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Catholicism and Cultural Change in the 1960's*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2009

Philip Gleason
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Extract

Areal cultural shift doesn't happen very often. Skepticism about whether one took place in the 1960's is quite natural, especially in view of the rapidity with which cultural fashions have come and gone in the past 15 years. The New Conservatism had hardly crested before it was succeeded by the End of Ideology, which was displaced with equal speed by the New Left. In the religious sphere, the revival of the early 50's gave way to the Death of God 10 years later. This proved even more ephemeral. With its companion, the Secular City, it was left behind in a welter of new movements—occultism, mysticism, and various forms of millenarian religious revolutionism. Paradoxically, the dizzying pace of change itself seemed to argue that nothing very profound was going on.

Type
Religion and Philosophy
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 34 , Issue 4 , October 1972 , pp. 91 - 107
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 1972

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References

1 Wills, Garry, “Catholic Faith and Fiction,” New York Times Book Review, 01 16, 1972, p. 1Google Scholar; Laqueur, Walter, “America and the Weimar Analogy,” Encounter, 05, 1972, p. 25Google Scholar; Bell, Daniel, “Religion in the Sixties,” Social Research, XXXVII (Autumn, 1971), 447–497Google Scholar, discusses the Catholic situation in the context of a broader cultural analysis.

2 In an elegant variation of this point, Francine du Plessix Gray writes: “The Catholic Church can be compared to a zoo of wild beasts, held in captivity for over a millennium, whose bars Pope John removed. There are as many new pacifists among the rampaging animals as there are liturgical innovators and structural reformists.” Divine Disobedience: Profiles in Catholic Radicalism (New York: Vintage, 1971), p. 94Google Scholar.

3 This question appeared on the cover of the National Review, May 4, 1965.

4 Gray, , op. cit., pp. 52, 67 ff.Google Scholar

5 Robert Rouquette, S. J., “France,” in Fitzsimons, M. A., ed., The Catholic Church Today: Western Europe (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1969), p. 232Google Scholar. For the Church in Holland, see ibid., pp. 1–28.

6 Glenn, Norval D. and Hyland, Ruth, “Religious Preference and Worldly Success: Some Evidence from National Surveys,” American Sociological Review, XXXII (02, 1967), 73–85CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Cf. also, Greeley, Andrew M., Come Blow Your Mind With Me (Garden City, N. Y.: Doubleday, 1971), pp. 166–168Google Scholar.

7 Cf. Greeley, Andrew M., Religion and Career: A Study of College Graduates (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1963)Google Scholar.

8 For a fuller elaboration of the argument made here see my essay, “The Crisis of Americanization,” in Gleason, Philip, ed., Contemporary Catholicism in the United States (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1968), pp. 3–31Google Scholar.

9 O'Dea, Thomas F., The Catholic Crisis (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968)Google Scholar, lays particular stress on the importance of this conciliar document and its teaching.

10 The factor of youthfulness is related in a complex way to many other factors. See Greeley, Andrew M., Priests in the United States. Reflections on a Survey (Garden City, N. Y.: Doubleday, 1972), especially pp. 160–161Google Scholar, and chapter 11. Greeley speaks of a generation “slope” rather than a generation “gap” among priests, with each 10-year age category “being more ‘modern’ in its religious attitudes and more ‘liberal’ in its sexual morality than its immediate elders.” Documentation for General Meeting of National Conference of Catholic Bishops, April 27–29, 1971. Detroit, Michigan (Xerox), p. 47.

11 Greeley, , “The New Agenda,” The Critic, 05–06, 1972, p. 36Google Scholar. Greeley'ss essay, “American Catholicism 1950 to 1980,” is a splendid review and analysis. See Come Blow Your Mind, pp. 109–165.

12 Gleason, Philip, “Our New Age of Romanticism,” America, 10 7, 1967, pp. 372–375Google Scholar, develops this thesis, citing literature not referred to here.

13 Lovejoy, A. O., Essays in the History of Ideas (New York: Capricorn, 1960), p. 232Google Scholar.

14 “…the Romantic period was eminently an age obsessed with the fact of violent and inclusive change, and Romantic poetry cannot be understood, historically, without awareness of the degree to which this preoccupation affected its substance and form.” Abrams, M. H., “English Romanticism: The Spirit of the Age,” in Frye, Northrop, ed., Romanticism Reconsidered (New York: Columbia University Press, 1963), pp. 28–29Google Scholar. On this same point see Barzun, Jacques, Classic, Romantic, and Modern (2nd rev. ed., Boston: Little, Brown, 1961)Google Scholar; Harris, Ronald W., Romanticism and the Social Order, 1780–1830 (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1969)Google Scholar; and Anderson, Eugene N., “Response to Contemporary Crisis,” in Halsted, John B., ed., Romanticism. Problems of Definition, Explanation, and Evaluation (Lexington, Mass.: Heath, 1965), pp. 96–103Google Scholar. Anderson's essay originally appeared in the June, 1941, issue of the Journal of the History of Ideas, along with several other articles on romanticism.

15 Cf. Chapter IV, “Romanticism: Community,” in Kahn, Ludwig, Social Ideals in German Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1938)Google Scholar; Cahnman, Werner J., “Max Weber and the Methodological Controversy in the Social Sciences,” in Cahnman, W. J. and Boskoff, A., eds., Sociology and History: Theory and Research (New York: Free Press, 1964), pp. 104 ff.Google Scholar Speaking of contemporary hippie communal thinking, Bell writes: “In this Elysium, each person does his own ‘thing,’ and there is little compulsion to obey any rules. All men are good if they only follow their own natures, in contrast to the pressures of the social structure. In their formal ideology there is no leader; like Adam Smith's invisible hand, natural grace leads to natural harmonies. As one description of ‘Drop City,’ a rural commune in Colorado, puts it: ‘Drop City is a tribal unit. It has no formal structure, no written laws, yet the intuitive structure is amazingly complex and functional… everything works itself out with the help of the cosmic forces.’” Bell, , op. cit., pp. 493–494Google Scholar.

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17 Cf. Thomas, John L., “Romantic Reform in America, 1815–1865,” American Quarterly, XVII (Winter, 1965), 656–681CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Davis, David Brion, “The Emergence of Immediatism in British and American Antislavery Thought, Mississippi Valley Historical Review, XLIX (09, 1962), 209–230CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

18 Cf. Carter, Robert, “‘The Newness,’” Century Magazine, XXXIX (1889), 129Google Scholar, and Higginson, Thomas W., Cheerful Yesterdays (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1898)Google Scholar, Chap. III, “The Period of the Newness.” Josiah Quincy, president of Harvard from 1829 to 1845, ran into trouble with the students because he was tactless enough to criticize their dress “or the whiskers which (greatly to his disgust) began to sprout toward the end of his administration.” Morison, Samuel E., Three Centuries of Harvard (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1937), p. 251Google Scholar. Cf. also King, Richard, The Party of Eros (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1972), chap. 6Google Scholar, “The New Transcendentalism.”

19 McLoughlin, William G., Modern Revivalism (New York: Ronald Press, 1959)Google Scholar; Smith, Timothy L., Revivalism and Social Reform in Mid-Nineteenth Century America (New York: Abingdon Press, 1957)Google Scholar; Wyatt-Brown, Bertram, Lewis Tappan and the Evangelical War Against Slavery (Cleveland: Case Western Reserve Press, 1969)Google Scholar. Intense religiosity permeated the correspondence of leading abolitionists. See Barnes, G. H. and Dumond, D. L., eds., Letters of Theodore Dwight Weld, Angelina Grimké Weld and Sarah Grimké, 1822–1844, 2 vols. (New York: D. Appleton-Century, 1934)Google Scholar. Even temperance reformers linked their cause with millennial hopes. The American Temperance Society in 1831 wrote that, with the success of their movement, “The word of the Lord, unobstructed, will run very swiftly; and, pouring with double energy its mighty, all-pervading influence upon the whole mass of minds, will be like the rain and the snow that come down from heaven, and water the earth, and cause it to bring forth and bud. The frost and the snows of six thousand winters will be forever dissolved; and the spring-time of millennial beauty, and the autumnal fruit of millennial glory will open upon the world.” Permanent Temperance Documents of the American Temperance Society (Boston: S. Bliss, 1835), p. 53Google Scholar.

20 Duberman, Martin, The Uncompleted Past (New York: Random House, 1969), pp. 336–356Google Scholar. In 1968 Duberman endeavored to shed some light on the contemporary racial scene by a historical parallel between abolitionism and the Black Power movement. See his article, “Black Power in America,” Partisan Review, XXXV (Winter, 1968), 40–43Google Scholar.