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In this episode Trent explores the history of Catholicism in America revealing the cracks in its foundation that were forming long before the cultural revolution of the 1960s.
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Transcription:
Trent:
When people think about the decline of Catholicism in America, they often think about the rebellious spirit of the 1960s and the hotly debated aftermath of the Second Vatican Council is where it started, but that’s not when American Catholicism began to decline. That happened in the 1940s. And today’s episode, we’ll see why it happened and the lessons that we need to learn from it. Although you might be skeptical about the 1940s starting, the church’s decline in America weren’t the forties. A time of Chattanooga choo choo socking old Hitler in the jaw and a celebration of all things good and traditional partly. But when you dig deeper, you see cracks forming in the larger social structure. For example, the sexual revolution of the 1960s didn’t instantly come into existence with the introduction for the birth control pill, though that did throw gasoline on the fornicating fire. Instead, we need to go back to the 1920s where Americans sick of a pandemic in a world war were ready to cut loose and flap their flappers. During this period, the Latex condom became available, which was cheaper, thinner, more effective, and lasted years longer than previous. Rubber and animal skin condoms, well not animal skin, they’re made from sheep intestines.
Man Catholic teaching on marriage looks better and better every day. In fact, the widespread proliferation of these products with the help of eugenics like Margaret Sanger motivated Pop Xi to reaffirm the church’s teaching on the evils of contraception in his 1930 and cyclical Casty Canobie. In the same year, the Anglicans became the first Protestant body to grant an exception for contraceptives for married couples. And it’s not like that would become a slippery slope for them. Seven years later, the FDA tested and approved barrier contraceptives and the American Medical Association formally recommended their use. While in many places they were illegal, doctors got around the contraception bans by promoting things like condoms for disease prevention. During World War ii, condoms were widely distributed because as popular warning posters reveal from the time not every soldier was out selflessly saving private Ryan. But not only were contraceptives becoming widely available, social changes were causing what later historians would term the silent sexual revolution of the 1940s bans on child labor and requirements to complete high school, extended childhood and ushered in a new label to describe the people going through this new phase of life between childhood and adulthood.
IE teenagers companies aggressively marketed to teens and the widespread adoption of the car moved dating out of the family home and into less supervised areas.
CLIP :
Jenny thinks that she has the key to popularity parking in cars with the boys at night. When Jerry brags about taking Jenny out, he learns that she dates all the boys and he feels less important.
Trent:
According to historian Alan Tiggy, between the beginning of World War II in 1941 and the inaugural issue of Playboy in 1953, the overall rate of single motherhood more than doubled. The Alfred Kinsey report on sexual behavior in the human male also came out in 1948 and contributed to propaganda saying that basically everyone was a sexual deviant. So why complaint about it? Films were also becoming more provocative, prompting the adoption of the Hayes Code to censor them. Though artists often mocked the code as can be seen in this 1940 photo purposely breaking many of the codes rules, provocative media of the 1950s, including magazines like Playboy did not create a sexual revolution from nothing. They accelerated one that began years earlier and was marketed to men who had indulge in things like pinup girls during the war. This can be seen in gross ads in the 1950s and even the 1940s like this one for bar mix that brags about using the world’s largest lemons.
That’s not to say the men during this time were just a bunch of perverts. Many were virtuous and deserve to be called members of the greatest generation. But there’s no denying how the horrors of war can leave scars on the soul even more than the body and be a place where sin can infiltrate. In 2003, John Paul II said, bluntly no to war. War is not always inevitable. It is always a defeat for humanity. And that makes sense because even if you supposedly win a war, a part of your humanity is always lost in the process. However, by the late 1940s after the war, Americans were in the midst of a self-indulgent reaction similar to the roaring 1920s. And this also affected Catholic communities, which before World War II often involved lower class communities. These Catholics had many children, and so some of them were usually encouraged to join the priesthood or the convent to secure a better life for themselves.
But after the war, many Catholic veterans use their GI bills to attend college and start families with middle-class lifestyles. This desire to keep up with the Joneses also lit the fuse of the future vocation crisis. Instead of seeing the priesthood as a path to success, college and post-war manufacturing jobs were now in reach for many Catholics. And the priesthood was pushed aside for many young people. In Robert an’s book, minor Setback or Major Disaster, the rise and demise of minor seminaries in the United States, he shows that around 1960 and 1961 before the second Vatican Council High school seminaries began to decline in enrollment. This makes sense because that’s when the children born after World War II were now becoming teenagers. Baby boomers often get a lot of hate, but you can’t blame them for the pressure their greatest generation parents put on them when they were teenagers to go out and make something of themselves in the world.
This post-war mindset can also be seen in the formation of Catholic priests. As Anello notes in his book, in early 20th century Catholic immigrant communities, the smartest person you knew was probably your parish priest. But with college education becoming more popular after the war, priests were expected to have the same level of general education as laypeople. And this gave rise to more liberal university study among priests and the disastrous secular dogmas that followed them into their priesthoods. And while we might like to think 1950s Catholics, the high levels of orthodoxy found among adherence of the traditional Latin mass, today the data tells a different story. Historian Leslie Woodcock Tendler from the Catholic University of America cites a 1952 poll commissioned by Catholic Digest, which found a majority of Catholics Did not think contraception or remarriage after divorce were sinful. The poll was so shocking, it was unpublished and left for tenor to find in the Archdiocese of Philadelphia’s archives.
And this wasn’t an isolated case. National fertility studies showed that about 30% of Catholic women in 1955 used contraceptives with that number ballooning to 51% in 1965 with the advent of the birth control pill. So what can Catholics learn from this? Well, it’s too simplistic to just blame the Second Vatican Council for the decline of American Catholicism. As we saw American Catholic views on moral issues and vocations we’re changing long before the Council, but that doesn’t mean the council was without fault. Stephen vin’s 2019 book, mass Exodus Catholic disaffiliation in Britain and America since Vatican II shows that after the council Protestant groups declined more than Catholicism. So religious decline wasn’t a uniquely Catholic phenomenon, but Olivin doesn’t completely absolve the council. He says that before World War ii, Catholics had high levels of social support because of their tight-knit communities, their lives revolved around their parish and their priest.
They were so tight-knit even in things like what they ate on Fridays that groups like the Ku Klux Klan saw Catholics as subversive dangers as can be seen in early 20th century propaganda. However, world War II had the effect of moving Catholic women into the workforce and Catholic men into close bonds with men from other religions and classes, which weakened Catholic reliance on the parish community. Conversely, this made Catholics less alien to other Americans. By the 1940s, Catholics were becoming more accepted as Americans and anti-Catholic bigotry was seen as a remnant of outdated fascism. As can be seen in this 1943 public service announcement, we’ll
CLIP :
Never be able to call this country our own until it’s a country without what? Yeah, without what? Without Negroes, without alien foreigners, without Catholics, without Freemasons.
Trent:
Within a few years, Catholics were seen as a prized marketing demographic as can be seen in McDonald’s launching the fly of fish to capture the Friday night Catholics who didn’t eat meat. However, the US bishop’s defacto end of the perpetual Friday meet fast and the second Vatican Council’s changes to the liturgy caused a weakening of Catholic identity and a resulting loss of a social net that helped keep people in the church. Though as we saw, this had been dissolving for decades before the Council, although it’s sad to read about the promises from those who adopted the spirit of Vatican II saying this would revitalize the church. It reminds me of the awful 1969 Elvis movie Change of Habit where Mary Tyler Moore stars as a nun who helps the poor but doesn’t wear a habit. And rebukes older priests who criticize her
CLIP :
Late parties profane music till all hours forsaken. The habit was one thing, but now you’re not even dressed like females. Father, I’ve had enough of you. I want you out of my parish. Father, we’ve done nothing to be ashamed of.
Trent:
So do young women flock to convents in order to emulate these cool hip nuns? Well, given that there are more nuns over the age of 90 in the United States than under the age of 60 today, the answer is no. Instead, today we’re seeing young people flocking the churches that embrace a timeless, authentic beauty that is found in sacred tradition. That doesn’t mean the church only needs one way of living out this tradition, just that it should not chase cultural fads that quickly become dated and unfulfilling. So what can we learn from these facts of history? First, we have to be watchful of changing social norms, which often begins subtly and under the radar before they become fully formed cultural changes. This is why Jesus told his followers this. When you see a cloud rising in the West, you say at once a shower is coming.
And so it happens. And when you see the south wind blowing, you say There will be scorching heat and it happens you hypocrites. You know how to interpret the appearance of earth and sky, but why do you not know how to interpret the present time? We too need to be watchful of damaging cultural changes while they exist in their embryonic form like they did in the 1940s before they become a full fledged crisis like they did in the 1960s. Second, holiness isn’t just about having all the right external behaviors. My colleague Joe Hess Meyer and I were discussing this episode and he said it reminded him of the truth that some people think chastity is just about not engaging in sinful physical acts and has nothing to do with what we think about. But I’m sure a lot of people in the 1940s and fifties thought ogling pinup posters or obsessing over the latest consumer fad was just a harmless diversion.
But sins of the flesh always begin as sins of the mind. And no one is immune from the temptation that he or she will think they could always keep them separate. And third holiness isn’t just about sexual morality. The idolization of sexual sin in the 1960s could not have happened without people idolizing modern post-war consumerism that disconnected people from the things that truly made them happy and holy. We have to be on guard against the temptation to make our faith something. We fit into our routine on Sundays rather than the primary axis that everything else in our life revolves around. This provides more reason to build up solid Catholic communities who can provide for people’s spiritual, emotional, and even their physical needs and keep them from thinking the only Catholic community they can trust is on the internet. For more resources on today’s episode, check out the links below. And don’t forget to hit the subscribe button and support us@trenthornpodcast.com. And of course, go to conference of trent.com to check out our conference coming up this April. Thank you all so much for watching and I hope you have a very blessed day.