The home is a little church : gender, culture, and authority in American Catholicism, 1940-1962 / Kathryn A. Johnson.

Format:

Book

Manuscript

Microformat

Thesis/Dissertation

Author/Creator:

Johnson, Kathryn A.

Contributor:

Rosenberg, Charles E., advisor.

University of Pennsylvania.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Penn dissertations--History.

History--Penn dissertations.

Local Subjects:

Penn dissertations--History.

History--Penn dissertations.

Physical Description:

x, 360 pages ; 29 cm

Production:

1997.

Summary:

My dissertation tells a story of assimilation and adaptation by Catholic families, who struggled to balance the demands of faith and citizenship, and to make their issues part of larger American concerns. I explore the creation of both a national Catholic community and an American Catholic identity in the years after World War II. It was an identity and a community based on the needs of class rather than ethnicity, as a growing cohort of middle-class, suburban Catholics combined ideas about faith, family and citizenship to forge a voice for themselves in both religious and secular arenas. By building identity and community around an increasingly privatized notion of the family, their actions and ideas placed them at the center of national concerns. Catholics also used the politics of citizenship and fervent anti-communism as avenues to patriotic spirituality and fuller participation within the Church itself. Anti-communist sentiments were a crucial pathway for claiming the mantle of patriotic nationalism, but the distinctive features of spiritual anti-communism allowed Catholics to maintain a particular vision of the meanings of American citizenship. Catholics also believed that their voices mattered in the marketplace of ideas and that they deserved equal opportunity to shape popular culture. Nevertheless, many remained apprehensive about the effect of consumerism on spiritual values and family life, and the tension between commodification and religion was central to the development of middle-class Catholicism. At the same time, the 1950s Catholic emphasis on family-related issues exposed a shift in the spiritual worldview within the Church. The rise of the importance of marriage and the family in Catholic doctrine provided a means for assimilation and adjustment to the emerging demands of a middle-class American society, but the gradual transfer of authority from Church to family, from priest and nun to father and mother, led to a new vision of American Catholicism.

Notes:

Supervisor: Charles E. Rosenberg.

Thesis (Ph.D. in History) -- University of Pennsylvania, 1997.

Includes bibliographical references.

Local Notes:

University Microfilms order no.: 97-27244.

OCLC:

187470370