of parishes.

Throughout the postwar period, the Telegraph was extraordinarily progressive when it came to race relations. The paper constantly alerted its readers to the poor treatment African Americans in Cincinnati and Dayton received. The paper chastised those who refused to hire or sell their homes to African Americans. A significant part of the coverage of the black community continued to focus on the conversion of African Americans to Catholicism. This was also the case with the Jewish community; the paper often expressed the hope that all would convert to Catholicism. While the Telegraph was clearly out front on racial issues, the history of the archdiocese and the cities in it make clear that this racial liberality was not shared by the entire Catholic community. (Dr. Roger Fortin's history of the archdiocese is especially strong on this issue.)

If Americans, as a whole, felt that their world had been overturned in the 1960s, Catholics felt it doubly so. In addition to changes in the social and economic standing of Catholics from the late 1950s onward, the Second Vatican Council had a profoundly transformative effect on the Catholic community of the archdiocese as well as on The Catholic Telegraph.

Wherever one stands on Vatican Council II, it remains one of the most significant moments of change in the history of the Catholic Church - right up there with the Protestant and Catholic Reformations and the French Revolution in its effect on the life and culture of the church and her followers. For some, Vatican II represents a moment of decline - when the Catholic Church lost its direction and became too enamored with fitting into the modern world. This group tends to point to the 1950s as the last moment when the church was still heading in the right direction.

For those who believe Vatican II was the moment at which Catholic Christianity renewed itself and started the long journey of making itself more responsive to the world in which it lived, the 1950s represent a dark age.

As is so often the case, neither picture really fits what was happening in the 1950s. One example: On the issue of changes to the liturgy, the general narrative is that those changes were abrupt and had little previous development. However, when one looks at what was going on, there was widespread discussion of dissatisfaction with Latin liturgy in its 1950s form. There was a strong push for greater participation in the liturgy. There was a great deal of experimentation with different ways of involving the whole community in the Eucharist. There was acknowledgement on numerous occasions in The Catholic Telegraph that most Catholic priests and their congregations looked forward to the adoption of the vernacular in more parts of Catholic life, especially prayer life. This was the atmosphere before the Council.

In the years that follow, one of the most divisive wars in American history would challenge the Catholic community and the aftereffects of Vatican II would transform the Catholic world.