Mike Potemra has a post up about a new book about the collapse of fifties Catholicism that is worth a read. I'm not sure I agree with any of the viewpoints—both those he puts forward and those he argues with—expressed in the post. I think what Potemra and liberal Catholics generally miss (and Potemra is a liberal Catholic even though he writes for National Review) is that 1950s Catholicism never went away. Check in with the people who are actually in the pews of Catholic churches on any given Sunday and you will be stunned at how little has changed.
The fifties are an odd era. Despite the best efforts of elites, most people look on the 1950s as a golden era. To pick a favourite example around here, Mad Men is tracking a cultural tragedy in the decline from the style and confidence of its opening in late 1959 to the falling man of the opening credits. Even critics who welcome the 1960s cannot pretend that something magnificent was not lost here.
The sheer volume of art celebrating the 1950s hammers this home. You may say, "I wouldn't want to go back to that," but, be honest, you wouldn't want to go back to the Golden Days of Athens, Pax Romana, Charlemagne, The Venetian Republic, Elizabethan England, the era of the Sun King, Victorian England or late 19th century Paris either. No one wants to go back in history even to its greatest eras.
But the shocking, jolting thing about the 20th century, now that it's over, is the realization that the 1950s (a decade so great it ran into the first half of the 1960s) was the cultural highpoint of the century. Woodstock, the SDS, LBJ and the Great Society, OTOH, seem little less important with every passing year; we increasingly see them not just as failures but silly inconsequential things, as fads.
This is a particularly touchy subject for North American Catholics that can be summed up in two words: Fulton Sheen. Love him or hate him, no one can seriously pretend that any other Catholic of the last fifty years has his power.
But, and this is the tricky question, why did the greatness collapse?
Well, part of the answer is that it didn't. The 1950s did not come crashing down suddenly in 1960, 1962 or even 1968. I remember watching Happy Days with my sisters in the early 1970s and liking the show because it was more like the life we were actually living than the world described on the news. The 1950s was more alive to us than the then present because the 1950s had never died in the suburbs. All the same values and beliefs of the Eisenhower era were the values and beliefs of the middle class suburb were I lived.
The other part is that what did collapse was 1950s liberalism. A good friend of mine is fond of saying that it is odd that liberals profess to hate the 1950s so much because the 1950s was the high point of liberalism in America. To spend as much time hating on the 1950s as current liberals do is a little like a classical music fan claiming to hate the classical music of Vienna.
The fifties are an odd era. Despite the best efforts of elites, most people look on the 1950s as a golden era. To pick a favourite example around here, Mad Men is tracking a cultural tragedy in the decline from the style and confidence of its opening in late 1959 to the falling man of the opening credits. Even critics who welcome the 1960s cannot pretend that something magnificent was not lost here.
The sheer volume of art celebrating the 1950s hammers this home. You may say, "I wouldn't want to go back to that," but, be honest, you wouldn't want to go back to the Golden Days of Athens, Pax Romana, Charlemagne, The Venetian Republic, Elizabethan England, the era of the Sun King, Victorian England or late 19th century Paris either. No one wants to go back in history even to its greatest eras.
But the shocking, jolting thing about the 20th century, now that it's over, is the realization that the 1950s (a decade so great it ran into the first half of the 1960s) was the cultural highpoint of the century. Woodstock, the SDS, LBJ and the Great Society, OTOH, seem little less important with every passing year; we increasingly see them not just as failures but silly inconsequential things, as fads.
This is a particularly touchy subject for North American Catholics that can be summed up in two words: Fulton Sheen. Love him or hate him, no one can seriously pretend that any other Catholic of the last fifty years has his power.
But, and this is the tricky question, why did the greatness collapse?
Well, part of the answer is that it didn't. The 1950s did not come crashing down suddenly in 1960, 1962 or even 1968. I remember watching Happy Days with my sisters in the early 1970s and liking the show because it was more like the life we were actually living than the world described on the news. The 1950s was more alive to us than the then present because the 1950s had never died in the suburbs. All the same values and beliefs of the Eisenhower era were the values and beliefs of the middle class suburb were I lived.
The other part is that what did collapse was 1950s liberalism. A good friend of mine is fond of saying that it is odd that liberals profess to hate the 1950s so much because the 1950s was the high point of liberalism in America. To spend as much time hating on the 1950s as current liberals do is a little like a classical music fan claiming to hate the classical music of Vienna.
The '50s and the brand of Catholicism that typified it cannot be understood without an understanding of what prededed it. As someone said, the '50s was a "once in a lifetime" event, a "golden era" that had never happened before and will never happen again. The '50s was born and made by those who had lived through the Great Depression and then WWII. They had sacrificed to create a better world, and the '50s was the payoff, their reward. The economy was booming and no better example of this were the Levittowns that were built in the Northeast that allowed millions of people to own a home.
ReplyDeleteBut it was short-lived because it wasn't real, it was only a veneer covering over issues and problems that lurked beneath the surface. Michael Harrington's landmark "Poverty in American" showed that not everyone had reaped the rewards of sacrifice. An increasingly vocal youth culture was emerging in the '50s called the "Beat Generation," people like Kerouac and Ginsberg that profoundly influenced the writers, artists, and musicians who would follow. They did not see the world the same way their parents did, although most of them had lived through the Depression and The War as children. And, of course, there was that pesky "Negro Problem" that had been a thorn in the side of America since Reconstruction.
To put Woodstock in the same category as the SDS, LBJ and the Great Society, (I don't know what OTOH is) is an insult to the latter two. Further, I don't know who would consider SDS and LBJ's Great Society as failures except those who are ignorant of all they accomplished. Because of SDS and LBJ, Negroes can vote, hold jobs, become Supreme Court justices, even be elected President of the United States. I could give more illustrations but you get the idea. In addition, a safety net was constructed for the elderly and the poor-- Medicare and Medicaid, which have been anything but failures both in terms of effectiveness and cost efficiency. The administrative costs of running Medicare are significantly lower--in the double digits--than private insurance. Even Richard Nixon, who would be considered a Liberal by today's standards, had a very progressive social agenda for the Second Administration that included among other things building on the themes of the Great Society, e.g, expanding Medicare to create Universal Coverage for all Americans, and a guaranteed national income to replace welfare as it was known then. Unfortunately, Watergate got in the way. All of this has been written about by Monica Crowley (who calls herself a Conservative now), who wrote her doctoral dissertation on Nixon.
As for Catholicism, we've been over this before and the article you cite in this post misses the point altogether. As the wise old priest told me 15 years ago, IT WAS THE G.I. BILL that allowed Catholics to become educated, and that's why '50s Catholicism bit the dust. And thank God it did, it was the Holy Spirit at work. As far as '50s Catholicism never going away for the people in the pews, you must have seen the Pew Poll that came out yesterday that said that 45% of American Catholics did not know what the "whole wafer thing" was all about. When I taught religious ed from 2000-2005, the parent of one of our students said to our Director, "Are you still teaching that Transubstantiation nonsense?" We weren't, but that's not '50s Catholicism.
Sitting in the chair getting a haircut I realized I had made a factual error in the above post. The title of Harrington's book was "The Other America." It was required reading at my high school for junior year religion class when we covered the Social Teaching of the Church.
ReplyDelete