Kitchen Table Politics. Stacie Taranto
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the $65 million cost of building twenty-eight elementary schools, twenty-seven additions to existing schools, three more high schools, eleven churches, a hospital, eighteen convents for nuns, and a day camp for children. Despite these strides, it was hard to keep pace with suburban transplants who, often with greater financial comfort and an adherence to the church’s ban on artificial forms of birth control, had large families.10
Lay Catholic women, more so than men, confronted the church’s suburban growing pains—something that was perhaps most obvious to them in parochial schools. Upon moving to the suburbs, parents typically looked into parochial education for their children, as generations before them had done in the city. Many children, however, ended up in the public system because of limited space in suburban Catholic schools. In an era when mothers were held almost solely responsible for their children’s welfare, it was clear to many women, even before Vatican II, that family life might not be as idyllic in the suburbs as they had envisioned. When Phyllis Graham and her family moved to Port Jefferson in Suffolk County in 1965, for example, she immediately tried enrolling her children at the local Infant Jesus elementary school. But the parish had more than quadrupled in size, from 400 families in 1951 to 1,700 by 1964, and there was a long waiting list to be admitted into the school. Graham was determined to give her children a Catholic education like she had in Brooklyn, so she devised a workaround. As a newcomer, she began volunteering at the church to make herself better known. Graham did what she knew best as a homemaker: she gave up what little discretionary time she had to benefit her children. Her tactic worked, and Infant Jesus eventually secured spots for her four children. Overcrowding, though, was only part of the problem in the sixties. Catholic leaders and everyday parishioners like these women also had to contend with the vast changes adopted at Vatican II.11
At a time when people were joining social justice movements worldwide, Vatican II tried to redirect some of that participatory energy toward the Catholic Church. The church leaders from across the globe who met in Rome from 1962 to 1965 at the Second Vatican Council were concerned that Catholic life and traditions, such as devotional ceremonies to various saints, had become too scripted and passive. They worried that even devout parishioners who attended mass regularly were repeating rote phrases in Latin that were not well understood. Church leaders instead hoped to engage parishioners more actively and foster thoughtful reflection about Catholic ideas. To do so, the Vatican II reforms recommended, for instance: fewer days of fasting and eliminating other dietary restrictions; creating parish councils to give the laity a greater stake in governance; and, perhaps most dramatically, having clergy face participants (instead of having their backs to them) while reciting the mass in English (or the official language of the country in which the service was being held) instead of Latin, which few people understood. Better comprehension and greater participation, they hoped, would make Catholicism more relevant in the sixties.12
Implementing these vast changes was a major challenge for the church and lay Catholics, in particular women. Phyllis Graham’s pastor at Infant Jesus on Long Island, the Rev. Matthew LePage, wrote a long letter to parishioners that included a very thorough description of what people were supposed to do and say in the radically new mass. Priests like LePage convened countless meetings to explain the reforms and devoted many hours to setting up parish councils and other social and religious groups Vatican II encouraged. Confusion and dissatisfaction predictably followed. Many Catholics like Phyllis Graham loved the rituals that leaders sought to eradicate; to her, there was great beauty in symmetry. Even if she did not fully understand the Latin mass, she knew all its parts, and it comforted her to know that it was always the same—whether recited in Brooklyn, suburban Long Island, or even on a U.S. military base in West Germany, where she and her husband had lived briefly after getting married. But despite how they felt, the church needed homemakers like Graham. Women prepared meals for their families as restrictions like the ban on meat on Fridays were lifted. They had more flexibility to attend meetings convened by LePage and other priests. In turn, the women educated their husbands and children on how to behave at mass, suggested groups that they could now join, and otherwise ensured that their families complied with the reforms.13
Catholic leaders pressed on through this difficult transition because they hoped that a more active laity would promote causes that they cared about, including the church’s historical commitment to social and economic justice. An encyclical letter by Pope Leo XIII in 1891 (Rerum Novarum, or On the Condition of Labor) set the church on this course by commenting on the large income gap and rampant poverty created by the second industrial revolution. The pope sided with poor unskilled workers in Europe and the United States, who he felt were forced to work in exploitative conditions in order to generate surplus profits for industrial oligarchs. In 1931, amid a global economic depression, Pope Pius XI reiterated much of the same in a fortieth-anniversary encyclical (Quadragesimo Anno) that criticized the excesses of capitalism, which he blamed for the market’s crash, as well as communism and socialism, which, despite promising more equitable work conditions, were shunned because of their effective atheism. In 1961, Pope John XXIII issued a related encyclical, Christianity and Social Progress (Mater et Magistra). In a nod to contemporary decolonization and civil rights movements around the world, as well as to the deeply entrenched Cold War context, the pope committed the church to liberating people from unjust social, racial, political, and economic conditions, including communism and socialism—especially in former colonies that were not yet fully industrial, and therefore thought to be more vulnerable to capitalist alternatives.14
In 1962, a year after writing Christianity and Social Progress, Pope John XXIII opened Vatican II in much the same spirit. As Phyllis Graham’s new pastor, the Reverend Matthew LePage, wrote to his parishioners at Infant Jesus on Long Island, the church hoped to compete better with the distractions of modern life by transforming the mass into a “community prayer in which everyone, priest and people, must take part actively.” Reflecting the social justice and participatory democratic zeitgeists of that time, LePage argued that Vatican II had “but one purpose: to get people to lead better and more Christian lives.”15 In the United States in the sixties, these ideals led Catholic leaders and parishioners to oppose legal and economic discrimination against African Americans and other racial minorities. Catholic leaders also criticized what they saw as an unjust war in Vietnam. They did not advocate for communism in that country, but they were against spending vast sums of money to wreak death and destruction upon a poor nation that had been exploited economically. Church leaders likewise rejected sending mostly working-class and poorer American men to do so since they lacked the resources to avoid being drafted into war.16
But while (male) Catholic leaders promoted justice along race and class lines, they held very traditional positions on women and gender, as their embrace of a “living wage” underscores. During the economic crisis of the thirties, Catholic leaders—from the pope, in encyclicals such as Quadragesimo Anno (1931), to parish priests in New York and elsewhere—began arguing for a living wage, which would enable a man to earn enough money for his whole family while his wife stayed home with the children. Church leaders recognized, however, that many women such as Phyllis Graham’s mother were in the paid workforce during the Depression (they avoided whether these women worked out of choice or necessity, framing it as the latter). As a result, the church promoted measures to help working women, beginning with protective labor legislation in the thirties and including equal economic opportunity by 1971 in a papal letter. Yet, ample language about women’s maternal obligations accompanied such pronouncements on work into the late twentieth century. The church hierarchy, much like the lay Catholic housewives who would lead New York’s antifeminist response, had a limited view of women’s economic rights. They felt that women, specifically mothers, belonged at home. When that was not possible for financial reasons, policies were needed to help them serve their families with crucial outside income. Clearly, the church’s concept of a worker was gendered male. Women were back-up earners who should only step in when a living wage was not tenable.17
The church’s concept of a leader was similarly gendered: men unequivocally ran the Catholic Church, although nuns wielded a considerable amount of de facto power before Vatican II. Prior to the reforms, becoming a nun was considered an acceptable (even praiseworthy) substitute for Catholic women who did not become wives and mothers, or for those who wanted greater agency in