Suburbanization and the decline of Catholic public ritual in Pittsburgh.

Thirty-five thousand Catholic men filled Pittsburgh's Forbes Field on Friday, September 30, 1955 for the first of two prominent public rituals that fall weekend. They watched as 1,200 altar boys processed in from the center field gate ahead of a late model black limousine carrying the Holy Eucharist. The men sang patriotic and religious hymns, recited the rosary and the Holy Name Society pledge, listened to a sermon, watched a consecration, lit the darkened stadium with 35,000 candles, and then left.(1) Many more people watched at home a local television station KDKA broadcast a half hour of the event live, and others listened to the ritual on the radio.(2) Two days later an estimated 60,000 Catholic men marched through Pittsburgh's East End along Fifth Avenue past 100,000 onlookers and a reviewing stand of civil and ecclesiastical dignitaries at St. Paul's Cathedral. Local public television station WQED broadcast three hours of Sunday's parade.(3)

Pittsburgh Catholics have attended no similar parades or rallies in the almost four decades since 1955. These two large public rituals therefore represent a kind of lost world of American Catholicism, and raise many important questions about the Catholic church's role in public life, about the way Catholics understood their religion and presented it to others, and about the way that religion shaped and was shaped by the larger culture. This article sets out to answer two key questions that these events raise. Why did rituals so alien to Catholics in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s draw such widespread and enthusiastic participation in 1955? Perhaps more importantly, what did these very public rituals mean to Catholic and non-Catholics?

Three sets of interpretations have emerged to date which offer potential explanations for the 1955 rituals' meanings. They come from contemporary Protestants and Catholics, and from historians looking back on similar rituals in other places.

Many Protestants worried about massive Catholic public displays in the year prior to the 1955 demonstration, and many of these fears lingered into the 1950s. Protestants understood the pre-1955 public parades and rallies as attempts to assert Catholic control over public life. Pittsburgh Bishop Canevin canceled the 1913 procession out of his concern about a potentially hostile Protestant reaction to the annual event. Protestants responded to the 1915 parade of 30,000 or 40,000 Catholic men by organizing a Protestant parade two weeks later with a reported 50,000 male and female marchers.(4)

Catholic explanations of the 1955 rituals' meanings could hardly have differed more than Protestant interpretations. The local Catholic hierarchy dismissed Protestant fears in their careful efforts to explain rallies' true meaning. The Pittsburgh Catholic relayed the rallies' "clearly obvious" purpose as "great public factors for civic and religious good." They were a "constant, usually annual, protest against blasphemy, perjury, cursing, swearing and profanity; against every word or deed which brings dishonor to Christ's Name." The Catholic recalled Theodore Roosevelt's 1903 observation that the Holy Name Society typified "one of those forces which tend to the betterment and uplifting of our social system."(5) The Catholic also repeated Bishop Canevin's 1914 statement that "taking part in the Procession is a solemn avowal of belief in God and Faith in the Divinity of Jesus Christ, and of loyalty to Him and our country."(6)

The hierarchy sought to interpret the 1955 rituals by reporting and prescribing the reaction individual Holy Name members felt at many of the convention's important events. The Holy Name Newsletter suggested that the Eucharistic Rally imparted grace, which engendered a spirit of moderation, comportment, and awe that stayed with the participants through at least the trip home.

Now it was all over, but you felt something inside you that possibly you had never felt before. Tears had been streaming down the cheeks of not hundreds but thousands of good strong stalwart Catholic men assembled there that night. Without the question being asked, dozens of Pittsburgh policemen volunteered the statement that this was the most orderly crowd they had ever seen at Forbes Field. The street car conductors and the bus operators echoed the same thought. Swiftly, carefully, you were returned to your parish and to your homes. Before you fell asleep you said to yourself "this, I shall remember, this, I shall not forget." And the benefit you received was a special grace given to you that night by almighty God for having participated in this Eucharistic Rally.(7)

God gave the gift with a purpose in mind, however, a purpose which various speakers addressed throughout the convention.

Worcester, Massachusetts Bishop John Wright gave the keynote address on the Wednesday preceding the Eucharistic Rally, and the Holy Name Newsletter told members that his talk "called to mind the problem at hand, the job that must be done for Christ." That task echoed the job which the convention had stressed eight years earlier at a previous convention held in Boston. The Newsletter continued that "I, a Holy Name man, and one of the lay apostles of Our Blessed Lord, should submit my talents and the time available to carry Christ's message into my daily activities, and thus oppose the evil forces that surround us in this modern, material world."(8) Those evils, identified elsewhere in the Newsletter, were indecent literature and movies, a disrespect for the Sabbath, the spread of Communism, and a propensity to swear. The hierarchy clearly suggested that the rituals' served to improve personal morals and engender greater love for America.

If Protestants and Catholics differed in their understandings of the rituals' purposes, historians have not yet resolved or supplanted the disagreement. This is in part because historians have only recently begun to study the large, twentieth-century, Catholic public rituals, and so have not developed a full understanding of their meanings. They have proposed two kinds of explanations of the public rituals so far. The first focuses on Catholic public rituals practiced before World War II and the second on those in which Catholics participated after 1945. Historians who have addressed twentieth-century Catholic public rituals in the pre-World War II period suggest that the events aimed inward at the Catholic community which performed them. In these works, the rituals served to bind the community to values and traditions which sustained ethnic Catholics in an alien and often hostile environment. They helped Catholics bolster the cultural ghetto walls which preserved their religious and ethnic heritage while they enabled Catholics to cope with the difficult transitions immigration and urban living entailed.(9) These examinations fit well with an emerging literature that focuses on American public ritual more broadly, and which suggests that participants in these rituals regularly negotiated a tension between what John Bodnar has labeled vernacular and elite interests. In fact, Bodnar understood urban vernacular impulses to take the form of ethnic celebration in the early twentieth century, which mirrors the meanings historians have assigned to Catholic public rituals.(10) The rituals enabled various urban groups to assert their differences from their neighbors--they engendered social pride.

Historians switch their focus in the post-war discussion to what Catholics intended the rituals to say to the city, state, or nation about important social issues of the day.(11) James O'Toole examined rallies and parades in post-war Boston and concluded that the hierarchy used them to express a distinctively Catholic cultural view and to flex newly found political muscle. Holy Namers gathered in Boston's streets to oppose modernity, particularly as it related to personal sexual mores, through efforts to curtail lurid newspaper accounts of crime, sex and divorce, and to clean up movies.(12) But O'Toole saw in these Catholic rallies and parades the sort of politicizing which generated Protestant fears in earlier years. The 1947 Holy Name parade and Eucharistic rally came in the midst of a state-wide debate over the legalization of birth control, and Catholic youths marched the following year while a legalization referendum was before the public.(13) O'Toole argues that the clear, though unstated, purpose for this exhibition of Catholic strength and determination was to signal Catholic resolve to fight back this latest modern encroachment on personal moral values. Others have suggested that Catholics played this very role in public debates, particularly on issues of personal morality, through other means. O'Toole makes the connection between the large scale public rituals and Catholic political pressure for the first time.(14)

Whatever the specific meanings, historians understand the rallies and parades in post-war America to represent a triumphal church, bolstered by growing post-war affluence and political influence, acting as a unified body to influence public policy. The 1955 Pittsburgh rally provides evidence for this kind of interpretation too. The thousands who participated, the hierarchical control, and the broad public coverage all suggest a confident church on the move. In this light the 1955 Pittsburgh rituals appear to confirm James O'Toole's explanations for the Boston events.

What Pittsburgher could not have been impressed with the two 1955 events? Even had they not actually seen the rally and parade in person or on television, nor heard the radio broadcast, the two daily papers provided front page coverage. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette headlines reported 50,000 men present at the Forbes Field Eucharistic Rally, and the Pittsburgh Press predicted on Saturday that 135,000 men would march in Sunday's parade.(15) The rituals provided good copy, as well as opportunities for impressive photographs. Thirty-five thousand candles lit Forbes Field on Friday night. Sixty-thousand men marched along Fifth Avenue two days later, including 1,500 New York City policemen and 700 firemen. Five thousand marchers came from Cleveland for the parade (with 500 police and firemen), 1,500 from Philadelphia (fifty priests), 500 from Boston, and at least 300 from Louisville, Kentucky.(16)

Nearly sixty floats and thirty bands representing parishes and deaneries throughout the Pittsburgh Diocese and beyond rolled down Fifth Avenue.(17) The Pittsburgh Catholic called the events the "mightiest religious spectacle in the history of Pittsburgh and one of the greatest ever witnessed anywhere." Reverend Harry C. Graham, Holy Name Society national director for twenty years, claimed that the 1955 Pittsburgh rally and parade were bigger and better than the 1951 rituals in Detroit, the 1947 events in Boston, and the 1936 convention in New York City.(18)

The messages emanating from Catholic officials also projected an active, confident church. Bishop Wright told the Holy Name men gathered for the weekend activities that the "Holy Name Society in our day has taken on a new urgency" out of the hierarchy's call for a new "crusade of prayer, of piety and of spiritual struggle as the Church of God battles in the realm of ideas and on the front of faith to redeem the minds and hearts of those captive by the new infidel of the East [communism], no less the despoiler of Christian persons, places and things than was the Turk of old."(19) The 1955 convention's very theme suggested a broader, more assertive public role for the laity in the struggle Bishop Wright identified: "The Holy Name Society and the Church Today: The Role of Lay Leadership."

Speakers at the various sessions confirmed that the Catholic men were to take an active role in shaping this modern world, a world of great promise and potential should the Holy Name men engage it. Father Hugh Wilt told the men at his session that

You and I are privileged to live in an age which (by human standards) is judged the greatest yet witnessed by man. The power, the vastness, the wealth, the sweeping changes of our few decades make the many centuries before us seem small and insignificant. Yet we realize that all this is but the beginning of a still greater Age.(20)

And should anyone think that this concern encompassed only the "Catholic" realm, the organizers infused the rituals with broader civil references and foci. The 35,000 men in Forbes Field on Friday night did not limit their interest only to Catholics as they sang the national anthem and prayed for President Eisenhower, recently stricken with a serious heart attack. (The Pittsburgh Catholic did make Eisenhower an honorary Catholic of sorts, though, when it pointed out that Ike had coached a Texas Catholic college's football team for a short while early in his career.)(21) Much of the evidence from the 1955 rituals available to historians today supports the interpretation James O'Toole has proposed for understanding the large post-war public rituals.

However, the 1955 rituals, as they were practiced in Pittsburgh, may have evidenced anxiety as well as surety, concern as well as confidence. The rituals may have represented the hierarchy's early attempts to empower the laity, to make them feel their strength to build their confidence to go out and sanctify their world. In this way the hierarchy sought these rituals to mark the beginning of a new era in American Catholicism, built on the foundations of the devotional church. Yet the rituals also marked the decline of the very foundation upon which the hierarchy hoped to build this new Catholicism, and therefore represented a final effort to assert the primacy of the old social construction of American Catholicism as much as they marked a new Catholic entry into the public arena. The clergy did not so much envision a Catholicism transformed by its interaction with the world, but rather a world made more like the Catholic ghetto. The rituals sought to strengthen the ghetto walls even as they pushed them outward. But in the months and years preceding the rituals, cracks in the social construction of Catholic faith and practice had begun to appear, cracks which portended a radical transformation in the coming decades. In fact, if we return our focus to what Catholics were saying to themselves through these rituals, we see a troubled church indeed.

If we consider the rituals as the hierarchy's attempt to send a message to Catholics, rather than as their attempt to communicate to the larger populace, we see a church attempting to affirm the old in the face of the new. This message, evident in the ritual components, might really have been a call for Catholics to remain in the Catholic ghetto. The rituals suggest that the bishop did not so much want Catholics to escape the ghetto as preserve it in the face of a dramatic transformation of religious sensibility, a change occasioned in part by the suburbanization of American Catholics. But the laity no longer responded to such a call in 1955. An explanation of the 1955 Pittsburgh rituals which emphasizes the triumphal church on the move must contend with some troubling data.

Perhaps the most telling sign of the troubled state of the church was the failure of the two rituals to send their most important message, to impress the world with the sheer grandeur and scale of the events. For though thousands turned out, the event did not measure up to similar public rituals held within the past decade, and fell far short of published expectations. Despite Father Graham's claim that the Pittsburgh rituals were the biggest in Holy Name history, the 1947 Boston Eucharistic Rally saw 15,000 more men crowd into Braves Field than had packed Pittsburgh's Forbes Field. Pittsburgh's 1955 parade had 60 floats and 30 bands, but Boston's had 75 floats and 106 bands. While 60,000 men marched in Pittsburgh's parade, 130,000 marched in Boston. And 100,000 spectators lined Pittsburgh's parade route while 3,500,000 stood to see the Boston parade.(22)

Much of Boston's greater turnout might be attributed to the city's larger size, but prior public rituals in Pittsburgh also outshone the 1955 events. Eucharistic Rallies in previous years drew significantly more men to Pittsburgh's Forbes Field and University of Pittsburgh Stadium. Roughly 75,000 men came to a Forbes Field rally in 1930; 90,000 packed Pitt Stadium in 1936; and 80,000 jammed in and around Forbes Field in 1941. Most impressively, 115,000 engulfed Forbes Field just five years before the 1955 Eucharistic Rally--fully 80,000 more than the 1955 crowd.(23)

The 1955 turnout not only paled in comparison to previous rituals, but must have disappointed 1955 organizers as well. The Holy Name Society ordered 80,000 candles for the Eucharistic Rally, but could distribute fewer than half of these. The Pittsburgh Catholic boasted just days before the rally that 100,000 men would crowd in and around Forbes Field on Friday night, a projection which likely exaggerated the turnout by nearly 300 percent.(24) The Pittsburgh Catholic also claimed that Sunday's parade would include 125,000 Holy Name men, while the actual numbers constituted just under half of that projection. The Pittsburgh Press told its readers that 135,000 marchers would participate in the parade.(25)

Table 1

Eucharistic Rally Participation in Pittsburgh

Year     Number of Participants         Place

1930            75,000               Forbes Field
1936            90,000               Pitt Stadium
1941            80,000               Forbes Field
1950           115,000               Forbes Field
1955            35,000               Forbes Field

Source: Pittsburgh Catholic

The 1955 rituals also marked the end of the large public ritual in Pittsburgh. The hierarchy never again attempted to gather the faithful for a massive public display. These numbers suggest that we should reorient our inquiry from seeking to understand why so many Catholics participated to why so few did? What do Catholics tell us by their absence, and why did these rituals mark the end of large scale Catholic public rituals in Pittsburgh?

What explains the seeming reluctance to embrace the public ritual in 1955 and the complete absence of any similar rituals in subsequent years? Perhaps Pittsburgh Catholics had ceased to accept the messages the ritual sent to its participants, meanings which had resonated so clearly just a half decade before. Part of the message came in the form of the explicit, articulated declarations which the hierarchy presented at various points throughout the convention week. The bishops, priests, and scattered laymen repeated decade old warnings of the threats Communism and moral decline posed for Catholics and the broader American society, and Catholic laymen may have ceased to fear these dangers so imminently. They may also have come to doubt the efficacy of the Eucharistic Rally and parade for combating them.(26)

Earlier rallies took place in the context of acute social strain, and Communism and impure language may not have animated lay Catholics to the same degree in 1955 as these other threats did in earlier years. The 1930 rally came near the outset of the Great Depression, which posed severe economic danger to lay Catholics. The 1936 rally took place in the midst of the continuing depression and in the wake, literally, of the great flood which washed over the city of Pittsburgh. The flood killed or injured more than 3,000 Pittsburghers and rendered homeless 135,000 additional residents--more than a fifth of the city's population.(27) The 1941 rally preceded Pearl Harbor by a mere two months, and called Catholic men together in the face of growing anxiety about developments in Europe. Catholics packed the 1950 rally as American men entered the Korean War to fight a more visible Communist menace than existed in 1955. Each of these acute social strains drew Catholics to seek solace or remedies in large public rituals, and 1955 saw no comparable threat.

But much of the decline in popularity probably resulted from the lay experience of the rituals, from the meanings the rituals transmitted to the vast majority of its participants about Catholicism itself. The rally and parade affirmed the primacy of an insular church, hierarchically controlled, deferential, and heavily devotional, which segregated by gender. It sought to preserve the Catholic ghetto at a time when Catholics yearned for and in greater numbers flocked to the suburban life.

Each of these messages came through clearly in the structure of the rituals. The Eucharistic Rally and the parade included Catholics only, and in this way reinforced the strong lines of demarcation between Catholics and members of other denominations and religions. It demanded that Catholic men, who lived and worked with non-Catholics in their neighborhoods and jobs disassociate from them for these activities. If the rally and parade were intended to mark a Catholic presence in the political arena, it suggested that Catholics would enter with their ranks closed, safe from the dangers full immersion entailed.(28)

The rally and parade also affirmed the primacy of the hierarchy. No layman addressed the rally in Forbes Field from the sanctuary, nor did any lead the rosary recitation, and only a few marched in the procession of hundreds. The laity did much of the support work and no doubt paid the ritual's expenses, but they did not play crucial roles in the ceremony itself.(29) The laity did constitute most of the parade, however. They marched between floats and lined the parade route. But even here the hierarchy conveyed the nature of the role they intended the laity to play in society. Bishop Dearden appointed as grand marshal a civil engineer, which reinforced the long standing association of the laity with support of the church's physical structures. What better choice could have been made for the most visible layman in an institution which measured its success in America to a large extent in the size and number of its churches and schools? Better still, John F. Laboon was executive director and chief engineer of the Allegheny County Sanitary Authority, and his efforts at ph}sical sanitation provided a useful metaphor for the moral sanitation of society which the hierarchy so desired.(30) But even in the parade the laity marched for the hierarchy, who gathered on the reviewing stand constructed to accommodate them near St. Paul's Cathedral.

The rituals were above all a powerful expression of Catholic devotional faith, and the lay withdrawal from these public rituals provides evidence of a growing rejection of devotional practices. This rejection does not establish a decline in Catholic religiosity, or devoutness, but rather a changing religious sensibility. American Catholics inherited this devotional sensibility from their nineteenth century forebears. Jay Dolan suggested that the devotions played such a strong role in shaping Catholic sensibility that they helped form a larger "devotional ethos" that manifested in a strong emphasis on formal ritual, sin, authority, and a belief in the miraculous. Dolan saw this ethos growing in the nineteenth century and persisting until at least the 1920s and 1930s.(31) Ann Taves and Colleen McDannell document the nineteenth century devotional ethos in prescriptive literature as well.(32) Women most often participated in these devotions, according to Dolan, until the years after World War I when the hierarchy sought to masculinize Catholicism with large scale public activities centered on devotional rituals.(33)

Pittsburgh Catholic men understood this masculinization of devotions well, for they had participated in regular public rituals dating to the early years of the twentieth century. The Holy Name Society sponsored these events, which grew from outdoor processions and benedictions in 1910, 1911, and 1912. The processions continued annually, and ended with World War I and its aftermath. The inter-war years saw the Holy Name Society concentrate on other forms of collective actions, such as retreats, joint prayer times, and simultaneous sectional rallies.(34) The Holy Name Society then turned to organized Eucharistic rallies in outdoor stadiums which drew tens of thousands of Catholic men in 1930, 1936, 1941, and 1950.(35) The Pittsburgh hierarchy had successfully overcome male resistance to devotional religion, and placed male public rituals at the center of Catholic devotional life.

The 1955 rally followed the pattern that had proved so successful throughout the first half of the century. The Catholic Encyclopedia defines devotion as "prayer or formula of pious practices devoted to the veneration of a particular saint, or in honor of the Trinity, the Sacred Heart, or to the Blessed Mother under one of her titles, made in common or in private."(36) The Eucharistic Rally directed the devotion to the consecrated host, which arrived behind 1,200 altar boys, various Knights of Columbus, and an honor guard of the Knights of Malta. It came protected in the brand new black limousine, delivered to a specially erected tent, and finally to a four foot Monstrance which Bishop Dearden elevated for all to see.(37) The Holy Name Society members also expressed their devotion to the "Holy Name" of God through the recitation of their pledge and the singing of "Holy God We Praise Thy Name."(38)

Did the small turnout for the 1955 rally and parade mark the beginning of the decline in Catholic devotional life? Though we know that Catholics have rejected a broad range of devotional rituals in recent decades, we cannot readily chart the popularity of devotional practices in the 1950s.(39) Some evidence for the decline in Pittsburgh does exist, however. A five year retrospective survey which the Diocesan Pastoral Council conducted in 1968 revealed that a majority of pastors and retreat house directors saw a decline in devotions by that period.(40) But that was fully eight years after the 1955 rally and parade.

Other evidence is less broadly rooted, but suggests that the decline may have begun by the 1950s. Pastors at St. Philomena parish in the city of Pittsburgh reported a regular and significant decline in attendance at what had been a widely popular devotion to Our Mother of Perpetual Help beginning as early as 1950 and stretching through the 1980s.(41) The suburban growth noted earlier may also have caused a decline in devotional behavior, as suburban parishes tended to offer fewer opportunities for devotional practice than urban churches. Urban churches sustained year round devotions to Jesus and various saints, but suburban churches practiced only seasonal devotions.(42)

So little evidence for actual lay behavior regarding devotions exists that the decline in participation in the Pittsburgh public rituals should alert historians to the significance of the 1950s as a key decade of change in the devotional ethos that had dominated the Catholic world view since the nineteenth century.

Perhaps the most striking aspect of the rituals to observers today was its gender segregation. Every participant had to be male. This mirrored the social organization of the church through the early decades of the twentieth century, among both the religious and the laity. If the Eucharistic Rally and parade reminded the participants and observers that Catholics were a people set apart from members of other denominations, the rituals also reinforced that the participants were set apart from their wives, daughters, sisters, and mothers. The church traditionally called upon Catholics to organize themselves separately in social and liturgical functions.

Table 2

Devotional Popularity in 1968

                                    No.       %

Forty Hours

Attendance is:
Improving                            49      24
Declining                           109      48
The Same                             47      21
No Answer                            15      13
Total Parishes
Sponsoring devotion                 225     (90%)

Surveyed parishes which held no
Forty Hours or saw decline          133     (53%)

First Friday

Attendance is:
Improving                            49      22
Declining                           107      45
The Same                             52      23
No Answer                            15      10
Total Parishes
Sponsoring devotion                 223     (90%)

Surveyed parishes which held no
First Friday or saw decline         133     (53%)

Novenas

Attendance is:
Improving                            23      17
Declining                            58      43
The Same                             42      31
No Answer                            13       9
Total Parishes
Sponsoring devotion                 136     (60%)

Surveyed parishes which held no
novenas or saw decline              171     (69%)

Source: Survey on Devotional Life in the Diocese of Pittsburgh, Diocesan
Pastoral Council Collection, HADP.

Women did play a role in the rituals, of course, but they were excluded from the rally and parade. They prepared refreshments for the honored contingent on the reviewing stand, sewed banners for the men to carry in the parade, and lined the parade route to affirm the importance of the activity underway.(43)

Catholic men and women repeated in the rituals the roles they played in life more broadly from the early decades of the 20th century. But by 1955 these roles no longer reflected the social construction of their lives so clearly, and therefore did not appeal to them as strongly as before. The laity, like many Americans, had begun by the middle of the 1950s to break down the barriers which separated male and female social worlds. Even the hierarchy supported some of this destruction.

Much of this new integrated social world came from the growing Catholic participation in the suburban social ideal. Margaret Marsh suggests that such an ideal emerged in the early decades of the twentieth century in which men and women shared more leisure time together, and men took on greater family responsibilities. This new social ideal, which Marsh calls "masculine domesticity," encouraged men to play larger roles in child rearing, spend less time with male friends, and take on "limited domestic duties."(44) Other evidence supports this merging of family and suburban ideals. William Dobriner reported after his review of all available quantitative studies of 1940s and 1950s suburban migration that Americans moved primarily for family reasons--they thought the suburbs were better for children, and they chose their place of residence around their children's needs.(45)

Marsh is not alone in suggesting that the suburbs raised the family's role at the expense of the street, neighborhood, or other social spheres found in urban living. Sam Bass Warner made a similar argument in his influential The Private City and Streetcar Suburbs decades earlier, and others have explored this for suburbanization in the 1950s and 1960s.(46) Even academics who seek to down-play the differences between urban and suburban social experience suggest that a more family centered social life existed in the suburbs than in central cities.(47) Perhaps most significantly, John Modell has concluded from his examination of ward level data in four American cities that the suburbs differed from the inner cities in family patterns more in the period after World War II than in the decades from which Marsh derived her understanding of the distinctive suburban social ideal. In other words, Modell's work suggests that Marsh's distinctions between urban and suburban ideals likely would be more pronounced in the 1950s than in the 1920s.(48)

Other historians highlight this transformation in life style as Americans moved to the suburbs as well, and suggest that the concentration on family pushed people away from commitments to participation in larger social networks.(49) S.D. Clark concluded from his study of Canadian suburbs that the "evidence was overwhelming of a general social apathy among the [suburban] population, of an unwillingness to become in any way involved in forms of organized activity demanding time, effort, and money."(50) This perceived reluctance to engage in outside activities led those studying Protestant suburbanites to focus their work on whether or not the suburbs fostered secularization?

Though the ideal first developed early in the century, it was rooted in the architectural designs, housing plans, commuting patterns and social organization of the suburbs. Catholic men and women would have lived this ideal as they moved to the suburbs, which they did in greater and greater numbers in the aftermath of World War II.

By the middle of the 1950s, Americans had already begun to move to the suburbs at the rapid rate which would push the suburban population above both the central city and rural populations by the end of the next decade. The suburban population grew more than four times faster than the central city population in America during the 1950s, so that 13 million more Americans moved to the suburbs than to the central cities in the decade. Suburban population growth constituted 76 percent of metropolitan area growth in the 1950s. This trend was even more pronounced in manufacturing belt cities, such as Pittsburgh, where the suburban population expanded while the central city population actually declined.(52) Between 1950 and 1960 the City of Pittsburgh had a net loss of 72,474 people, or 11 percent of its population, while the area outside the city grew by 22 percent. The suburbs in Allegheny County alone saw an even more significant increase of roughly 40 percent.(53) While it is impossible to determine precisely what percentage of suburbanites Catholics constituted, there is no reason to suspect that Catholics remained disproportionately in the city.

Some data are available which might shed light on the suburbanization of Pittsburgh Catholics. One measure is unrevealing, save of organizational lag. Though we cannot specify the precise urban-suburban split in the Pittsburgh Diocese, we can ascertain the number of suburban and urban parishes in this period. These-data are less valuable than actual population figures because the diocese did not form parishes as quickly as Catholics moved to new areas, and because suburban parishes tended to house more Catholics than urban parishes. Still, the data in Table 3 might seem to caution us against concluding that Catholics migrated to the suburbs in great numbers, as the percentage of suburban parishes remained exactly the same from 1952 to 1956.(54)

Other evidence points in different directions, suggesting that Catholics did move to the suburbs in great numbers between 1950 and 1956. A comparison of the number of pupils attending Catholic schools in two sets of parishes, one urban and the other suburban, reflects this suburban trend. The total student population in a sample of ten urban parishes and ten suburban parishes illustrates the dramatic growth of suburban schools at a time when urban schools grew more marginally. The urban school sample contained almost 1,500 more students than the suburban school sample in 1951, but by 1956 suburban schools taught almost 1,500 more students than their urban counterparts. Though we must remain cautious about making conclusions about the overall Catholic population from school data, the suburban school population growth suggests a significant expansion of the suburban Catholic parish population.(56)

Signs of a greater family orientation even in Catholic social and liturgical experience had begun to emerge by 1955, particularly in the arrival of the Christian Family Movement (CFM). The Christian Family Movement first came to Pittsburgh as a means of getting the family to practice religious rituals together in their homes, and grew initially among suburban Catholics. Though the rituals the Pittsburgh CFM advocated did not differ in tone from the devotional style then prevalent, the very fact that it designated the family as the primary unit of worship undermined traditional devotional religious practices. It also drew men back to the home and family and away from the single-sex adult community. And TABULAR DATA OMITTED the Pittsburgh CFM had already begun to grow in parishes in the early 1950s, so much so that it held its first general meeting two weeks before the 1955 rally and parade.(57) The CFM alone did not precipitate changes in the religious practices of the Pittsburgh laity, and certainly not in the short time it had operated in Pittsburgh. Rather it came out of a changing Catholic attitude toward religious practice, which migration to the suburbs encouraged.

But if Catholics had begun to move away from the devotional ethos manifest in the large public ritual, they did not yet fully articulate a new religious sensibility. Within a decade of the 1955 rituals the hierarchy gathered in Rome to reform Catholicism worldwide. The reforms debated and adopted at the Second Vatican Council shaped a new Catholic ethos, and the Council came so soon after the 1955 disappointment that we can gauge neither the emerging lay sensibility nor what the hierarchical response to the laymen's rejection of the public rituals would have been absent Vatican II. The 1955 rituals do tell us that change had begun before the Council, and cause us to reconsider the widely held belief that the Council transformed an unchanging church. The rejection of the public rituals may also help explain why Pope John XXIII called the Council. Pope John may have initiated the reforms in part as a response to the growing European and American lay rejection of the old Catholicism, as evidenced in such behaviors as the low turnout at the 1955 rituals.(58)

Finally, suburban growth may have posed another problem for the large urban public ritual, wholely unconnected to a changed religious sensibility. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, in its efforts to explain the lower than advertised turnout for the Eucharistic Rally, suggested that the absence of parking in the area played a role. The Pittsburgh Police had closed off nearby streets and parking to all but buses and street cars chartered to bring in Holy Name men so as to minimize the confusion and distractions surrounding the rally. Such restrictions no doubt dissuaded more suburbanites from attending than urban residents.

Perhaps Catholics had begun by 1955 to reject the values and meanings the rituals and parades represented. Perhaps they had begun to lose the world of public ritual in the five years between 1950 and 1955. There is evidence of changes just then beginning within the church which might have suggested this to prescient observers. The devotional tenor of Catholicism had begun to lose its popularity. Catholics, particularly suburban Catholics, had begun to emphasize the family rather than the single sex adult community as the primary unit of religious experience. Finally, the laity may have seen the irony of orchestrating traditional deferential rituals to highlight a convention dedicated to lay leadership.

The explanations for the 1955 rituals that we have provided to date reflect too much our response to the grand scale of the rituals. We seek explanations appropriate to the impressive size of the events; we assume massive public displays must derive from ambitious and consequential aims. If we examine the rituals not for what the Catholic hierarchy intended to say to the larger non-Catholic community about Catholic political, social, and cultural strength, but rather what the hierarchy wished to convey to the participants themselves, we can see a troubled church indeed. The hierarchy attempted to assert the primacy of the traditional church in the face of a changing Catholic sensibility; they sought to affirm the traditional social construction of Catholicism at a time when social forces had begun to transform lay lives. The laymen's rejection of the public rituals in 1955 tells us that even in the years before the Second Vatican Council reforms the laity no longer responded to traditional Catholic messages. They no longer found comfort in the Catholic ghetto, but rather sought a new kind of religious experience which addressed the world in which they lived, or in which they aspired to live. Though this study focuses on Pittsburgh, the findings have implications far broader. Pittsburgh Catholics shared a religious ethos common to virtually all American Catholics, and the social phenomena discussed in these pages occurred all across the nation.

Department of History Pittsburgh, PA 15232-2814

ENDNOTES

1. "Best Convention Honors Holy Name," Pittsburgh Catholic (6 October 1955): 1, 3.

2. "Millions See, Hear Rally on Radio, TV," Pittsburgh Catholic (6 October 1955): 1. The diocesan newspaper claimed that fully 3,000,000 people in the Pittsburgh district watched the rally on television, but this was unlikely. The figure cited exceeded the entire 1960 Pittsburgh Standard Metropolitan Statistical Area population by 25 percent.

3. "KDKA-TV Does Outstanding Job on Rally Telecast," Pittsburgh Catholic (6 October 1955): 15; "Parade Steps into Homes Via WQED," Pittsburgh Catholic (5 October 1955): 15.

4. Bishop Canevin halted the parades in World War I ostensibly because so many Catholic men had gone into the armed services. But only 3,000 had gone, which left 37,000 of the 40,000 Catholic men who had walked in the 1915 parade available to march. Canevin may have worried more about the response to those who marched than the absence of those serving in the military. "40,000 Proclaim Devotion," October 11, 1915; "30,000 Catholics Join in Holy Name Procession," October 11, 1915; "50,000 Protestants Attest Religious Ideals in Great Street Pageant," October 24, 1915, unidentified newspapers in "Clipping Book (1895-1960)," Historical Archives of the Diocese of Pittsburgh (hereinafter to be cited HADP). "Diocesan Holy Name Society Holds Rallies," October 1917, "Clipping Book (1895-1960)," HADP. The article stated that only 23,000 Pittsburgh Catholic men belonged to the Holy Name Society in 1917. Only 21,000 men had marched in 1916, so a loss of 3,000 might have made a more significant impact.

5. Ibid.

6. "First Holy Name Society Parish Units Organized in Pittsburgh," Pittsburgh Catholic (29 September 1955): 8.

7. Holy Name Newsletter (November 1955): 5, Holy Name Society Collection (hereinafter to be cited HNS Collection), (The Holy Name Collection has been reorganized since I concluded my research, and so my fuller citation will no longer help in locating the material. I found the newsletter in Box 11.), HADP.

8. Holy Name Newsletter (November 1955), p. 4, HNS Collection, HADP.

9. The fullest explication of such a ritual is Robert Orsi's work on Italian Catholics in New York City's East Harlem neighborhood. Orsi suggests that the festa of la Madonna of Mount Carmel on East 115th Street served to connect Italian-Americans to their home villages in Italy and reinforced traditional understandings of proper gender roles, family, and community. The Madonna of 115th Street: Faith and Community in Italian Harlem, 1880-1950 (New Haven, 1985). Gary Mormino noted that Italian-American Catholics in St. Louis interpreted their rituals so insularly that they could not agree even on a meaning which appealed to all Italian-American Catholics. Gary Ross Mormino, Immigrants on the Hill: Italian-Americans in St. Louis, 1882-1982 (Chicago, 1986), p. 167.

10. John Bodnar, Remaking America: Public Memory, Commemoration, and Patriotism in the Twentieth Century (Princeton, 1992), pp. 42-109. Mary Ryan also examined public rituals (parades), but determined that they disappeared by the end of the nineteenth century because they could no longer draw on a common civic culture. The city populations had become too diverse--divided too much along ethnic and class lines. Mary Ryan, "The American Parade: Representations of the Nineteenth-Century Social Order," in Lynn Hunt, ed., The New Cultural History (Berkeley, 1989), pp. 131-153. David Glassberg suggests that local historical pageants too sought to unite city residents around common civic values, but he locates the demise of these public rituals with the conclusion of World War I-- nearly a half century after the civic parade's disappearance. American Historical Pageantry: The Uses of Tradition in the Early Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill, 1990), pp. 281-290.

11. These Catholic rituals might even blur the line between vernacular and national interests which Bodnar drew so clearly for the pre-war period. The parades could be understood both as a vernacular challenge to the dominant Protestant culture, and as a whole hearted embrace of the nationalism which Bodnar suggests elites desired. Catholics rallied against both birth control and communism.

12. O'Toole, "The Church Takes to the Streets," p. 8.

13. O'Toole, "The Church Takes to the Streets," pp. 9-22. O'Toole suggests that Cardinal Cushing used public rallies to influence United States foreign policy as well.

14. Many people have written about Catholic political action. See the following for some examples. Kenneth Wilson Underwood, Protestant and Catholic: Religious and Social Interaction in an Industrial Community (Boston, 1957), see especially chapters 1 and 2; James Hennessey, "Roman Catholics and American Politics, 1900-1960: Altered Circumstances, Continuing Patterns," in Mark A. Noll, ed. Religion and American Politics: From the Colonial Period to the 1980s (New York, 1990), pp. 311-312; Christopher J. Kauffman, Faith and Fraternalism: The History of the Knights of Columbus, 1882-1982 (New York, 1982), pp. 385-388; David O'Brien, Public Catholicism (New York, 1989).

15. Pat O'Neill, "50,000 Catholics Salute Christ," Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (1 October 1955): 1; "135,000 to March in Catholic Procession," Pittsburgh Press (1 October 1955): 3.

16. "Holy Name Directors Plan for Convention," Pittsburgh Catholic (1 September 1955): 11; Holy Name Newsletter, (November 1955), p. 13, HNS Collection, HADP.

17. "Procession Floats Show Religious Themes," Pittsburgh Catholic (8 September 1955): 11; "Holy Name Timetable Compiles Directions," Pittsburgh Catholic (15 September 1955): 11. The Pittsburgh HNS hired a Washington, D.C. firm to construct the most of the floats, though enough groups designed their own to hold a contest to see who had the best.

18. "Best Convention Honors Holy Name," Pittsburgh Catholic (6 October 1955): 1.

19. Holy Name Newsletter, (November 1955), p. 6, HNS Collection, HADP.

20. Father Hugh Wilt, "The Layman Through the Years," Holy Name Newsletter (February 1956): 10, Box 11, HNS Collection, HADP.

21. "Best Convention Honors Holy Name," Pittsburgh Catholic (6 October 1955): 1; "Texas Catholic College Prays for Ike, Its Football Coach in 1916," Pittsburgh Catholic (6 October 1955): 1. In addition, public officials took part in the rituals either through extending formal welcome to the Holy Name men or standing in the parade's reviewing platform constructed by city workers in front of St. Paul's Cathedral. They included Pennsylvania Governor George M. Louder and Pittsburgh Mayor David L. Lawrence.

22. O'Toole, "The Church Takes to the Streets," pp. 8-10.

23. "Eucharistic Rally Fifth in History Here," Pittsburgh Catholic (29 September 1955): 3.

24. The actual turnout is difficult to determine, because reports varied widely. The Pittsburgh Catholic suggested at one point that 100,000 actually showed up. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported 35,000 in Forbes Field and an additional 15,000 on vantage points in nearby Schenley Park, for a total of 50,000. The Pittsburgh Press reported only 30,000, all of whom were in Forbes Field. If one accepts the Pittsburgh Press estimate that only 30,000 men filled Forbes Field, the Pittsburgh Catholic would have exaggerated the turnout by over 230 percent. Pat O'Neil, "50,000 Catholics Salute Christ," Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (1 October 1955): 1; John Troan, "Catholic Rally Prays for World Peace," Pittsburgh Press (1 October 1955): 1; "HNS Buys 80,000 Candles," Pittsburgh Catholic (15 September 1955): 11; "135,000 to March in Catholic Procession," Pittsburgh Press (1 October 1955): 3.

25. "John F. Laboon To Lead Procession," Pittsburgh Catholic (29 September 1955): 7. In other places the Catholic suggested that the parade would draw only 100,000 marchers. "Call for Crusade Heralds Rally, Parade by 125,000," Pittsburgh Catholic (29 September 1955): 1; "Holy Name Timetable Compiles Directions," Pittsburgh Catholic (15 September 1955): 11.

26. Bishop Wright dedicated a renewed vigor in the Holy Name Society to fighting the "new infidel of the East," and concern about indecent literature came through in a number of cases.

27. Stefan Lorant, Pittsburgh: The Story of An American City (Lenox, MA, 1988, originally 1964), pp. 355, 370.

28. W.T. Lhamon, Jr. suggests that a new cultural style emerged in America almost exactly in 1955 which can best be characterized as "deliberate speed." It was a conjoining of a number of musical, artistic, and literary trends which sought deliberately to bridge the social and cultural rifts which divided Americans in this period. It strove to surmount the 1950s fears and harness them to a new optimism--and none of this squared with a ritual designed both to emphasize societal divisions and to seek a divine respite from worldly fears. To the extent that the culture of deliberate speed entered Catholics' lives, the Eucharistic Rally became a relic of another era, of another perspective about the world. Lhamon suggests that Americans in the 1950s formed a culture which produced artifacts which "are about this process of finding new ways to overcome despair, reassembling old feelings in new ways so to feel possibility again in the world." W.T. Lhamon, Jr., Deliberate Speed: The Origins of a Cultural Style in the American 1950s (Washington, 1990), p. 7.

29. The only laymen who did so were some Knights of Columbus, Pittsburgh policemen, and seven Knights of Malta whom Bishop Dearden designated to be an honor guard for the Blessed Sacrament. Twelve hundred altar boys did lead the procession, and they were members of the laity. But altar servers are problematic, since the clergy saw them as the best pool of potential vocations. In this way they were "future clerical." "Bishop Names Honor Guard," Pittsburgh Catholic (22 September 1955): 1; John Troan, "Catholic Rally Prays for World Peace," Pittsburgh Press (1 October 1955): 1, 3.

30. "John E Laboon To Lead Procession," Pittsburgh Catholic (29 September 1955): 7.

31. Jay P. Dolan, The American Catholic Experience: A History From Colonial Times to the Present (Garden City, NY, 1985) pp. 221-240.

32. Ann Taves, The Household of Faith: Roman Catholic Devotions in Mid-Nineteenth Century America (South Bend, IN, 1986); Colleen McDannell, The Christian Home in Victorian America, 1840-1900 (Bloomington, IN, 1986), chapters 3, 5, and 6.

33. Dolan, pp. 349-358

34. Catholic men gathered together to recite the same prayer in "joint prayer times" and held separate but simultaneous local rallies to constitute "simultaneous sectional rallies."

35. "First Holy Name Society Parish Units Organized in Pittsburgh," Pittsburgh Catholic (29 September 1955): 8; "Eucharistic Rally Fifth in History Here," Pittsburgh Catholic (29 September 1955): 3.

36. Robert C. Broderick, ed., The Catholic Encyclopedia, Revised and Updated Edition (New York, 1987), p. 161. Another Catholic Encyclopedia defined devotion in a similar way: "Practices of piety that give concrete expression to the will to serve and worship God by directing it to some particular object, such as a divine mystery, person, attribute, or even to some created reality as that is related to God." J.F. Mulhern, "Devotions, Religious," New Catholic Encyclopedia, Vol IV (New York, 1967), p. 833.

37. John Troan, "Catholic Rally Prays for World Peace," Pittsburgh Press (1 October 1955): 1,3.

38. "Best Convention Honors Holy Name," Pittsburgh Catholic (6 October 1955): 1,3.

39. One recent study from the University of Notre Dame looked at the age of devotional participants in the 1980s and discovered that people older than sixty years of age participated in far greater numbers than those younger. The authors concluded from this data that the older Catholics had continued a devotional attendance begun in their youth, and that Catholic devotions have declined in recent decades (particularly since the Second Vatican Council). I suspect that this conclusion is relatively accurate, but it serves to highlight the absence of any real data on pre-Vatican II devotional behavior. Joseph Gremillion and Jim Castelli, The Emerging Parish: The Notre Dame Study of Catholic Life Since Vatican II (San Francisco, 1987), pp. 145, 153.

40. "Survey on Devotional Life in the Diocese of Pittsburgh," December 1968, Diocesan Pastoral Council Collection, HADP.

41. St. Philomena Parish Annual Reports, 1950-1957, Redemptorist Archives, Baltimore Province, Brooklyn, New York. Similarly, Robert Orsi reports a significant decline in participation in the devotion to the Madonna of Mount Carmel in New York City's East Harlem neighborhood. Robert Anthony Orsi, The Madonna of 115th Street: Faith and Community in Italian Harlem, 1880-1950 (New Haven, 1985).

42. I come to this conclusion based upon my examination of devotional patterns in three parishes in the Pittsburgh Diocese: St. Thomas More (suburban), Immaculate Heart of Mary (urban-ethnic), and St. Philomena (urban). I suspect that this was due to a variety of reasons. Suburban residents often had a harder time getting to church during the week, when devotions were offered. They had to travel greater distances with fewer transportation options. People often moved to the suburbs as they became more affluent, and devotions served people most often in distress (economic and otherwise, but often economic). For a fuller discussion of this, see chapter six of my dissertation. "The Devotional Tradition in Three Parishes," "The Transformation of American Catholicism: The Pittsburgh Laity and the Second Vatican Council, 1950-1980" (Ph.D. dissertation, Carnegie Mellon University, 1990).

43. "Mars Mothers Make HNS Banner," Pittsburgh Catholic (29 September 1955): 16; "Women Serve HNS Reviewing Dignitaries," Pittsburgh Catholic (29 September 1955): 17; "Ladies Serve, Too," Pittsburgh Catholic (6 October 1955): 4.

44. Margaret Marsh, Suburban Lives (New Brunswick, NJ, 1990), pp. xiv, 74-89.

45. William Dobriner, Class in Suburbia (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1963), pp. 64-65.

46. Sam Bass Warner, The Private City: Philadelphia in Three Periods of its Growth (Philadelphia, 1968), p. 174. Idem, Streetcar Suburbs: The Process of Growth in Boston 1870-1900 (New York, 1976) p. 154; E. Gartly Jaco and Ivan Belknap, "Is a New Family Form Emerging in the Urban Fringe?" American Sociological Review, XVIII (1953); Clark, The Suburban Society, p. 152-154; Clifford E. Clark, Jr., "Ranch-House Suburbia: Ideals and Realities," in Lary May, ed., Recasting America: Culture and Politics in the Age of Cold War (Chicago, 1989), p. 172.

47. See, for example, Herbert J. Gans, "Effects of the Move From City to Suburb," in Leonard J. Duhl, ed., The Urban Condition: People and Policy in the Metropolis (New York, 1963), pp. 186-187, 190 Gans also reports a greater sense of community in the suburbs, though these conclusions seem to derive more from interviews with people moving from more rural areas to the suburbs from those whose move to the suburbs actually brought them closer to the city.

48. John Modell, "Suburbanization and Change in the American Family," Journal of Interdisciplinary History IX:4 (Spring 1979): 640-645.

49. See, for example, Kenneth T. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (New York, 1985), p. 279. Even works which seek to downplay any distinction in community interaction between urban and suburban living highlight to greater amount of energy and time suburban residents devote to private, family centered activities-especially work on the house and yard. Herbert J. Gans, "Effects of the Move from City to Suburb," in Leonard J. Duhl, ed., The Urban Condition: People and Policy in the Metropolis (New York, 1963), pp. 184-187.

50. S.D. Clark, The Suburban Society (Toronto, 1966), p. 161.

51. Frederick A. Shippey wrote to counter the secularization model, though he did conclude that the suburbs presented special challenges to Christian religious belief and practice. Protestantism in Suburban Life (New York, 1964). I do not propose that the decline in Catholic public ritual indicated a secularization among Catholics, but rather a changed religious sensibility.

52. David L. Birch, The Economic Future of City and Suburb Center For Economic Development Supplementary Paper Number 30 (New York, 1970), pp. 18-19; William Issel, Social Change in the United States, 1945-1983 (New York, 1987), pp. 87-88. Though Americans moved to the suburbs in significant numbers beginning in the 1940s, the five years between 1950 and 1955 brought more suburban growth than the preceding decade. Conrad Taeuber and Irene B. Taeuber, The Changing Population of the United States (New York, 1958), p. 109.

53. Pittsburgh falls within Allegheny County, but its Standard Metropolitan Statistical Area includes three other contiguous counties, and the Pittsburgh Diocese included six counties around the city in 1955. The Allegheny County suburban growth figures can be found in the Pennsylvania State Planning Board's "The Population of Pennsylvania, A Social Profile: An Analysis of Recent Demographic Trends Emphasizing Inter-County Comparisons" (September, 1963), p. 33.

54. Table 2 does suggest another hypothesis, however. The Pittsburgh Diocese lost 129 parishes (30%) in 1951 when the Holy See formed the Greensburg Diocese out of counties formerly within the Pittsburgh Diocese. Perhaps the large numbers of participants at the rallies came from those parishes farthest from the city, and once they no longer fell within the Pittsburgh Diocese these parishioners stopped coming.

55. The Diocese of Greensburg was formed from among counties formerly within the Pittsburgh Diocesan boundaries this year.

56. We should remain cautious for a few reasons. Though the school population in the two sample sets of ten urban and ten suburban parishes reflects a remarkable surge in the suburban student population, urban schools still far outnumbered suburban schools in this period. The total student population in urban areas still far exceeded the suburban student population. But we are interested in the suburbanizing trend, and the data do suggest a dramatic growth in suburban population. The source for these figures, the Catholic Directory, often reported exactly the same number of students in a parish school for consecutive years. This leads me to suspect that, though the trends are probably accurate, the figures for any given year probably are not. This helps explain the very dramatic rise in suburban population between 1954 and 1956 for suburban schools. One of the factors depressing the urban growth was St. Paul Cathedral's divestiture of a school with about 400 students. In 1953 the Cathedral gave over control to another parish, and this move is reflected in the 1954 data. The ten urban parish schools were: St. Paul's Cathedral, Holy Trinity, St. Philomena, Sacred Heart, St. George, St. John the Evangelist, Guardian Angels, St. Gabriel, Nativity, and St. Peter. I selected the sample randomly, save for ensuring that parishes from each of the three sections of the city (Northside, Southside, and Central City) made it into the sample in the proportion in which the sections housed parishes. The ten suburban parish schools, which I also selected randomly from a list of those suburban parishes which maintained schools in 1951 were: Sacred Heart in Emsworth, St. Alphonsus in Wexford, St. Bernard in Mt. Lebanon, St. Irenaeus in Oakmont, St. Joseph in Verona, St. Theresa in Perrysville, St. Althanasius in West View, St. Elizabeth in Pleasant Hills, St. James in Sewickley, and St. Ann in Castle Shannon. Even the selection of John Laboon as Grand Marshal for the 1955 Holy Name Parade reflected this growing suburbanization, and therefore makes him an ironic choice for honor in the 1955 parade. For Laboon's efforts as the County's Sanitary Authority Executive Director were central to the Catholic dispersal throughout the surrounding suburbs. He as much as anyone facilitated the suburban migration which spelled the end of the very ritual in which he shined.

57. "CFM Brings Awareness of Others," Pittsburgh Catholic (15 September 1955): 12; The Holy Name Society first promoted CFM a year later in its monthly publication. Mr. and Mrs. Gerry Ryan, "Catholic Family Customs," Holy Name Newsletter (November 1956): 7, HNS Collection, HADP.

58. The decline in religious participation was more severe in Europe, where even vocations had dropped dramatically in the 1950s. For the decline in women's vocations, see Patricia Curran, Grace Before Meals: Food Ritual and Body Discipline in Convent Culture (Urbana, 1989), p. 133. For a discussion of the pre-Vatican II state of male vocations, see Dennis Castillo, "The Origin of the Priest Shortage: 1942-62 "America (October 24, 1992): 302-304.