VOX POPULI An inseparable couple: Catholics and America
Fisher, James
James Fisher Urban-dwelling immigrants and their children, Catholics and Jews, created a new mass culture in the early decades of this century, but only the former express guilt over it, as though...
...It is perhaps fitting that in the postmodern era one need not even be Catholic to uphold this tradition: see for instance Robert Coles or the late Christopher Lasch, who viewed the church-or at least those precincts within it that had not succumbed to what Phillip Rieff called "the triumph of the therapeutic"- as one of the last holdouts against various modernist idolatries...
...Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins, and Jerry Lee Lewis-all steeped in the traditions of Southern fundamentalism-blended gospel imagery and pop crooning with the rhythm and blues introduced to places like Memphis during the 1940s' black migrations: the result was a cultural revolution inspired by George Whitefield as much as Bing Crosby...
...In a symposium devoted to Patrick Allitt' s Catholic Intellectuals and Conservative Politics in America, 1950-85 (U...
...How about this one: since the Scopes trial of 1925, evangelical Protestantism had grown increasingly defensive and could offer little resistance to the hegemony of East Coast Catholic and transplanted Hollywood Jewish producers of a national popular culture...
...Shopping for yet another theory about the cultural origins of rock 'n' roll...
...I tell them to go see Kevin Smith's Clerks instead (read "clerics"), in which young New Jerseyans working in a convenience store engage in ferocious post-Thomist disputation over the relative merits of space-adventure films, and treat sexual morality with the kind of hair-splitting earnestness not seen since the advice columns in the American Ecclesiastical Review of the 1950s (except in Clerks, "Dante" and "Veronica" skip the euphemisms: the language is downright gross, and while that's part of the message about these free-floating post-post Vatican II Catholics, if you were raised at all like me you'll be offended...
...At the risk of further collusion with the dominant culture, I would simply ask: What would happen if theologians began to apply their insights and methods to the subjects and texts of found Catholicism, down in those spaces where a furtive spirituality flourishes in defiance of stereotypical representations of "the church...
...A lot of people in the old days believed this goal entailed separation from the dominant culture...
...S. Catholic Historian, Winter, 1995), William L. Portier chides Allitt and other contemporary historians (present company included), in whose hands "American Catholic history becomes a history of Catholics living in American culture rather than the history of Catholics living consciously within the church's formal structures...
...Portier characterizes such work as "dare I say, 'trendy' and even, to some extent, fundable...
...Portier's jeremiad extends a creaky if enduring American Catholic tradition that equates spiritual virtue with resistance to consumerism, suburbia, rock 'n' roll music, and various mass-produced detritus served up by the "dominant" culture...
...It will undoubtedly suffer from the self-consciousness of a "serious" treatment of religious concerns...
...But any religious community that produces Jimmy and Dorothy Kilgallen, Jackie Gleason and Art Carney, Gracie Allen, Eleanor Powell, Bing Crosby, and Rosalind Russell should not have to ask what it can learn from popular culture...
...For starters, Catholic critics of popular culture in the age of modernity were quite often converts and thus more implicated in a tangle with some presumed "other" America than immigrant or "ethnic" Catholics, who were less inclined to construct such oppositions as "sacred" versus "secular...
...The ways in which Catholics have negotiated this interaction are fascinating...
...James Fisher Urban-dwelling immigrants and their children, Catholics and Jews, created a new mass culture in the early decades of this century, but only the former express guilt over it, as though the accomplishment somehow gives scandal to standards of theological purity...
...I weary of being asked by non-Catholics what I think of the lifeless, boring, and wholly predictable movie, Priest...
...But Clerks reminded me of the old 1940s' dreams of an integral Catholicism, in which one's entire universe was so infused with spiritual energy that distinctions between sacred and secular were obliterated (though Smith, admittedly, sure seems intent on making us endure a heavy dose of the dark side of rock 'n' roll Catholicism...
...His Dr...
...James Fisher teaches at Saint Louis University...
...America: The Lives of Thomas A. Dooley, 1927-61 will be published by the University of Massachusetts Press next year...
...Does all this have anything to do with Professor Portier's concern for "Catholics living consciously within the church's formal structures," a challenge that may sound ecclesiolog-ical but actually exposes the fissure between theological and cultural approaches to Catholic America...
...Maybe today, since there are so many of us doing so many different things, it just means being ourselves...
...But while Jerry Lee Lewis was soon locked in mortal spiritual combat with his cousin Jimmy Swaggart and the music was held hostage to broader internecine strife in the "Bible Belt," rock 'n' roll offered Northern Catholics like Bruce Springsteen access to the primal myths of his civilization, profoundly adding to a foundation he had built over the writings of Jack Kerouac, one of the first American Catholics to seriously explore the profoundly multicultural fabric of urban American life...
...Now apparently that critique includes "graduate schools that Catholics used to call 'secular.'" This strain of countercultural Catholicism has proven quite hardy despite its highly paradoxical foundation...
...Kevin Smith has had all sorts of fun telling skeptical journalists that he is not only a former altar boy but a persisting Catholic and that his next film is to be titled Dogma...
Vol. 122 • September 1995 • No. 16
