Mary Ellen O’DONNELL. 2018. Ingrained Habits: Growing Up Catholic in Mid-Twentieth-Century America. Washington D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press. Pp.164. ISBN 978-081-323-0375. Reviewed by Michael J. McCALLION, Sacred Heart Major Seminary, Detroit, Michigan.

Ingrained Habits focuses on the 1940s, 50s, and 60s by drawing upon the work of some of America’s greatest writers of American Catholicism.  It is an important book for historians and other social scientists of religion to read, but it will be particularly fascinating for those social scientists who are Catholic. O’Donnell compellingly narrates a Catholic world that was robust and joyful and sometimes limiting and frightful by deftly capturing the cultural memory of those who grew up during these decades.  To capture this fascinating Catholic world, she focuses on three social contexts in and through which Catholic children were socialized during this time period: 1) the Catholic parish/school, 2) the home, and 3) the neighborhood.  Each reveals a subcultural world that only Catholics experienced and, at least partly, understood and how each of these settings contained its own lessons for what it meant to be Catholic.  With great effect, throughout the book, she contrasts this experience with her daughter’s experience of being Catholic today.  The difference between the two is “cultural Catholicism:” those in mid-twentieth century were engrossed in it, while her daughter is enmeshed in a culture of choice.  The backdrop of cultural Catholicism can no longer be taken-for-granted.

Chapter one discusses the broader cultural context of mid-century America that began the social change from a robust communal and cultural Catholicism to a more fluid and pluralistic and even more individualistic Catholicism.  The chapter then deals with two gradual transformations.  The first is about demographics in which second, third, and fourth-generation Catholics were moving from the city to the suburbs and, the second transition, involves the religious shift inaugurated by Vatican II—especially the liturgical changes that ensued.  Everything seemed to look and feel different after Vatican II.

Chapter two explicates the first of the trinity of social contexts O’Donnell argues made Catholics unique: the parish and Catholic school.  For the Irish it was the high regard they held their priests and sisters but especially priests.  Priests were almost “as unapproachable as the Eucharist itself” (p.44).  Today, with so few priests and sisters, this same reverence is no longer.  In the school during this time, discipline was “virtually an eight sacrament" (p.48).  Discipline, rules, and authority were key ingredients in the mid-twentieth century Catholic world.  Indeed, O’Connell writes about these ingredients as “die-hard habits,” lasting well into adulthood.  Cultural Catholicism, in other words, was a lens for seeing the world and it was a hard habit to break—ingrained (as the title of the book suggests).
Chapter three discussed the context of the home where children were first introduced to the tradition outside the institution.  Devotions, sacred objects, songs, and tiny religious rituals added another dimension to their identities.  Here they learned how to bless themselves, genuflect and take their hat off in church, and know their basic prayers.  Importantly, I think, O’Donnell quotes Anne Rice saying, “What strikes me now as important about this experience is that it preceded reading books” (p.77).  Understanding the faith, in other words, had little to do with literacy.  There was an all-encompassing Catholic cultural backdrop wherever they went, and O’Donnell quotes Kate Clinton to illustrate this backdrop in talking about sex: “The antisex force field of my youth—God, the guardian angel Snitch with the Tripp wire on my right, my mother, her spies, the church—was like a sex surveillance system with hidden cameras and heat sensitive sprinklers” (p.102).

Chapter four unpacks the influence of the neighborhood which was built around the parish with most everyone knowing everyone else.  If asked where they lived, the response was St. Mary’s or St. Joseph’s, their parish.  Even advertisements in newspapers listed available homes and apartments by parish.  O’Donnell spends several pages discussing ethnicity here, especially Irish and Italians.  Indeed, parishes were known as racial parishes during this period. These parishes created intense social solidarity but tensions, conflicts, and inevitable injustices as well within and between parishes.  O’Donnell describes Hampl’s Irish Catholic experience as a curse and Manning’s Irish experience as buoyant and optimistic, claiming the majority of Irish Catholics lived somewhere between these experiences.  Italian experiences were similar: binding constraint or a loving embrace with most experiences somewhere in-between.  Chapter four also discusses the implications of social class, particularly parishioners’ attempts to assess where they should sit in church, the front (upper class), middle (middle class), or back pews (lower class).

O’Donnell concludes with a funny story about receiving ashes, illustrating clearly the difference between then and now.  If you found yourself in Msgr. O’Brien’s line you were doomed for a large black cross on your forehead whereas if you got lucky and were in Fr. Duggan’s line you were more likely to receive a smaller smudge of a cross. Comparing this experience to today, she states that when her children receive ashes they won’t be in a pew full of classmates, nor know about the priest’s ash-giving habits.  More likely they will receive them from a visiting priest or a lay minister and, moreover, have to explain the smudge to people they meet.  Tellingly, they are more likely to compare their forehead ashes while chatting on-line with people in Houston or Honduras or Hungary than with people within their own parish.  The taken-for-granted cultural Catholicism of the mid-twentieth century has gone up in ashes, requiring parents today to be more intentional about raising their children in the Catholic faith.