Volume 21, Number 3 · March 7, 1974
America's Catholics
By Wilfrid Sheed
BOOKS DISCUSSED IN THIS ESSAY
Catholics
by Brian Moore
Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 107 pp., $1.25 (paper)
Aphrodite in Mid-Century: Growing Up Female and Catholic in Postwar America
by Caryl Rivers
Doubleday, 283 pp., $6.95
The Last Catholic in America
by John R. Powers
Saturday Review Press, 228 pp., $6.95
The Seduction of the Spirit: The Use and Misuse of People's Religion
by Harvey Cox
Simon and Schuster, 350 pp., $8.95
Bare Ruined Choirs: Doubt, Prophecy, and Radical Religion
by Garry Wills
Delta, 272 pp., $2.95 (paper)
The Rise of the Unmeltable Ethnics: Politics and Culture in the Seventies
by Michael Novak
Macmillan, 416 pp., $1.95 (paper)
Catholic America
by John Cogley
Doubleday, 304 pp., $1.75 (paper)
Fragments of the Century
by Michael Harrington
Saturday Review Press, 322 pp., $7.95
The New Agenda
by Andrew M. Greeley
Doubleday, 312 pp., $6.95
The decline of the American Catholic Church in the late Sixties has become a statistician's plaything, as the empty pew is weighted against the growth of Real Concern. Thus: the sprawling seminaries of the Fifties may be ghost towns—but we are all priests now. Likewise, the swollen churches can't meet their mortgages—but then, our life is our prayer. That kind of argument. The decline of a state of mind is hard to chart and I leave it to the professionals (anything so unanswerable must have money in it). But for those of us who lived through it, the physical fact itself, and the loss of institutional confidence that went with it, formed a psychic event so unmistakably spectacular that we felt as if our tripes had been removed by sleight-of-hand. The Church was still standing solid as the post office in, say, 1966; the Vatican Council had been weathered—better than weathered. In fact, the first death spasm looked like a little dance step. (The first half hour of freedom is always the best: we would be better Catholics without coercion.) And then it was gone.
Review, 5951 words
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