It Goes with the Territory
On the wall of my old Newsweek office, next to a window with a narrow view of the changing seasons in lower Central Park, I kept a large map, in a mosaic of colors, of the United States. When you are a writer working in New York City, you need something to remind you of what the rest of the country is like: this was mine. There are no place-names on the map, only the boundaries of the states, and within them the spidery outlines of each county. It’s a relief map of sorts: any county in which 25 percent or more of the citizens identify with a single religious denomination is shaded in a color representing that tradition. Counties where more than half the people are of one persuasion—more than half the map—are colored more deeply.1
At a glance, the map yields a rough religious geography of America. Across the South, where it sometimes seems there are more Baptists than there are people, the counties are awash in deep red. Utah, Idaho, and Wyoming are solidly gray: the Mormon Zion. There are swaths of Lutheran green in Minnesota and Wisconsin. Belt high from Delaware to central Kansas, especially in rural areas, the map shows streaks and potholes of blue where the Methodists and their nineteenth-century circuit riders planted churches. Catholic purple blankets the Northeast, the Great Lakes region, the Gulf Coast, and nearly all of California. Like my window onto Central Park, the map afforded a view of America that’s closed to most New Yorkers, especially those who regard their city as the center of the universe. When colleagues stopped by my office they’d often stare over my head at the map. “Where are my people?” was the usual question. Some Episcopalians, thinking of all their coreligionists elected to Congress and the White House, assumed the nation’s capital to be theirs. But the District of Columbia is heavily African American and so it is dyed a deep Baptist red. According to the map, Episcopalians do dominate a half-dozen counties—all of them tribal reservations in North Dakota where the church made converts of the Native American inhabitants. Most Jewish colleagues thought New York City and its environs (home to half the nation’s Jews) was surely theirs to claim, but the whole metropolitan area is deep Catholic purple. Jews do own a plurality in one Florida county, Miami-Dade.
Recent demographic studies back up the map’s quick visual impressions. Between them, Catholics and Baptists alone account for 40 percent of the American population. Each has its homelands—states where Catholics or Baptists own absolute majorities—and its diasporas, where to be a Catholic or a Baptist is to hold outsider status. In other words, religion cannot be separated from region. And neither can it be separated from ethnicity. Social historians looking at my map would immediately recognize the counties where Dutch Calvinists, German pietists, Scotch-Irish Presbyterians, and Scandinavian Lutherans carved out their ecological niches. In America, even now, religion “goes with the territory.”
For me, the map was a visual reminder that religion in America has never been just a matter of personal choice. It has also been about community and connection—to places, to people, and to what religiously convicted Americans have made of the places where they chose to live. Which is to say that religion, as a way of belonging as well as of believing and behaving, is always embedded—in institutions, yes, but also in the landscape. “Habitations,” as historian Martin Marty reminds us, “foster habits.”
I am a midwesterner—born there, reared there, educated at three midwestern universities, and before I moved to New York and to Newsweek magazine I had lived in six of the eleven “heartland” states. In mix of religion, as in mix of population, the Middle West is more representative of the nation as a whole than is any other region of the United States. More important, perhaps, the Middle West is what movie mythmakers have imagined the entire nation to be like when Americans are on their best behavior. From Meet Me in St. Louis and State Fair through The Wizard of Oz, The Music Man, Field of Dreams, and Hoosiers, the Middle West has supplied its share of fictive images of hometown innocence, morality, and even magic realism: “Toto, I’ve a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore,” Dorothy says to her dog when they land in Oz. But, of course, they are.
I grew up in Ohio, where, a glance at my office map reminded me, almost every kind of Protestant denomination could claim a town or county as its turf. Even after their children moved on, these immigrants from elsewhere left behind brick-and-mortar evidence of their hegemony in the form of church-related colleges—more of them, when I was college-age, than any other state. The Methodists established Ohio Wesleyan and Otterbein; the Episcopalians, Kenyon College; the Congregationalists, Oberlin and Marietta; the Presbyterians, Wooster; the Quakers, Wilmington College; the German Reform Church, Heidelberg; English Evangelical Lutherans, Wittenberg; the Mennonites, Bluffton, and so on. Students at these small liberal arts colleges not only learned together; they also worshipped together at chapel, and the faculty was hired to ensure that the distinctive character of the founding church tradition was passed on whole and intact. After commencement, graduates married each other, too.
Catholics, of course, had their own colleges on their own urban turf in cities like Cleveland, Cincinnati, and Dayton. There, as in the Protestant colleges, the goal was to provide an education that included solid formation in the faith. For that reason, if a graduate of a Catholic high school wanted to stay near home and attend a nearby Protestant college—or venture east to Harvard or Yale—he usually had to forward his transcripts himself because Catholic school officials discouraged journeys beyond the pale.
My father was born in the final November of the nineteenth century on what was to become Veterans Day. He was reared among hymn-singing, family-reunion-gathering, Sunday-dinner-making, small-town Ohio Protestants of Welsh and Scotch-Irish stock. An only child, he was never one to talk about his youth. But he did reveal one important detail of his early life: in Youngstown, where he lived, he stepped forward at a revival by evangelist Billy Sunday and at age sixteen declared himself for Christ. It was during the Wobblies’ (Industrial Workers of the World) strike against the Youngstown steelworks in 1916, and the conjunction of these two emotional events, I’ve always thought, is why he was anti-labor all his life. In any case, my job as a religion writer never impressed him more than when, on a Sunday afternoon while my parents were visiting, another evangelist, Billy Graham, called me—at home—just to have a chat.
My mother was from an Irish-Italian family in Detroit. She was the first in the extended Brady-Cauzillo family to go to college—a leap from a one-room schoolhouse to the University of Michigan’s vast Ann Arbor campus—and that was the pivotal experience of her youth. When we were kids she used to reprise her sorority song for us: it was a sorority just for Catholic coeds. Here’s the kind of Catholics my mother’s siblings were. Her brother, my only uncle, kept copies of the Imitation of Christ by Thomas à Kempis on his desk and passed them out to vendors who called on him for business. It didn’t matter whether they were Catholic or even Christian. One sister was a cloistered nun who snuck away from college one day, without my grandmother’s permission, and crossed the border to join her friends in a Canadian convent. Two others, both English teachers in mostly black inner-city public high schools and never married, shared a tidy house with a crucifix hung in every room. On a bookshelf they kept a series of volumes by Catholic intellectuals published by Sheed and Ward. Whenever they drove their car, they paused first to dip their fingers in holy water founts mounted on each side of the garage doorframe. On the road they routinely recited the rosary. Even on short trips to the grocery, they measured distances by how many decades they could finish before they reached their destination.
How my parents met and married across religious boundaries was never explained to us. We did know, though, that the ceremony was held in the parish rectory because religiously mixed couples were not allowed a wedding inside a Catholic church. At that time, my father pledged to rear the children Catholic, as the church required, and though he never became a Catholic himself, he never wavered in his pledge.
I have ventured this brief family biography for just one purpose. Growing up where and when I did, I experienced an America that was highly diverse, though not in the ways we think of diversity today. What region of the country you inhabited mattered greatly, and so did ethnic background. But the primary source of diversity in those days was religion. Since this is no longer true, this facet of American social history needs explanation.
The immigrant communities then were mostly white and European. In cities like Cleveland, the place I knew best, each had its own neighborhoods and social clubs, funeral parlors, corner bars and restaurants, as well as churches. At home, adults cooked and talked Greek and Italian, Polish and Slovak, just as more recent immigrants now speak Spanish, Mandarin Chinese, or Arabic. They read and discussed newspapers in Ukrainian, Czech, Armenian, Romanian, and Yiddish. Yes, they were mostly Christian, but that only made differences in church doctrine and tradition more pronounced: Muslims and Hindus are intriguing in their obvious otherness, but none of the religions new to America today challenge Christians like other Christians claiming to be the one true church of Jesus Christ.
In urban neighborhoods, therefore, no less than in small towns, where you worshipped—and how—said much about who you were. Even the ecumenically inclined and the nonreligious observed their social boundaries and kept their social distance. Within all these “ghettos” (though no one called them that), religion was free to form individual and group identities through shared “habits of the heart” and acquired sensibilities. Even in the more open spaces of the suburbs, where I grew up, the families you knew best belonged to the same church. But my parents’ marriage was proof to me that the boundaries created by religion could amicably be breached. Nonetheless, among those who took it very seriously, religion remained a powerful symbol system that defined ultimate reality for all who lived in its embrace.
But however diverse Americans felt themselves to be, all of us who would come of age in the Fifties were marked by a single event: the Second World War.
Growing Up on the “Home Front”
I was born in 1935 and passed through childhood while the nation was at war. Unlike the war in Vietnam two decades later, World War II united the nation in common cause. Unlike our more recent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, this war was not fought offstage by volunteers so that the good life at home could continue uninterrupted. To the contrary, on the “home front” all children were suckled on a culture of sacrifice and restraint—one that linked us closer to the children of the Great Depression (though our circumstances were never so drastic) than to our own children born into postwar affluence. Beginning in 1942, staples of the good life—first sugar, then gasoline, fuel oil, and rubber tires, then fruit juices, canned and frozen food, including baby food, even shoes and clothes—were strictly rationed. As participants in the common “war effort” everyone made do.
My mother dutifully planted a low-yield Victory garden—thin carrots, limp bean stalks, lettuce the size of baseballs. By war’s end, 40 percent of the nation’s vegetables were harvested from an estimated 20 million family plots like ours. At the store, Mother bought meat and butter with red ration stamps from her government-issued “War Ration Book” and soups and dried beans from stamps color-coded blue. Because he was a salesman, and his car was his living, my father got extra ration stamps for gas. At home, he did his civil duty as a suburban air-raid warden: one night a month, when the warning siren sounded, he put a yellow metal helmet on his head and went about making sure the neighbors had turned out all their lights, lest enemy bombers should penetrate the airspace over Lake Erie’s southern shore. My older brother and I followed the battles overseas by pasting newspaper headlines in scrapbooks. From inside cereal boxes we collected colorful arm patches worn by the men in uniform, and from strips of balsam wood and glue built models of the airplanes the American pilots flew.
It was a good time to be a child. Despite the separations caused by the war, even young families were remarkably stable. Divorce was rare: most marriages lasted until the death of a spouse. In the families I knew, only the father worked and all the fathers seemed to arrive home in unison by 6 p.m. The mothers not only reared the children and did the housework; they also made the schools and churches hum. Through these community ties they were the marriage partners who decided which neighbors would also be close friends.
Weekends were strung like hammocks between the fathers’ Friday evening arrivals and their going off on Monday mornings. In their absence, life on the block unrolled as regular as church ritual. Once a week the iceman delivered a chiseled block to keep our food refrigerated, and cut cold slivers for us to suck. The uniformed milkman delivered full bottles on his scheduled route and took away clinking empties. And when the bread man arrived curbside we rushed inside to inhale the concentrated aroma of fresh-baked jelly rolls and warm pecan buns. Life on the home front was predictable. The war and its restrictions gave even kids a sense of unity and national purpose. Then the war was over. Only later did we learn about the multitude of young men who never came back.
Roots and Horizons
All of us come from a place we mistake for universal. So you should know something of mine. The place I called home was a suburb that mushroomed a century earlier out of farms and orchards and shoreline summer cottages sixteen miles west of Cleveland. Rocky River, as it came to be called, spread out from a tavern overlooking a river (hence the name) that rolls through a deep gorge on a meandering path to Lake Erie. It was our Grand Canyon. A single arch of concrete, once the longest in the world, shouldered traffic east and west, and on a separate wooden trestle, freight trains on the “Nickel Plate Road” (the New York, Chicago & St. Louis Railroad) hustled manufactured parts to assembly plants in Toledo and Detroit. Rocky River had eleven thousand inhabitants then and called itself a city only because it was governed by its own mayor and city council. By my definition, though, a city was a place with a choice of movie theaters and Rocky River had only one: the Beach Cliff.
Like other writers, artists, or journalists who migrated to New York, I brought my hometown with me. Working in New York is what allowed Willa Cather to see her native Nebraska so sharply, Sherwood Anderson his Elyria, Ohio, Willie Morris his Mississippi. As it is with trees, our roots shape our horizons.
My earliest memories are of the water. Our first house was three blocks from Lake Erie, which we reached along a sidewalk lined with blackberry bushes and down a plunge of stone steps, more than fifty of them. Mother took the three of us, Nancy, Bill, and me, to the beach early on summer weekdays, slathering us with oil against the sun and watching as we paddled in the slowly lapping low-tide morning waters. Every day during the summer, the newspaper posted a polio count and when it was high we knew there would be no beach for us that day.
Several times before the age of eight, my best pal and I packed a bag with sandwiches, a cache of our favorite toy soldiers and the stuffed animals we slept with, and set out “to run away from home.” We weren’t trying to escape; we just wanted to explore what lay beyond the neighborhood, convinced that wherever we went the world would wear a friendly face. Our parents never knew because we always returned in time for dinner. When I tell these stories to my grandchildren they are incredulous. That’s because the America they inhabit is a far more dangerous and fearful place.
At war’s end we moved to a house farther from the lake on a street that dead-ended in a woods. As soon as spring arrived, I ventured out alone across a marsh of pussy willows, over moldering logs and across the graveled railroad tracks, through thickets of sycamores, elms, and spindly sumacs whose pointed leaves were tipped in red, like my mother’s fingernails; then climbed over the fences guarding the city sewage plant and crossed between elegant houses off Lake Road to bluffs that rose up like the cliffs of Normandy. Below was the familiar strip of sand and out along the horizon, if I squinted hard enough, I was sure I could glimpse the shore of Canada. I spent eleven summers on the beaches of Lake Erie as a lifeguard.
If our fathers were incipient Organization Men, as social critics later claimed they were, they never imposed those stringencies on us. For instance, we kids camped out overnight on our own, pitching tents in the woods and warming to fires built and extinguished without the superintending presence of Boy Scout leaders in short pants. Evenings in the fall, we raked leaves to the curbside and burned them, the sweet smell of smoke curling up like incense under streetlights, between the houses and above the trees as if in oblation to some benign suburban deity. Our playgrounds were empty lots where we traced out baseball diamonds and football fields like seasoned groundskeepers, and whenever a new house went up we dangled from the risen joists once the workers left; after dark, we pilfered discarded lumber to build tree huts or to cover secret underground meeting places we shoveled out ourselves. Mounted on bikes, we collected behind the town shopping area at a treeless place we called “the sandpit.” That was where the traveling carnival set up its booths and dare-you rides for a week each summer. At other times it became our badlands, our surface of the moon, or our Sherwood Forest, depending on what kind of Saturday serial we had just seen at the Beach Cliff. For spending money we cut lawns, shoveled driveways, and delivered newspapers. From sidewalks to shoreline, Rocky River was one vast neighborhood and, we figured, it belonged to us.
Suburban life as I experienced it, therefore, was open and unfettered and not at all like the caged dystopia I later read about in books. But so was urban life in middle-class ethnic neighborhoods. In the Forties and Fifties, city kids played stickball in the streets, roamed parks till dusk, or gathered under streetlamps on stoops or designated corners at night. Polish and Italian kids from Brooklyn, Jews and Irish from the Bronx, they all felt free to venture on the subway to Yankee Stadium or to midtown Manhattan for the day without parental oversight or fear for their safety. This is not nostalgia speaking.2 On the contrary, as political scientist Robert Putnam has recently argued, the freedom and sense of security that postwar children enjoyed was based on solid social realities: broad family stability, shared middle-class values, strong neighborhoods and community institutions (for blacks as well as whites), a relatively high degree of economic equality, a strong job market, and upward social mobility.3 And religion weighed heavily in the mix.
Catholicism as a Parallel Culture
When I was growing up, Rocky River was white, broadly middle class, and mostly Protestant (Jews collected in the more cultured eastern suburbs of Cleveland, blacks in the central city neighborhoods) with a pronounced Methodist flavor: they tolerated the tavern, which had preceded their arrival, but also sustained blue laws that meant only the Beach Cliff was open on Sundays. Decades went by before the first Catholic, Miss Case, was promoted to principal of a Rocky River public school. The Protestant clergy were none too happy, then, when the Catholics built St. Christopher’s church and school, right across from the public junior high. The school was especially galling—a divisive breach of faith in the American system of common education. But as first pastor the bishop wisely sent out a gentle Irish priest who looked like God would if He were a grandfather. And when Father Patterson died in 1947, a quarter century later, the local Protestant ministers were his willing pallbearers.
By the late Fifties half of all American Catholic kids attended parochial schools, a figure unequaled before or since. Nancy and Bill and I were three of them. First grade was more than just the beginning of formal education. It was above all an initiation into a vast parallel culture.
As I have already noted, every religious group formed its own subculture, some more closed to the outside world than others. Lutherans, Adventists, and some (mostly Orthodox) Jews also operated their own religious schools. Across much of the South, Southern Baptist majorities effectively determined the moral and religious ethos of public classrooms, as did the Mormons in the intermountain states. But, I want to argue, at midcentury only Catholics inhabited a parallel culture that, by virtue of their numbers, ethnic diversity, wide geographical distribution, and complex of institutions mirrored the outside “public” culture yet was manifestly different. We were surrounded by a membrane, not a wall, one that absorbed as much as it left out. It was, in other words, the means by which we became American as well as Catholic. Call it controlled assimilation.
Catholic education was the key. Through its networks of schools and athletic leagues, the church provided age-related levels of religious formation, learning, and belonging that extended through high school and, for some of us, on into college. Church, therefore, always connoted more than just the local parish: kids experienced it anywhere, including schools, where the Mass was said. In this way, Catholicism engendered a powerful sense of community—not because it sheltered Catholic kids from the outside world, as sectarian subcultures try to do, but because it embraced our dating and mating and football playing within an ambient world of shared symbolism, faith, and worship. In my adolescent years, for example, St. Christopher’s transformed its basement on Saturday nights into the “R Canteen,” where teenagers from all over Cleveland’s west side danced to jukebox music; a muscular young priest from the parish roamed the premises to prevent fights and keep the drunks at bay. Yes, Catholics felt like hyphenated Americans, but nothing in human experience, we also came to feel, was foreign to the church.
In 1971, I looked back on that Catholic parallel culture and tried to capture for the readers of Newsweek the contours of a world that was by then already receding into history:
There was a time, not so long ago, when Roman Catholics were very different from other Americans. They belonged not to public school districts, but to parishes named after foreign saints, and each morning parochial-school children would preface their Pledge of Allegiance to the Flag with a prayer for Holy Mother the Church. When they went to Mass—never just a “Sunday service”—they prayed silently with rosaries or read along in Latin as if those ancient syllables were the language Jesus himself spoke. Blood-red vigil candles fluttered under statues and, on special occasions, incense floated heavily about the pews. Kneeling at the altar rail, their mouths pinched dry from fasting, the clean of soul were rewarded with the taste of God on their tongues—mysterious, doughy and difficult to swallow. “Don’t chew the Baby Jesus,” they were warned as children, and few—even in old age—ever did.
The Catholic Church was a family, then, and if there were few brothers in it, there were lots of sisters—women with milk-white faces of ambiguous age, peering out of long veils and stiff wimples that made the feminine contours of their bodies ambiguous, too. Alternately sweet and sour, they glided across polished classroom floors as if on silent rubber wheels, virginal “brides of Christ” who often found a schoolroom of 30 students entrusted to their care. At home, “Sister says” was a sure way to win points in any household argument.
Even so, in both church and home, it was the “fathers” who wielded ultimate authority. First, there was the Holy Father in Rome: aloof, infallible, in touch with God. Then there were the bishops, who condemned movies and sometimes Communism; once a year, with a rub from a bishop’s anointing thumb, young men blossomed into priests and Catholic children of 12 became “soldiers of Jesus Christ.” But it was in the confessional box on gloomy Saturday nights that the powers of the paternal hierarchy pressed most closely on the soul. “Bless me Father for I have sinned,” the penitent would say, and in that somber intimacy, sins would surface and be forgiven.
There were sins that only Catholics could commit, like eating meat on Friday or missing Sunday Mass. But mostly the priests were there to pardon common failings of the flesh, which the timid liked to list under the general heading of “impure” thoughts, desires, and action. Adolescent boys dreamed of marriage when it would be OK by God and the fathers to “go all the way.” But their parents knew full well that birth control was not included in such freedom. Birth control was against God’s law, all the fathers said, and God’s law—like Holy Mother the Church—could never change.
The church, of course, did change, which is why it is worth recalling what it was like before the reforms of Vatican Council II took hold.
Personal Identity and Communal Formation
To be a Catholic child in the Fifties was to imagine yourself at the center of concentric circles of belonging. They included not only the other Catholics that we knew, not only, even, all the Catholics we saw at other parish churches when traveling, but all Catholics who ever were or would be on the face of the earth—plus quite a few saints we knew by name who were now, we believed, with God in heaven but still close enough to talk to because they were always watching over us like grandparents looking down from high front porches. The saint I knew best was Lawrence, my personal patron because his was my given middle name. What I knew about St. Lawrence, a deacon of the early church in Rome, was that Roman soldiers had placed him on a grid, like a hamburger patty, and roasted him inside a fiery furnace. When the soldiers later looked inside they saw he was, miraculously, still alive: “Turn me over, I’m done on this side,” he said from the flames. And then he died. The story is legend, of course, but I still like to think of my sainted patron as a martyr with a sense of humor.
In other words, the religious identity we acquired in childhood was a primal identity that absorbed and conditioned all the others. This communal formation began, almost imperceptibly, with the transformation of the seasons.
Like the public grammar school a block away, where my mother often filled in as a substitute teacher, St. Christopher’s celebrated the diurnal cycle. In fall, we traced autumn leaves on the schoolroom windows; in winter, snowflakes; and come spring, tulips and other icons of budding nature. But for us October and May were also the Virgin Mary’s special months when we prayed the rosary daily. November signaled the arrival of Advent, as well as of Thanksgiving, and so began the liturgical preparation for the birth of Jesus. Lent with its challenge—what should I give up?—followed all too soon in February, and in April the hymns we sang all anticipated the gravity of Good Friday—for me, still the most solemn day of the year—followed by the triumphal music of Easter Sunday and the end of Lenten austerities. In this way, the seasons were subsumed into the liturgical cycle, and our narrative of time recast. And then the cycle recessed for the summer, like school itself, only to resume all over again in fall.
Whatever the season, God was never far away in grade school. St. Christopher’s was structured like a U, with the two classroom wings connected by the church. The church was not much larger than a chapel and to get from one wing to the other we had to pass through its silent, sacred space. Each time we entered and departed we blessed ourselves with holy water and genuflected briefly toward the altar. There, behind small gold doors and in the form of Eucharist bread, we knew, Jesus was always present. It was an intimacy easily assumed and not easily forgotten. God’s abiding presence, it has always seemed to me, is best experienced in the thickness of silence that precedes and follows those moments when we have our liturgical say.
During Lent and Advent, we attended Mass each morning before school, marching class by class to our assigned pews. On cold days we heaped our coats and metal lunch boxes on the hissing radiators, and before the Mass was over the odor of warming bananas, fruit tarts, and bologna, egg salad, and peanut butter sandwiches permeated the church. Whenever the parent of a classmate died, we all attended the funeral. The casket was always open and one by one we all passed by, glancing sideways at the cushioned body. At funerals, the priest wore black vestments symbolizing death. On martyrs’ feast days he dressed in red, the color of spilt blood. White and gold expressing joy were reserved for special “feast” days like Easter. Otherwise, the priest appeared in green, the color of that quotidian virtue, hope. In class, we memorized mantra-like the questions and confident answers printed in our small blue Baltimore Catechisms. But it was from images and sounds and colors that we developed our specifically Catholic sensibility.
Mass of course was said in Latin, a language only priests understood. By fourth grade, however, the boys at least were let in on the secret. In order to assist the priest at Mass, his back to the congregation, we were taught the Latin responses to the priest’s prayers; later we followed the entire Mass in our own missals, which provided the prayers in Latin on left-hand pages and English translations on the right. But the Latin I remember best, and still sing sometimes in the shower, were hymns like Panis Angelicus and the Dies Irae and Pange Lingua that we mastered as members of the boys’ choir. The choirmaster, Father McGovern, was an exacting musician who stood nose to nose with each of us to demonstrate precisely how each syllable should be formed. By eighth grade, when our voices began to crack, I had memorized each gold filling in his mouth. I have always thought the church’s worst disservice to women was not the bar against ordaining them, but the failure to teach young girls church Latin.
In every other way, however, the experience of Catholic grade school was shaped by women. It was the sisters who taught us what to believe as well as how to write script that others could decipher, how to read and do math, and after class how to clap erasers and make black marks disappear from schoolroom floors with scouring pads. They were the ones who knew us, graded us, and then stood aside when the pastor came into class every quarter to hand out the salmon-colored report cards that they had carefully marked with lowercase a, b, c, or d.
The blue nuns, as the sisters at St. Christopher’s were known informally because of the color of their habits, were nothing like the dominatrix caricatures of off-Broadway plays: only once did any of them apply a ruler to my hands. On the playground, these women with their starched wimples and huge rosaries wagging from their waists organized games and comforted homesick first graders by enfolding them in their voluminous skirts. Of course we wondered what color hair they had under their tightly wrapped headdresses, and if they had breasts like other women—who could tell? The blue nuns were wonderfully warm teachers and I cherish nearly every one of them.
But there were also lots of mothers at the school, including mine. She often attended our Lent and Advent Masses—her voice stood out because she liked to sing—and took turns monitoring the basement lunchroom at noon. Around Thanksgiving and Christmas she joined in baking mince and apple and pumpkin pies that we could smell upstairs in the halls. Mothers were the only audience we had for our after-school shows and mine loved the stage. At one time or another she was president of the Ladies Guild at church, of the city’s Garden Club, and of the Women’s Association at the golf club, where she once won a club championship despite being less than five feet tall. The sisters called her by her first name, Marie, but when in sixth grade she took over my class for a semester, I was embarrassed by this confusion of roles and never did figure out how to address her during school hours. Mom knew all about nuns: every year she took us to visit her sister, a cloistered Ursuline, who ran a school for retarded children (as we called them then) in Canada. The sisters at St. Christopher’s lived by more relaxed rules: occasionally Mom would drive them to our house for a glass of wine and one other indulgence. I was always astonished to find on arriving home the odor of cigarette smoke and lipstick-free butts in the ashtrays.
Because St. Christopher’s fielded teams in a parochial school league, we were the envy of our friends in Rocky River’s public grammar schools, which had no athletic teams. Occasionally in winter we staged impromptu snowball fights between the “Catlickers” and the “Pubstinkers,” but in summer neighborhood friendships resumed. One summer, against my vigorous protestations, my parents even abandoned me to a YMCA camp for two weeks. There, around the campfire, we sang songs with lyrics right out of a Baptist playbook:
The B-I-B-L-E
Yes that’s the book for me.
I stand alone on the word of God
The B-I-B-L-E.
There was no Latin translation.
In the spring of eighth grade, most of the boys at St. Christopher’s took the entrance exam for St. Ignatius High School, where my brother was already a junior. The stakes could not have been higher. Ignatius, a Jesuit school, was for decades the only Catholic high school for boys on Cleveland’s west side; not to go there was, in Catholic circles, to risk standing forever on the intellectual sidelines. Besides, my father, a Protestant, had promised to send his children to Catholic schools, as he reminded me, so I had better pass the exam. I did.
More than my leaving home for college, entering St. Ignatius was a major rite of passage. It meant traveling ten miles every morning to a working-class neighborhood where families lived in small frame houses with no grass to cut. The hulking brick Gothic building, erected as a college in the nineteenth century, was full of classrooms and not much else. There was no auditorium, no cafeteria—not even a practice football field: still, Ignatius was a power in schoolboy athletics. The school gym was a small, sweaty box where we played basketball every day and at lunchtime we milled about on a gravel schoolyard like jailhouse inmates. We loved the place.
One of the features of Catholic secondary education at midcentury (a feature often overlooked even by Catholic historians) is the role that Catholic high schools played in integrating children of different social classes and ethnic backgrounds. In Cleveland, a city where east siders seldom met or talked to west siders, Ignatius was the only institution west of the Cuyahoga River that drew students from both sides of this civic divide. They came from blue-collar neighborhoods as well as wealthy suburbs, and included migrants from ethnic parishes named after saints I’d never heard of. We were all Catholics, of course, and we were all white. But ethnically and economically, the student body was far more diverse than most suburban high schools. No one talked of money and those who had it dared not flaunt it. What counted, the Jesuits made clear, was how we handled what they gave us. For four years, St. Ignatius was in many ways the church to us, and our shared identity as Catholics provided the commonality without which a diverse student body is just a crowd. After one semester of commuting mornings with my father to Ignatius and hitchhiking back home in the evening, it was Rocky River and its posh public high school that seemed parochial.
Catholic schooling also offered a valuable rotation in gender influence, though I can only speak for boys. If grade school passed in the company of women, studying under the Jesuits was a thoroughly male experience. Their reputation as educators came presold, though not all of them were effective in the classroom. Besides the priests, the faculty had dedicated laymen who worked second jobs so they could teach at St. Ignatius, where their salaries were much lower than those paid public school teachers. We were also tutored by a corps of Jesuit “scholastics”—apprentice Jesuits barely a dozen years older than we were who coached us, guided our clubs and publications, and occasionally challenged with boxing gloves pugnacious students who got out of hand. The golf coach, Richard McCormick, went on to become a leading moral theologian.
What all these men offered us was the challenge to do whatever we did in later life “Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam”—for the greater glory of God. They did this most effectively by recounting Jesuit lore: right away we were conscripted into a kind of bloodline of Jesuit martyrs and missionaries who had engaged the world on its own terms in order to transform it. The Jesuit mindset is active rather than monastic. And although the thought was then beyond my adolescent ken, I now see a manifestly phallic appeal in their urging us as Catholic laymen to “penetrate” the world for Christ. No priest ever asked me if I wanted to join the Jesuits, nor did they slip us holy cards suggesting that Jesus might be calling us to the priesthood—as the blue nuns sometimes did. They relied instead on their example of the Jesuit way of life to provoke our interest. This was enough to make me think through carefully why that calling was not for me, and for that exercise in imagining a totally different trajectory in life I’ve always felt grateful.
I wasn’t at Ignatius very long before I learned that God is unfair in distributing talent. Many of the best students were also the best athletes. We all studied Latin for four years, but after sophomore year we had to sort ourselves out on separate tracks according to which other foreign language we chose to study. The most promising students were expected to take the Classics Course and study Greek. Next in assigned rigor was the Academic Course, which required French. For those who wanted neither there was the General Course, which featured Spanish. My Latin teacher, who also taught Greek, was close to tears when I told him I had elected French. But twenty years later, I discovered, he was deeply immersed in Latin American Liberation Theology. I trust he learned his Spanish.
Mostly, though, what I thought about in high school was girls. Far from limiting our access to them, being a student at Ignatius only multiplied our opportunities. Cleveland had half a dozen or so Catholic academies for girls and for most of them appearing at an Ignatius dance or football game on Friday nights, plus the beer-drenched parties that followed, was a command performance. To this day, there are Cleveland mothers who tell their daughters they can date any young man they wish, so long as he goes to St. Ignatius. That’s what I call tradition. While we imagined the public school girls were “looser” than the academy girls, my pals in public schools were convinced that Catholic academy girls were lustier because they were more “repressed.” We all talked more than we knew.
On the subject of sex, the thumb of the church pressed heavily on our adolescent consciences—and for good reason: sexual sins were the only kind that really held our interest. Even the most tentative explorations in erotic stimulation, it seemed, could imperil our immortal souls. For that reason, the nuns enforced modesty of dress on Catholic schoolgirls (no strapless gowns at proms) and on dates they were to be in charge of controlling libidinous males. Because of this, I fear, some of them entered marriage thinking sex was a nasty business to be endured only for the sake of having children. But for boys like me, the mortal dangers attached to sexual excitement only made the mysteries of our rising sap that much more intriguing. The only question that mattered to us was: “How far can you go?” My parents left it to the Jesuits to explain these delicate calibrations, and were probably relieved to do so. What sticks in mind, though, is not the finely tuned dos and don’ts and whys and why-nots, but the fact that we could talk about all this with celibate priests.
Even so, I don’t think Catholic adolescents were all that different from most others who were raised in midcentury America. Though they may have spent Sundays in different churches or none, most adolescents in the Fifties were raised to observe certain sexual limits—just as lovers did in the movies from which we took our cultural cues. Like them, we kissed and groped in the backseats of cars, or at night on the beach, but hardly anyone I knew had intercourse. The thrill of the erotic, we learned, extended all along a line that still fell short of “going all the way.”
This mix of social taboo and personal inhibition, I want to argue, was enormously freeing for adolescents, as all good social conventions tend to be. It allowed us to date as adults did, two by two, and to explore our sexuality without “having sex.” It also encouraged the serial ritual of “going steady” and breaking up so that by the time we were old enough to marry we had a pretty good idea of the kind of mate we wanted. A generation later, as I watched my own teenagers ripen, adolescents socialized in groups, in large part because by then there were few ritual guidelines, much less social taboos or ingrained sexual inhibitions, that teenage couples dating solo could readily count on. Without them, coping with adolescent sexuality was reduced to a game of all or nothing at all. President Bill Clinton thus spoke a Sixties truth when he said of his White House affair with Monica Lewinsky, “I did not have sex with that woman.” We Fifties kids knew better.
In the fall of 1953, I entered the University of Notre Dame. It was a casual choice: I went there because my brother was already there, and he was there because his best friend had decided on Notre Dame—college admissions tests were still in the future. Like most private universities, Notre Dame operated “in loco parentis” (in place of parents) and the rules reflected this assumed responsibility. Freshmen were required to sign into their dorms at 10 p.m. weeknights with lights out an hour later. The seniors’ curfew was midnight. Three times a week we had to be out of bed by 7 a.m. for “morning check”—a routine designed to nudge us into chapel (there is one in every dorm) for daily Mass. No one under twenty-one was allowed to drink or keep a car on campus. Across the street was St. Mary’s College, but with only five hundred female students—one for every ten males at Notre Dame—freshmen had almost no chance in the competition for dates. By the end of sophomore year I had clocked more than a thousand miles on the road, hitchhiking weekends to party with friends at Michigan, Michigan State, and Purdue—any place where there were girls to meet and drinking beer underage was not punishable, as at Notre Dame, with suspension or worse. This was not what I imagined university life to be—and nothing at all like the Princeton I read about in F. Scott Fitzgerald.
In the long run, though, the regulated life at Notre Dame turned out to be exactly what I needed. I was an undisciplined student, unfocused, and easily distracted. If in those days they had tests for attention deficit disorder, mild dyslexia, and hyperactivity, I’d have aced them all. I devoured books but two weeks later could not remember what I’d read. By junior year, however, I encountered as an English major several teachers who were encouraging mentors. A few of them were accomplished poets who brought a practitioner’s keen appreciation to the study of literary texts. Altogether, they introduced me to a lively tradition of Catholic culture—broadly humanistic, rigorously critical, and decisively Incarnational—to which we as students, we came to feel, were the fortunate heirs.
Under their brightening glance, Catholicism became something infinitely more compelling than a way of believing, behaving, and belonging. It was, above all, a way of seeing and coming to understand, and I was dazzled by the possibility that the life of the mind could be integrated with the spiritual life of the church.
It was in the classroom of Professor Frank O’Malley, in particular, that the integration of faith and intellect was made powerfully, even prophetically, explicit. Serious students from the engineering as well as the science and business schools scrambled every year for a seat in his class on Modern Catholic Writers. Under that elastic rubric we read Dostoyevsky, Kafka, Rimbaud, and Joyce as well as identifiably Catholic authors like Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, and François Mauriac. To these O’Malley added a long list of distinguished Catholic thinkers like the philosophers Josef Pieper, Étienne Gilson, and Jacques Maritain, whose paperback edition of Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry I carried around in my hip pocket like a Baptist would his Bible. Altogether, O’Malley’s syllabus of required and suggested books ran to more than three hundred titles. How, I asked him, could anyone get through them all? “Mr. Woodward,” he replied—in those days university students had only last names, whereas today they have only first—“to be an English major is a way of life.”
I want to focus on O’Malley for a moment because universities no longer encourage teachers of his ilk. Frank possessed a powerful sense of pedagogic mission: he encouraged his students to wrestle with life’s big questions and challenged them to live out the answers. Yet he tried not to overwhelm. “The teacher must respect the delicate sacred interiority of each student,” he believed; “he must encourage the timid efforts at genuine utterance and integration.”
For more than four decades, O’Malley was as influential at Notre Dame as, for example, Lionel Trilling was at Columbia—and more accessible to his students. One of a handful of “bachelor dons” who lived mostly in student dorms, O’Malley had arrived at Notre Dame as an undergraduate in 1928 and never left. He even turned down a free ride at Princeton, thereby spurning his chance to earn a PhD. O’Malley was a brilliant and inspired lecturer, but oddly shy: at the lectern he never looked up from his notes and so discouraged classroom give-and-take. Yet he memorized each student’s name and where they came from. And if we wanted to talk with him, we were welcome to attend the “evening colloquia” he held standing up at one or another of the South Bend bars he frequented almost every night. O’Malley never took class attendance, either, and regarded final grades—in which he was always generous—as less important than the copious comments he made on our papers, always in red ink.
In the Fifties, literature and its criticism defined the work of public intellectuals as much as politics. In my junior year, for instance, T. S. Eliot addressed a gymnasium crowd of fifteen thousand at the University of Minnesota on “The Function of Criticism.” If I couldn’t be a poet or a novelist, I thought, then at least I could be a critic and write essays for The Hudson Review or The Sewanee Review. In his major course, “The Philosophy of Literature,” O’Malley taught us that serious art disclosed truths of human existence and so required criticism that goes beyond the merely formal, social, or historical. If Trilling urged on his Columbia students “the moral obligation to be intelligent,” O’Malley urged on us the moral obligations of intelligence illumined by transcendent truths disclosed by faith. He hated the merely formulaic in both art and religion, and could be ruthless when he found examples of either in our papers. On the other hand, our best insights sometimes found their way into his lectures: we were all, he believed, collaborators in an ongoing communal process he called “the work.” When he died from the effects of alcoholism in 1974, all he left behind in his room were his books, stacks of student essays, and a drawer stuffed with checks from generations of students who had hit him up for loans. Of course he never cashed them.
Approaching religion through literature proved to be a boon. For one thing, it saved me from reading a lot of bad theology, which for undergraduates was the only kind available. Instead of focusing on church doctrines and their defense, the study of literature attuned us to the theological imagination at work in art and culture, and so to the mysteries of sin and salvation as they are encountered in the messiness of real life. Moreover, we knew that Catholic philosophy was at that moment a lively and fructifying influence in literary theory and critical practice at places like Yale, Princeton, and the University of Chicago. In no way, then, did we English majors at Notre Dame feel like outsiders looking in.
Graduation from Notre Dame was my exit from the Catholic parallel culture, though by then its effects were inscribed in my DNA. My anxiety was what to do next. On the beach at Fort Lauderdale, Florida, during spring break senior year, I had my first date with Betty, a junior at St. Mary’s. Immediately I knew she was the woman I would marry. But how would I support her? I won a scholarship to the University of Michigan Law School but one year there convinced me that the law was not my calling. A second scholarship to do graduate work in English at the University of Iowa brought me closer to Betty’s home in Des Moines but no closer to a career. I was disappointed to learn that graduate school is a place to study literature, not enjoy it. My pursuit of a doctorate was doomed the day a professor waved off a question saying, “Mr. Woodward, that’s a late-eighteenth-century issue and I am, you see, an early-nineteenth-century man.”
Betty and I married that summer and went off to Europe on her meager savings. I dreamily imagined that was what all apprentice writers did. Eventually, I put together a job teaching a class on the short story on a U.S. Army base with a stint as a stringer in Germany for Time. Betty was the real soldier, though, giving birth at age twenty-four in a foreign land with no family around but me. Back in the States, I reluctantly turned to journalism solely because I had a family to feed. My start at Newsweek was still three years away, and just as well: I had yet to learn how to type.
This, then, is my memory of how Catholicism and its institutions formed me during the first quarter century of my life. The story is my own, of course, but I trust that others who reached adulthood in the postwar era—not only fellow Catholics but also urban Jews and rural Methodists, Utah Mormons and prairie Lutherans, the two hundred different brands of Baptists and three hundred different kinds of Pentecostals who grew up in America’s diverse religious subcultures with their boundaries and communitarian loyalties—will recognize elements of their own formative experiences. Not only of religion but of war and rationing, of community ties and childhood freedom, of education as formation, of upward mobility, economic opportunity, and the naive assumption that future generations would enjoy more of the same.
But of course history does not allow for repetition. Which is why I have tried to recapture the feel of an America that only a few of us are left to remember and the present generation cannot recognize. The children and the grandchildren of Fifties parents now inhabit an altogether different world, with local habitations based on secular differences in economic class, educational achievement, political outlooks, and (despite the civil rights movement) persistent racial divides. The engines of this transformation were already at work in Fifties America. To understand them we turn now to the wider social, cultural, and political forces that both sustained and transmuted American religion.