In your first chapter you assert that there is a particularly interesting paradox in how Catholics imagined cities and suburbs through the postwar years and call the shifts in these understandings “ironic.” How so?
In The New Suburban History, Becky Nicolaides’ described “How Hell Moved from the City to the Suburbs” in the minds of twentieth century scholars and commentators. I argue that something similar happened in American Catholic conceptions of city and suburb. From the late nineteenth century through World War II, American Catholic leaders decried the city as vice-ridden and godless and idealized rural life as conducive to the protection of faith and family. But as the suburbs exploded after World War II, Catholic intellectuals and pastoral leaders ridiculed suburbia as shoddily constructed, materialistic, and morally bankrupt for ignoring the plight of the city. Amid the civil rights movement and the urban crisis, Catholic leaders found a new appreciation for the city. The irony in this is that when Catholic leaders attacked the city and advocated a return to the land the majority of American Catholics lived in the industrial cities of the Midwest and Northeast. And when, in the postwar period, millions of these Catholics moved to the suburbs, in part, to find a safer, cleaner, and more leisurely setting for family life, Catholic leaders dismissed suburbia and celebrated the city.
As you assert in Chapter 3, “space shapes religious practice.” What religious values and practices, and ecclesial structures, were altered or lost amid the shift from urban to suburban spaces?
I argue that suburbia’s spatial arrangement helped shift Catholic practice from public, communal expressions of piety in the parish, to domestic and private forms of prayer in the family home. Because newly formed suburban parishes lacked the infrastructure of church, rectory, school, and convent, gatherings that normally occurred within parish buildings had to be held in a variety of temporary spaces. Masses and religious education classes were held in airplane hangars, factories, drive-in movie theaters, and especially private homes. As a result, domestic rituals and forms of devotion such as home Masses, block rosaries, and self-guided retreats rose in popularity, replacing the public and communal devotions that had marked the urban ethnic parish. Even expressions of charity and activism came to be centered in the family home including ecumenical gatherings and efforts to improve race relations. All of these changes undermined the traditional sense of the parish as a permanent and sacred space. And the overcrowding in suburban parishes further diminished a sense of true community. Suburbanization thus led not only to changes in pious practice but even to the questioning of the parish as a viable ecclesial structure.